| # Rights, Licensing & Redistribution — SONAR packaging |
|
|
| **Status:** packaged and rehosted under a *maintainer-asserted* license. Read this before |
| relying on the data for anything beyond non-commercial research. |
|
|
| ## What this repo is |
|
|
| A re-encoded, schema-normalized packaging of the **SONAR** synthetic-audio detection |
| evaluation set (arXiv [2410.04324](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04324); upstream code/data: |
| [github.com/Jessegator/SONAR](https://github.com/Jessegator/SONAR)). 4,548 clips: 2,274 |
| bonafide (LibriTTS clean-test) + 2,274 spoof from nine speech-synthesis systems. |
|
|
| ## The rights situation (be honest about it) |
|
|
| SONAR has **no unified upstream redistribution license**: |
|
|
| - The paper explicitly declines one: the constituent sources "may be subject to different |
| distribution licenses and usage restrictions," and it directs users to "the usage policies |
| of the respective API providers." |
| - The official upstream repo has **no `LICENSE` file** and no redistribution statement. |
| - The spoof set aggregates output from systems with their own terms — notably **OpenAI TTS |
| API** output (600 clips), whose API Terms of Service restrict redistribution — alongside |
| xTTS, Seed-TTS, VALL-E, VoiceBox, NaturalSpeech 3, PromptTTS 2, FlashSpeech, AudioGen. The |
| bonafide side is **LibriTTS** (CC BY 4.0). |
|
|
| We therefore **cannot point to an upstream grant** that clearly permits rehosting these audio |
| bytes. |
|
|
| ## What we asserted, and why |
|
|
| This packaging is published under **CC BY-NC 4.0** (full text in `LICENSE.txt`) as the |
| **safest defensible choice** for an aggregated research benchmark we can't relicense |
| permissively: |
|
|
| - **NonCommercial** narrows exposure on the commercial-API-derived portion (OpenAI TTS). |
| - **Attribution** preserves credit to the upstream sources and the SONAR authors. |
|
|
| **This is a packaging license applied by the Arena maintainers, not an upstream grant.** The |
| underlying sources retain their own terms. CC BY-NC 4.0 here is an assertion *over an aggregate |
| we do not hold full rights to* — it reduces, but does not eliminate, redistribution risk. |
|
|
| ## For downstream users |
|
|
| - Use is intended for **non-commercial research / benchmarking only**. |
| - If you need stronger guarantees, **regenerate the spoof audio yourself** from the upstream |
| recipes in `github.com/Jessegator/SONAR` rather than relying on this rehost, and consult each |
| provider's usage policy (OpenAI, Coqui/xTTS, etc.). |
|
|
| ## For maintainers / takedown |
|
|
| If any upstream rights-holder (OpenAI or any synthesis-system owner) objects, treat this as a |
| **takedown candidate**: depin the dataset from `arena-manifest` (remove the `core_set` entry + |
| add a `dataset_repin`/note CHANGELOG event) and delete or gate the HF dataset repo. The |
| labels/protocol are ours; the audio is the encumbered part. The cleaner long-term fix is a |
| loader that regenerates spoof audio on the user's side instead of rehosting it. |
|
|
| _Recorded 2026-06-07 alongside the SONAR add. See also the dataset card's "License & |
| redistribution" section and `docs/plans/2026-06-07-sonar-arena-dataset.md`._ |
|
|
