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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

If you're a "media" producer, you can use them to build your game, soundtrack, presentation, etc. Once you're satisfied, and the product will be published, you can decide to get a license. You've seen the price: buying such licenses beforehand is only for dedicated professionals.

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For comparison, see the prices and licensing of the General Series 6000 library from Sound Ideas:

* https://sound-ideas.com/Collection/2/2/0/The-General-Series-...

The Sound Ideas licence expressly prohibits the use of any of its sound effects "as mobile telecom audio content such as ring tones, ringback tones, soundscapes, multimedia messaging services (MMS), voice messaging, audio enhancements, greeting mail services, or other content applications now known or which shall become known".

* https://sound-ideas.com/Page/Sound-Ideas-End-User-License

That's not the only restriction in the Sound Ideas licence. You may only use the effects at one address. You may not sell or throw away your computers or disc drives if you don't wipe them. You may not put sound effects into firmware.

But can you use them as a sound effect in a youtube video, where you may earn some revenue through adverts some time in the future (or maybe not)?

> where you may earn some revenue through adverts

This is commercial use and paid.

It really isn't as clear as that. Most youtube videos are not monetised, but the status could change years later. Further, in an hour long video, using a 5 second audio clip with an advertising revenue of £0.10 is considered commercial and a payment?

Not a lawyer, but I do work with licensed content: In this case you would probable need to pay the licensing fee before turning on ads for any video using assets from this library.

But what if you do it by accident, forgetting that you’d used a licensed asset in this long-published video? Tough cookies.

If you’re going to publish a mix of commercial and non-commercial content, you’d best be using some sort of tagging system to keep track of which videos use assets from which libraries. Because if you mess up, it’s on you.

We frequently run into this issue when a vendor gets bought by another company who doesn’t want to renew their contract with us: At that point we have to use our tagging system to find any content using assets from that library and either pull it or find replacements from somewhere else.

> with an advertising revenue of £0.10 is considered commercial and a payment?

Yes. Ignorance not excuse. There are quite a few cases where people go on GIS and find some random image, and then stock image crawling bots encounter it and extract payment with penalties.

Even if they are not monetised by the uploader, the video will still be monetised by Google, so this is still commercial use, even if they only earn 0.0001c

YouTube is a commercial website, whether or not they give you a cut of their profits for your content is irrelevant. To upload videos to YouTube, you must assign them a license for their commercial use. You have no right to make that assignment of license if you do not hold the right yourself.

Yes

Looking at the license[1], I think not:

> [...] You can't [...] put ads next to or over it (the content)

1: https://github.com/bbcarchdev/Remarc/blob/master/doc/2016.09...

Can you actually buy a license from the BBC for these?

Go to the actual BBC page, the RES Acropolis one that has been pointed to in this very discussion several times, and your question is answered in the third sentence.

"Yes" would have been shorter.

Shortness wasn't the goal. Making you read what is in front of you, for yourself, was. And "yes" is not even the answer.

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