Effective date: [DATE] Last updated: [DATE]
This policy is part of the Terms of Use. It explains what happens to a recording's rights the moment you upload it.
Every recording in the archive is in one of two states, chosen by the uploader at the moment of upload.
Released to the world under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Anyone, anywhere may:
on one condition: they must give appropriate credit (see Section 4), link to the license, and indicate whether they made changes.
They may not add legal or technical restrictions that stop others from doing anything the license permits.
No Creative Commons license is granted. You reserve every right you have.
Protected recordings may be listened to on ListenToYourCity.com and nowhere else. Downloading, redistribution, sampling, remixing, commercial use, inclusion in datasets, and bulk export are all prohibited without your written permission. We display a clear "Protected — All Rights Reserved" badge on the pin, the player, and the recording page, and we technically exclude Protected recordings from downloads, the public API, and bulk archive exports.
If someone wants to license a Protected recording, we pass the request to you. We take no cut and we are not a party to whatever you agree.
If you upload without choosing, your recording is Open under CC BY 4.0.
This is a deliberate choice about what this archive is for. A soundscape archive that nobody can use is a hard drive. The point is that a filmmaker in Berlin can score a scene with the sound of a Ninth Ward morning, and that a researcher in 2075 can hear what this city sounded like — and that both of them credit the person who stood there holding the recorder.
The upload screen states the default in plain language, shows the Protected toggle at equal prominence, and requires you to confirm you understand the license is permanent before the upload completes. We don't hide the default in a settings menu.
Separate from the public license, you grant [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, transcode, compress, stream, cache, back up, index, generate waveforms and transcripts from, and publicly display your recording and its metadata — for the purpose of operating, preserving, and promoting the Service.
This applies to Protected recordings too; without it we cannot legally stream your file to a listener's browser. For Protected recordings it is limited to running the Service and does not include promotional use.
For Open recordings, this license also lets us feature the recording in collections, maps, exhibits, press, and social posts about the archive, always with your attribution credit.
This license ends when you delete the recording — except where it's necessary to keep serving copies already licensed to the public under CC BY, and except for backup copies that age out on their normal cycle.
We do not sell your recordings. We do not license your recordings to third parties on your behalf. For Open recordings, third parties get their rights from the CC BY license directly, not from us, and we take no fee. For Protected recordings, no third party gets anything.
If you are using a CC BY recording from this archive, here is the attribution. Include it wherever you'd normally put credits.
Standard format:
"[Recording Title]" by [Contributor Name], from Listen to Your City (listentoyourcity.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Example:
"Streetcar, St. Charles at Napoleon, 6:14am" by J. Rivera, from Listen to Your City (listentoyourcity.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0.
If you modified it, say so:
"Rain on the Roof, Bywater" by A. Toussaint, from Listen to Your City (listentoyourcity.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Pitched down and layered.
Every recording page carries a one-click copy button with the attribution string pre-filled, in plain text, HTML, and BibTeX. Use it.
Where credit is genuinely impractical — a live installation, a broadcast with no credit roll — CC BY 4.0 permits attribution "in any reasonable manner based on the medium." A project website, program note, or liner credit satisfies it. Silence does not.
What attribution does not do: crediting a contributor doesn't imply they endorse your project, and you may not suggest that they do.
Read this section twice.
CC BY 4.0 is irrevocable. When you upload a recording as Open, you grant a license directly to every person in the world, forever, under the terms of that license. That grant is complete at the moment of upload.
Consequences:
If any of that would bother you for a particular recording, tag it Protected. That option is one tap away and it costs nothing.
Protected → Open: Allowed, one time, permanent. You'll confirm through a dialog that spells out Section 5. From that moment the recording is CC BY 4.0 forever.
Open → Protected: Allowed, and it takes effect going forward only. We'll stop offering downloads, remove it from the API and bulk exports, and re-badge the pin. Everyone who already has a copy keeps their CC BY rights, in perpetuity, and there is nothing either of us can do about that. We will not advertise this as "taking a recording back," because it isn't.
Bulk defaults: You can set an account-level default (Open or Protected) so you aren't choosing every time. Changing your account default does not retroactively change recordings already uploaded.
Your license covers your copyright in your recording as a sound recording. That's it.
It does not — because it cannot — clear:
Downstream users: the CC BY license you receive from a contributor is a license to that contributor's copyright and nothing else. It is not a clearance. Before commercial use of any recording containing music, identifiable speech, or identifiable people, do your own rights work. CC BY 4.0 explicitly disclaims warranties, and so do we.
Titles, descriptions, tags, and coordinates you write are licensed the same way the recording is — CC BY 4.0 for Open, all rights reserved for Protected.
The database structure, the map interface, our curation, and our editorial writing are ours and are not covered by any Creative Commons license.
Open recordings are available through the public API and periodic bulk archive exports. Every file carries embedded license and attribution metadata. Attribution is required for bulk use too — an accompanying credits file listing contributors satisfies it for large collections.
This includes machine learning. CC BY 4.0 permits using the recording to train models, subject to attribution. We're stating this plainly rather than letting you find out later. If you don't want your work in a training set, tag it Protected — that is the opt-out, and it is the only reliable one.
Protected recordings are excluded from the API, from every bulk export, and from any dataset we produce or permit. Scraping Protected audio out of the streaming player violates the Terms of Use and we will pursue it.
Rate limits and terms for API access are published separately. Bulk access is a courtesy and we can suspend it for abuse.
If a recording was made collaboratively, the uploading account must have authority from all contributors to license it, and should name them in the description. The uploader is responsible to the others for the choice made. We deal only with the uploading account.
If you're recording for an employer, a university, a client, or under a grant, the work may not be yours to license. Check before you upload. "I made it" and "I own it" are different questions, and the second one is the one that matters here.
If you believe a recording on the Service infringes your copyright, send a written notice to our Designated Copyright Agent containing all of the following:
Designated Copyright Agent: [AGENT NAME] [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] [MAILING ADDRESS] [EMAIL] [PHONE]
(Register this agent with the U.S. Copyright Office at dmca.copyright.gov to keep safe-harbor protection. Registration must be renewed every three years.)
What we do: expeditiously remove or disable access to the recording, notify the uploader, and give them the counter-notice procedure.
Counter-notice. If your recording was removed and you believe that was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice with your signature, identification of the removed material and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification, your contact information, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court in your district (or, if you're outside the U.S., the Eastern District of Louisiana). If the complainant doesn't file suit within 10–14 business days, we may restore the recording.
A removal does not revoke a CC BY license already granted. It removes our copy. Copies already distributed under the license are outside our reach — and if the uploader never had the rights in the first place, the license they purported to grant was void from the start, which is a matter between the copyright owner and whoever relied on it.
Misrepresentation. Knowingly filing a false notice or counter-notice carries liability for damages under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f). Don't use this process to remove recordings you simply dislike.
Repeat infringers. Accounts that accumulate multiple valid, uncontested notices are terminated.
If you appear in a recording and want it removed for privacy reasons, or a performance of yours was uploaded without permission, write to [PRIVACY EMAIL]. You don't need to file a DMCA notice for this. Describe the recording and your connection to it. We take these seriously and generally remove first and ask questions after.
We'll also honor requests to remove recordings that expose a sensitive location, that were made without required consent, or that identify a minor.
Licensing questions: [LICENSING EMAIL] Copyright complaints: [AGENT EMAIL] Privacy and takedown: [PRIVACY EMAIL]