Audio Thievery!

I have noticed that several of my audio clips have an inordinate amount of views, and several have been added to bin and/or added to cart.

None have sold.

I suspect thievery. If I were an audio editor (I am), and I needed a particular sound (as I have) and I wasn't particularly honest (I haven't always been) I would sample audio from sites such as this and with creative editing use the audio around the watermark. (Is this karma?)

So how would I prevent it from happening more? Obviously, with my single-gunshot clips, re-eding them to make the "Pond5.com" lady say her thing right in the middle of the sound's good part would do it, but some, like this clip, have several very usable chunks in between the Pond5 voice.
https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/1223770

A brief survey of sound effects on Pond5 reveals MANY sounds that can be stolen.

This must be stopped, or else why bother uploading?

Gene

I'm sure its the same as we've talked about for video. The put in cart does not mean there will be a sale.
If I have 40 videos a week put in a cart, I may only have 20 sales

But I do see what you mean about only using a small piece of the audio file. So how would you propose stopping it?
I don't think you could put the Pond5 lady throughout the entire clip. People couldn't hear what they want to buy.
Jake

I do understand the distinction between ATC and actual sales. But I am looking at my portfolio, and the amount of views of the audio clips, mostly gunshots, is off-balance.

I agree that the lady should not be accompanying the entire sample track, and it should not sound bad, either. I was thinking some kind of bias tone on the preview...a frequency carrying a code in pulse that cannot be detected by ear, but stymies illegitimate downloads and possibly even analog resampling. A digital audio watermark?

That's a bit out of my league though.

Maybe just an admonition to those imperfect beings still unable to allow themselves to believe that stealing is bad - all things are in balance, always. If you pay now, you KNOW what form the "balancing" will take, and if you don't, you might be regretful when karma (or whatever) strikes....

Or just not worry about it and hope that there are more honest people than not.

That could be an interesting way to protect them. On the P5 preview the ladies voice is fine. If they download a demo make the lady continuous on the download sample version. Indeed there is a lot of clean audio between the ladies voice as it is now. Many times the demo file is completely useable since sounds like a gun shot only last a second.

My "digital error" sound fx are eminently "stealable" too....it was actually a digital error that I realized I should record, but as a secure file, there is more than enough sound between the voiceover to re-create the sound.

Funny, but those ones have quite a few views too....

While it would have to be a P5 function in creating the previews, just like adding the voice, and they would LOVE to hear us ask that we want them to re-encode the existing clips!! But look at this article, (skim it, as you know all this stuff already) but listen to the Hip Hop sample down at the bottom of the article...the overdub is occupying a much narrower frequency range than the full-sounding Pond5 lady, and is almost continuous, AND at a lower volume, so the quality of the sound is not obscured: http://www.conradaskland.com/blog/2006/09/protecting-online-audio-downloads-files-from-theft/

Any serious audio engineers making money would never rip any sound effects from this site as the preview quality is terrible in comparison to the original audio file. I believe it is still very wrong to steal sounds in any scenario, as a sound designer myself, and I have often thought about custom watermarks (at least for short sfx such as gunshots, or in my library I've got some sounds like body hits that don't have a watermark due to their prompt timing) and I'm glad you've brought it up since it would be nice to have some sort of solution that will not simply be the Pond5 lady starting immediately with the file. Perhaps a broadband noise such as white noise (at a low level that would enable the listener to judge the audio file but loud enough to deter anyone from wanting to steal the sound) could be an option for short sfx, with an obvious disclaimer from Pond5 explaining : "Due to the timing of the clip, noise has been added to the clip to protect...."

Any thoughts?

As a serious audio engineer, I must agree in concept with your first statement, but point out to you that John Q. Public, the suspect more likely to steal, has an already "dumbed down" sense of what good audio is in the first place. Take a nice, well-recorded sound or song recorded on analogue or good digital (24/96 or higher, generally) and then convert it into an MP3 at horrible bit rate so you can fit "thousands of songs" onto your drives. And they do, and they think it sounds fine. What they DON'T know is what the sound was like before, or what they are missing because of the data compression.

I think the broadband white noise (or other colors, depending on audio) might work, but also might harm the sales even with forewarning as you say, because the buyer might interpret the noise as, well, noise....in that they cannot tell how clean the sample is. That's why I recommended something similar to the narrow-band voiceover in the post above. It could also be a narrow-band, random-frequency sine in some cases. If the preview player was set up to generate a random oscillation between frequencies when played, as opposed to having the sample generated with the voiceover on it, a curious buyer could listen to it several times looped and the sample/audio would be easy to discern from the tone, more so at different times with each playback, so theoretically it would allow for a moment of clarity.

I dunno - this is a tough issue!

I had a story. Enjoyed searching google and found the sound with a similar name. Decided to compare out of curiosity. And found that on another site stock audio posted a fragment of my audio for sale. I wrote to tech support that site and the offender was removed :)
In such situations, automatic marking preview does not help. Help only if the authors will manually add watermarks

Hey, hopefully this isn't to old to resurrect!

Just wondering how any of you got on with your shorter SFX. Have you noticed that the effects that are too short to contain the P5 water mark sell less than others? I've just started to upload here and am curious to how it panned out?

about 20% of my portfolio is too short to get watermark :) In some files I've noticed atc and atb activity inacuarate to sales. But I suppose in most cases 64 kbps of quality of preview is too low for pro use.