Really interesting to scroll through and play random sounds. Seems very comprehensive, although it is a bit UK centric (not surprisingly). A good source for a project I've been contemplating to deconstruct sounds in the same way a picture can be represented by SVG.
I don't think this license makes sense at all for a sound effect library.
> 4.a Not removing content from your device or systems when we ask you to.
Use sound effect in a short film, BBC take down the sound effect library, your film is now illegal.
> 4.b Don't use our content for (…) promoting (…) tobacco (…) anything that would harm the BBC reputation (…) social campaigning purposes or fundraising.
Also no ads next to or over the content.
Also, from paragraph 4.h you are not allowed to share the content.
Real scenario: a friend was asking me a few weeks back if I had any audio clips for the theatrical show in his kid's school. Not much, just a clock ticking, a car honk. The show was of course free (parents were acting for their kids to enjoy). All non-profit. That library would be helpful (and will be helpful next year when they'll have to perform again).
And oh how I miss GetRight. I remember it was able to jump-around and download from linked web-pages. While IDM doesn't seem to be able to crawl like this (or at least I haven't found a way).
Edit: snap if you got an Android/iOS app and want to add some sounds (e.g. "Lion roaring (inside cage)") then you fall under '8. a) for commercial purposes – to make a profit' you need permission, which sensibly one can obtain without jumping through too many hoops.
It appears this is part of a larger collection intended for educational use:
“The RES initiative was launched to make lessons, lectures and learning more interesting, varied, colourful and informative, to enrich teaching across different levels and subjects and to support research at all levels.
RES offers a free, openly licensed index of cultural assets from some of the world's leading cultural institutions. Images, TV and radio programmes, podcasts, documents, text, pre-formatted teaching materials, and more are all being indexed by RES. The information about rights is included with the assets.”
If you're looking for more things to listen that are atmospheric I recommend checking out this site: http://mynoise.net
The author and sound designer has had a long history of making patches for famous Roland instruments, and he designed his own microphones for a lot of these recordings. They are top notch.
I listen to Rain on a Tin Roof and Steel Mill at work as white noise. Very good for focus!
Someone should crawl (with permission) and torrent it - stopping thousands of people crawling this site with who knows how little bandwidth or data transfer quota.
(This should also ideally have been done by the person who first published this thing on the public Internet, but here we are.)
Actually, some of those transfers ended up timing out, and I have no way to know which files are incomplete.
Ended up using Notepad++ and a simple regex in the find/replace dialog to prepend ########.wav with the URL, then chucked it into JDownloader's link grabber. 283.83GB, BTW. I may end up compressing these with FLAC to save the space.
If anyone is curious, the regex I used was: (([0-9])+.wav) and replaced with http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/$&
The RemArc license https://github.com/bbcarchdev/Remarc/raw/master/doc/2016.09.... clearly attempts to appear friendly and aimed at being understood by non-lawyers but what the license says is not nice at all. This license purports to cover software (among other things) and it is clearly non-free (and a clear illustration of how open source is not free software). That's bad enough to reject the license and all covered works in itself. But the license is worse for using unclear and rights-limiting language.
Open source and software freedom are not the same thing:
This license claims to cover many types of "content" (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content for why that's a bad idea) including "Technical stuff such as metadata and open-source code (please see point 7)". The Open Source Initiative started over a decade after the free software movement began and promotes a 10-point development methodology built to reject the ethical underpinning of the free software movement. The Open Source Definition is not at all the same as software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software). Open source advocates sometimes reject that 10-point methodology altogether and adopt whatever proprietary work is available if that work is sufficiently attractive (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... for more on this). The RemArc license is an example of papering over the limitations of proprietary control by using a term people think they understand.
The RemArc license is highly prejudiced against commercial and educational use. Section 7 tells us RemArc-covered works are "only for non-commercial, personal or research purposes". Using the covered work "substantially to do your job – as an employee, contractor or consultant" might require you to pay a fee not listed in this license. And that personal or research use (however that is meant to be interpreted) is further limited to "formal education purposes while you are a student or a member of staff of a school, college or university". So if you're doing your own research/education work or if you're home-schooling, you are not licensed to use the covered work. I can't say if this qualifies as "open source" as the license says, but these restrictions absolutely disqualify this license from being a free software license.
RemArc license is very unclear:
"Don't mess with our content" seems to mean let the copyright holders dictate when you must remove the work upon request. So you are being kept from keeping a copy of the work thus censoring you.
"Don’t use our content for harmful or offensive purposes" is defined using vague and undefined terms such as being "insulting", "promoting pornography" (precisely what pornography is or what 'promotes' pornography is doubly-unclear), "putting children at risk" (of what? They don't say), "anything illegal. Like using hate speech" (which, is not defined in the US and not defined in this license, and would not survive 1st Amendment scrutiny in the US if used by a state-funded institution akin to coming from the state-funded BBC). Also one is not licensed to use the work in a "harmful or offensive" way such as "Using our content for political or social campaigning purposes". Not only is that unclear it could include doing things I don't find offensive, harmful, insulting, or illegal such as ...
> It makes no sense why BBC fee payers would want to be compelled to pay to have taxpayer-funded workers to make works which are so restrictively licensed.
Are you suggesting that I should instead be compelled to pay to allow a Neo-nazi to profit off my tax contributions?
I get it, you think noncommercial and moral use clauses are the worst thing ever. Your position is not as universal as you think it is.
