Sound designers, recordists, and sound effects library companies have established the Professional Sound Alliance to combat unauthorised use of professional sound in both commercial media and AI training. The coalition, launched today, seeks to secure fair licensing protections for sound design and effects across film, television, games, and artificial intelligence, addressing what members describe as two distinct problems: the scraping of sound libraries into commercial AI models without permission, and the unlicensed use of sounds in media production.

The founding members include award-winning professionals such as Mark Mangini (Academy Award winner with credits on Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune) and Emmy-nominated mixer Karol Urban, alongside executives from Pro Sound Effects and Boom Library. Pro Sound Effects maintains an AI training dataset comprising 1.27 million rights-cleared, human-tagged sounds totalling over 5,000 hours of audio, which it markets to industry leaders including Google and Sony AI. The Alliance argues that both unauthorised uses bypass the extensive professional work—field recording, editing, expert curation, and metadata creation—that forms the genuine product behind professional sound libraries.