Professional Sound Alliance Forms to Combat AI Scraping of Sound Libraries and Design

Sound designers and SFX libraries launch Professional Sound Alliance to fight AI scraping: ‘Now sound will have protection of our own’

September 18, 2026 By Mandy Dalugdug

Sound designers, recordists, mixers, and sound effects library companies have launched the Professional Sound Alliance , a coalition formed to fight the unlicensed use of professional sound in media production and AI.

Continue to article...

The group, which launched on Thursday ( September 24 ), says it will push for fair licensing of sound design and sound effects across film, television, games, and AI training.

“Music has its protectors. Voice has its protectors. Now sound will have protection of our own,” said Douglas Price , the Alliance ‘s Chair and the Founder and CEO of Pro Sound Effects .

The Alliance says it was formed in response to two forms of unauthorized use, which it calls Data Piracy and Sync Piracy .

The Alliance describes the first as “the scraping of sound libraries into commercial AI models without permission or compensation,” and the second as “the use of sounds and libraries in film, television, and games without a license.”

Both, the Alliance says, “bypass years of field recording, editing, expert human curation, classification, and metadata creation” behind professional sound libraries.

That process is the product. Pro Sound Effects sells an AI training dataset of 1.27 million sounds that it describes as “rights-cleared” and “human-tagged,” running to more than 5,000 hours of audio.

Pro Sound Effects says an in-house team annotates every file using a professional taxonomy, and that the dataset is “never crowdsourced or synthetic.”

The company lists Google , Sony AI , and Dolby among the “industry leading teams” on the page where it markets that data.

Sony AI has separately said the sound libraries behind Similar Sound Search, the tool it developed with Audiokinetic for the Wwise middleware, were supplied by Pro Sound Effects and Boom Library .

On the sync side, Pro Sound Effects set out in a 2022 post on its own blog what unlicensed use looks like in practice.

A freelancer’s licensed files left behind on a company server after a job ends do not carry over to that company’s next project, the company says.

Nor does sharing an editor’s library password with someone outside a multi-user agreement extend the license to them. Work made that way is unlicensed.

Professional sound, as the Alliance defines it, is everything heard in a film, game, or TV show that is neither music nor voice – “every explosion, ambience, footstep, and door slam.”

The Alliance says its core group is Price as Chair; Jeremy Siegel as Coordinator; Pierre Langer , CEO of Boom Library ; Sound Ideas Vice President Craig Nimens ; Karol Urban , an Emmy-nominated re-recording mixer and former Cinema Audio Society President; and Mark Mangini , a two-time Academy Award winner.

Siegel is Director of Strategic Partnerships at Pro Sound Effects , putting both of the Alliance ‘s officer roles at the same company.

> “It’s time professional sound received the same respect and protection every other audio field has earned, for the lifetimes of work our industry has collectively built.” Douglas Price , Professional Sound Alliance / Pro Sound Effects

“It’s time professional sound received the same respect and protection every other audio field has earned, for the lifetimes of work our industry has collectively built,” said Price .

Price added: “If you’ve helped to shape this craft, add your name and stand with us.”

“Sound effects are not a commodity,” said Mangini , whose credits include Mad Max: Fury Road , Dune , and Blade Runner 2049 . “They are the product of human expertise, human experience, and human artistry.

> “Sound effects are not a commodity. They are the product of human expertise, human experience, and human artistry.” Mark Mangini , Professional Sound Alliance

“They deserve the same protection as any other creative work.”

The Alliance ‘s data piracy complaint tracks the case the major record companies have spent more than two years making against generative AI firms.

The three majors sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, in cases coordinated by the RIAA that alleged “mass infringement” of copyright.

The labels later expanded those claims, alleging the companies had ripped recordings from YouTube and circumvented the platform’s protections.

Sound libraries turned up in the same material. Hacked source code from Suno , reported by 404 Media in July, named Freesound and the stock library Pond5 among the sources it drew training data from.

The datasets logged 62,117 hours from Pond5 , which is owned by Shutterstock , according to that report.

The majors then moved from litigation to licensing, but not uniformly.

Universal Music Group settled with Udio in October 2025 and signed licensing deals for a new AI music service. It has not settled with Suno , and is still litigating that case alongside Sony Music .

