Freesound Forums

Hi.

I'm the webmaster at HammerSound (www.hammersound.net), a
website with free soundfonts. There are ads on the website.

Someone has created a soundfont with samples from freesound and has
included attribution for each sample in a textfile accompanying the
soundfont.

Can I distribute this soundfont on the HammerSound website?

One could argue that the distribution is commercial, since I have ads
on my website.

One could also argue that the soundfont is not "Derivative Work", as
the sample is embedded in the soundfont more or less in it's original
form. The natural conclusion would then be that this soundfont is a
"Collective Work", since it is in essense a collection of samples with
some additional parameters attached to make it into an instrument
(i.e. loop points, filter settings, keyboard layout, etc).

So, by distributing the soundfont on HammerSound, I would then in fact
be distributing a "Collective Work" commercially - which is explicitly
forbidden by the CC Sampling Plus 1.0 license.

I might be reading the license as a devil's advocate - but I just
don't want to do something stupid here.

Any advice on this would be appreciated.

Best Regards,

Thomas Hammer
HammerSound

I don not speak on behalf of the site, but respect for bringing this up.

Since you're not exchaning the soundfont bank itself for money, I should think you're ok to host and distribute it. I think one could argue that the ads are connected to your site's traffic rather than to the exchange or distribution of its content.

Respect for your honesty !
Allow me to take this occasion to congratulate you for your work on Hammersound, according to me the best sf library on Internet...

I'm neither a lawyer, nor a specialist in CC licences, so maybe a MP to the webmaster would give you more practical informations.

Still, I'd say that, as these soundfonts are "just" libraries of sounds, you might think about mentionning it clearly in the presentation of this soundfont, as the other ones you have do not have this licence limitation. Your visitors would know its "specificity" right away.

The ads on your website does not make it a commercial website. Actually, the money you make with them is not because of the soundfonts, but because of the website itself (its quality, its popularity, etc.). Besides, nobody has to click on an ad to be able to download one of the soundfonts you share... There's actually no link between the ads and the sound fonts...

Let's wait for the webmaster to express his views... I just wanted to give you my feeling about it...

This sounds fine to me. As stated, you're not *re-selling* the sounds or *synchronizing* them. The fact that you offer them as free downloads and make money on the side with seperate advertising shouldn't make it a commercial use. If you were using the sounds as part of the advertising (in an flash ad, for example) things would be different.

Thanks for the input.

I guess I'll just have to give it a try and see what happens. I'll make sure it's obvious to the user what license the soundfont is covered by.

.Thomas