We can leave the whether or not publicly-funded work like this should belong to the public (no not the Crown) so I understand that this is theirs to license how they see fit... but this license stinks.
It's non-commercial. It has huge moral use clauses. It basically limits your use to the same standards the BBC is required to keep at broadcast.
And you have to give a credit. And you can't use too much of it (lest somebody think you're sponsored by the BBC). And you cannot denature the collection or remove tracking or branding from it.
AAAAAnd you have to remove files from your copy when they ask. This is a revocable license.
29 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] thread> 4.a Not removing content from your device or systems when we ask you to.
Use sound effect in a short film, BBC take down the sound effect library, your film is now illegal.
> 4.b Don't use our content for (…) promoting (…) tobacco (…) anything that would harm the BBC reputation (…) social campaigning purposes or fundraising.
Also no ads next to or over the content.
Also, from paragraph 4.h you are not allowed to share the content.
And oh how I miss GetRight. I remember it was able to jump-around and download from linked web-pages. While IDM doesn't seem to be able to crawl like this (or at least I haven't found a way).
Edit: snap if you got an Android/iOS app and want to add some sounds (e.g. "Lion roaring (inside cage)") then you fall under '8. a) for commercial purposes – to make a profit' you need permission, which sensibly one can obtain without jumping through too many hoops.
“The RES initiative was launched to make lessons, lectures and learning more interesting, varied, colourful and informative, to enrich teaching across different levels and subjects and to support research at all levels.
RES offers a free, openly licensed index of cultural assets from some of the world's leading cultural institutions. Images, TV and radio programmes, podcasts, documents, text, pre-formatted teaching materials, and more are all being indexed by RES. The information about rights is included with the assets.”
https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/
The author and sound designer has had a long history of making patches for famous Roland instruments, and he designed his own microphones for a lot of these recordings. They are top notch.
I listen to Rain on a Tin Roof and Steel Mill at work as white noise. Very good for focus!
curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%
(This should also ideally have been done by the person who first published this thing on the public Internet, but here we are.)
I'm just lazy. These are epic!
EDIT: Working on a one liner :)
EDIT: I'm sure it's like some curl and xargs and sed, it's been a while...
EDIT: Oh yeah, I win at internet:
curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%>%
EDIT: Wait I suck that doesn't work. This does:
curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%
-O for dOwnlOad
Now to give them better names than the numbers used by BBC. Any solutions/suggestions?
Ended up using Notepad++ and a simple regex in the find/replace dialog to prepend ########.wav with the URL, then chucked it into JDownloader's link grabber. 283.83GB, BTW. I may end up compressing these with FLAC to save the space. If anyone is curious, the regex I used was: (([0-9])+.wav) and replaced with http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/$&
Now for the naming and splitting by CD name...
Open source and software freedom are not the same thing:
This license claims to cover many types of "content" (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content for why that's a bad idea) including "Technical stuff such as metadata and open-source code (please see point 7)". The Open Source Initiative started over a decade after the free software movement began and promotes a 10-point development methodology built to reject the ethical underpinning of the free software movement. The Open Source Definition is not at all the same as software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software). Open source advocates sometimes reject that 10-point methodology altogether and adopt whatever proprietary work is available if that work is sufficiently attractive (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... for more on this). The RemArc license is an example of papering over the limitations of proprietary control by using a term people think they understand.
The RemArc license is highly prejudiced against commercial and educational use. Section 7 tells us RemArc-covered works are "only for non-commercial, personal or research purposes". Using the covered work "substantially to do your job – as an employee, contractor or consultant" might require you to pay a fee not listed in this license. And that personal or research use (however that is meant to be interpreted) is further limited to "formal education purposes while you are a student or a member of staff of a school, college or university". So if you're doing your own research/education work or if you're home-schooling, you are not licensed to use the covered work. I can't say if this qualifies as "open source" as the license says, but these restrictions absolutely disqualify this license from being a free software license.
RemArc license is very unclear:
"Don't mess with our content" seems to mean let the copyright holders dictate when you must remove the work upon request. So you are being kept from keeping a copy of the work thus censoring you.
"Don’t use our content for harmful or offensive purposes" is defined using vague and undefined terms such as being "insulting", "promoting pornography" (precisely what pornography is or what 'promotes' pornography is doubly-unclear), "putting children at risk" (of what? They don't say), "anything illegal. Like using hate speech" (which, is not defined in the US and not defined in this license, and would not survive 1st Amendment scrutiny in the US if used by a state-funded institution akin to coming from the state-funded BBC). Also one is not licensed to use the work in a "harmful or offensive" way such as "Using our content for political or social campaigning purposes". Not only is that unclear it could include doing things I don't find offensive, harmful, insulting, or illegal such as ...
Are you suggesting that I should instead be compelled to pay to allow a Neo-nazi to profit off my tax contributions?
I get it, you think noncommercial and moral use clauses are the worst thing ever. Your position is not as universal as you think it is.
It's non-commercial. It has huge moral use clauses. It basically limits your use to the same standards the BBC is required to keep at broadcast.
And you have to give a credit. And you can't use too much of it (lest somebody think you're sponsored by the BBC). And you cannot denature the collection or remove tracking or branding from it.
AAAAAnd you have to remove files from your copy when they ask. This is a revocable license.
This is very likely a legal requirement for them.