Professional Sound Alliance to launch campaign against unlicensed AI scraping and sound use

The Professional Sound Alliance, a coalition of sound designers, recordists, mixers and sound-effects library companies, is due to launch on Sept. 24 with a campaign against unlicensed use of professional sound in media production and artificial intelligence. The group will press for fair licensing of sound design and sound effects in film, television, games and AI training. It defines professional sound as the non-music, non-voice audio heard in screen works, from explosions and ambience to footsteps and door slams. Music Business Worldwide reported that the alliance has framed its concerns around two forms of unauthorised use. “Data Piracy” is the scraping of sound libraries into commercial AI models without permission or compensation. “Sync Piracy” is the use of sounds and libraries in film, television and games without a licence. The coalition argues that both practices bypass the field recording, editing, expert curation, classification and metadata work that underpins professional sound libraries. Its initial public campaign consists of a petition and a downloadable seal for supporters’ websites, social profiles and email signatures, rather than a collective-bargaining agreement or litigation fund. Douglas Price, the alliance’s chair and founder and chief executive of Pro Sound Effects, said sound should receive the same protection as other audio fields. “Music has its protectors. Voice has its protectors. Now sound will have protection of our own,” he said. The core group also includes Jeremy Siegel, the alliance coordinator and Pro Sound Effects’ director of strategic partnerships; Pierre Langer, chief executive of Boom Library; Craig Nimens, vice-president of Sound Ideas; Karol Urban, an Emmy-nominated re-recording mixer and former Cinema Audio Society president; and Mark Mangini, a two-time Academy Award winner. Mangini said sound effects were the product of “human expertise, human experience, and human artistry” and deserved the same protection as other creative work. Pro Sound Effects offers a private dataset of 1.27 million rights-cleared, human-tagged sounds for AI training, testing and deployment. The company says the collection has more than 5,000 hours of audio, 5.8TB of data and more than 660 categories, and that every file is annotated by its in-house team using a professional taxonomy. Pro Sound Effects says it owns its catalog, which it describes as professionally recorded rather than crowdsourced or synthetic. It has more than 1.2 million effects available for licensing and says it is expanding toward 3 million by 2028. The company has already pursued a licensing arrangement with Musical AI, under which certain catalog recordings are made available for AI training. The Hollywood Reporter said Pro Sound Effects retained the ability to consent to how licensed material was used, while Musical AI would report on usage in outputs tagged with the relevant rightsholders’ names. The stated aim was to facilitate fair and proportional royalty payments to creators. Stability AI’s Stable Audio 3.0, released in May, included an open-weight Small SFX model designed to generate effects on phones and laptops. It is free to download, though companies with annual revenue above $1 million require an enterprise licence. A research paper released with the model said the family used licensed AudioSparx audio and Creative Commons recordings from Freesound. Sony AI also released Woosh in May, a sound-effects foundation model that generates audio from text prompts and video. Its private version was trained on licensed professional libraries, including Pro Sound Effects and Boom, while its public version used openly available data under a non-commercial licence. Major record companies sued Suno and Udio in coordinated cases in June 2024, alleging mass copyright infringement. The U.S. Copyright Office’s report on generative-AI training has likewise examined whether using copyrighted works to develop such systems requires owners’ consent or compensation. Sound professionals, artists, toolmakers, software companies and studios will be able to add their names through the alliance’s website when the campaign launches.