Sound Effects Pros Launch an Alliance Against AI Scraping

Sound designers and SFX libraries launched the Professional Sound Alliance to push for consent and payment when their work trains AI, even as its founding libraries already license to companies like Sony AI.

Sound designers, mixers and sound effects library companies launched the Professional Sound Alliance on Sept. 24, arguing that everything in media audio that isn't music or voice has never had an organized defender. The group targets two practices it calls Data Piracy, the scraping of sound libraries into commercial AI models without permission, and Sync Piracy, the use of library sounds in film, TV and games without a license.

Founding members include Pro Sound Effects CEO Douglas Price, Boom Library CEO Pierre Langer, Sound Ideas VP Craig Nimens, re-recording mixer and former Cinema Audio Society president Karol Urban, and two-time Oscar winner Mark Mangini, who says on the alliance's site that sound effects "are not a commodity."

The launch is deliberately modest. It consists of a public petition and a supporter seal, and the alliance has said it has no intention of litigating or setting licensing standards through the group. The goal is recognition.

It also isn't anti-AI. Pro Sound Effects sells a rights-cleared AI training dataset of more than a million human-tagged sounds, listing Google, Sony AI and Dolby among its clients. Sony AI trained a private version of Woosh, its sound effects generation model, on licensed libraries from Pro Sound Effects and BOOM. Stability AI's Stable Audio 3.0 family includes an open-weight Small SFX model the company says was trained on fully licensed data. The line the alliance is drawing is consent and payment, not the technology.

That's the same line music has been fighting over. Sony and Universal are still litigating against Suno, and the source code exposed in Suno's July hack reportedly listed stock audio sources Freesound and Pond5 among its training inputs.

For AI music creators, sound effects are the next provenance question. As generators add foley, ambience and texture inside tracks, "trained on licensed libraries" is likely to become a selling point the way licensed catalog has for Suno v6 and Stable Audio, and the alliance's own founding members are the ones positioned to do that licensing.