Warner Music Group settled with Udio in November 2025, then became the first major to settle with Suno days later.

Sony Music has settled with neither. In July it filed a second suit against Udio , over a further 30,117 recordings.

Those deals have since drawn their own lawsuit, with the American Federation of Musicians ( AFM ) suing Universal , Warner Records , and Atlantic over the licensing of members’ recordings to the two AI companies without paying or crediting them. The labels have moved to dismiss, with briefing closed on September 11.

Sound effects generation is already a shipping product for AI developers such as Stability AI .

Stability AI ‘s Stable Audio 3.0 family, released in May 2026 , includes a model called Small SFX built for sound effects generation on phones and laptops.

Small SFX is open-weight and free to download, with an enterprise license required only of companies above USD $1 million in annual revenue.

According to a research paper published alongside that launch, the family is trained on licensed audio from production library AudioSparx , plus Creative Commons recordings from Freesound – the same repository named in Suno ‘s hacked code, on different terms.

Licensing a library is not the end of the argument. In December 2025, musician Anders Manga sued Stability AI and AudioSparx , alleging his recordings were used to train Stable Audio in breach of a licensing agreement that predated generative AI. A judge dismissed the claim against AudioSparx in March, finding that the licensing agreement between the two covered the use in question.

The line between searching a library and generating from one is not fixed, and it runs through Pro Sound Effects ‘ own customer list.

Also in May 2026, Sony AI released Woosh , a foundation model built specifically for sound effects, which generates audio from text prompts and from video.

Sony AI said it trained a private version of the model on licensed professional libraries “including Pro Sound Effects and BOOM,” and released a public version, trained on openly available data, under a non-commercial license.

“There’s no model that really is specific to sound effects,” said Hakim Missoum , Strategy & Partnerships Manager at Sony AI . “And in order to get good quality output, you need good quality input.”

Two of the Alliance ‘s founding library companies have, in other words, already licensed their catalogs to train a generative sound effects model. The Alliance ‘s objection is to the unlicensed version of the same transaction.

The Alliance describes sound as “the third pillar of audio alongside music and voice.” Its website puts the argument as a three-way split: “Audio has three pillars. Two are protected. One isn’t.”

Its launch statement sets out the comparison directly: “Music has the RIAA and its labels. Voice has SAG-AFTRA.”

Those two bodies do different jobs. The RIAA is a trade organization that coordinates litigation and policy for rightsholders.

SAG-AFTRA is a union that bargains contracts, and in 2024 it reached a deal with the major labels requiring an artist’s consent before a recording can use a digital replica of their voice.

Neither of those arrangements is permanent. That SAG-AFTRA agreement expires on December 31 this year, and the AFM and the labels are negotiating their next Sound Recording Labor Agreement with AI at the center of the talks.

Sound is not starting from nothing. The Cinema Audio Society ( CAS ) was formed in 1964 and the Motion Picture Sound Editors ( MPSE ) in 1953 .

Both are nonprofit craft bodies built around education, mentorship, and awards rather than rights, and both are professional societies rather than unions.

In 2020, the CAS , MPSE , and the Association of Motion Picture Sound wrote jointly to the industry asking for key sound professionals to be grouped together in film credits and positioned alongside other key roles – a campaign for recognition rather than licensing terms. The CAS President who signed it was Karol Urban , now in the Alliance ‘s core group.

The Professional Sound Alliance launches with a petition and a downloadable seal, not a collective bargaining agreement or a litigation fund.

Its announcement does not say whether the Alliance intends to pursue litigation, bargaining, or a licensing standard.

Sound professionals, artists, toolmakers, software companies, and studios can add their names at professionalsoundalliance.org, the Alliance said.

Supporters can also download a Professional Sound Alliance seal for their websites, social profiles, and email signatures. Music Business Worldwide

News United States Boom Library Cinema Audio Society Craig Nimens Douglas Price Jeremy Siegel Karol Urban Mark Mangini Pierre Langer Pro Sound Effects Professional Sound Alliance Sound Ideas

_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sound-designers-and-sfx-libraries-launch-professional-sound-alliance-to-fight-ai-scraping-now-sound-will-have-protection-of-our-own/)._