Entry 3 - The Freesound Project

( http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=361 )

The Freesound Project (http://www.freesound.org/) is a website that was created to host free sounds for others to sample from. The site contains a database of sounds protected under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license, so people must provide credit to the original sound creators, but the derivative work can be used commercially or non-commercially. The sounds range from electronic beeps to anything you can imagine, although the database is specifically for sounds, not music.

The site is an exciting prospect for remix artists, who now have a fully-legal library of sounds to sample from, rather than having to record the sounds themselves, or resort to sampling without permission, which could get them in legal troubles later. I feel like copyright laws need to change a bit to allow proper artistic expression while still protecting the rights of the original content creators, after all, a lot of sounds in the world are not under the Sampling Plus license. How can someone claim ownership to a few seconds of sound? It is a difficult issue, because creative works require protection, but this protection also limits future creativity.