Licensing & Attribution

Every audio file in the ToneVault catalog is sourced from material believed to be in the public domain or distributed under a permissive Creative Commons license. This page explains what those terms mean in practice, what your obligations are as a downloader, and how to credit the source if you reuse a recording in your own work.

Public domain

A work is in the public domain when copyright protection has expired, was never granted in the first place, or has been formally waived by the rights holder. In the United States, sound recordings published before 1923 entered the public domain on January 1, 2022 under the Music Modernization Act; many recordings published between 1923 and 1946 followed in subsequent annual rollovers. Internationally, the picture is more complicated — copyright durations vary country by country.

For practical purposes, public domain audio can be downloaded, copied, modified, and redistributed without permission and without payment. Attribution is not legally required, though it's widely considered good practice.

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons (CC) is a family of standardized public licenses authored by the nonprofit organization of the same name. They allow rights holders to grant the public broad reuse permissions while retaining specific reservations. The licenses you'll most commonly encounter on ToneVault are:

• CC0 (Public Domain Dedication) — the rights holder has voluntarily placed the work in the public domain. No restrictions, no attribution required. Effectively identical to a true public-domain work for reuse purposes.
• CC BY (Attribution) — you may copy, modify, and redistribute the work, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to the original creator.
• CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike) — same as CC BY, plus any derivative works you create must be released under the same license.
• CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) — same as CC BY, but commercial reuse is not permitted. Personal use as a phone ringtone is non-commercial; using the same audio in an advertising campaign, for example, would not be.
• CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivatives) — you may share the work as-is, with attribution, but you may not modify it before redistributing.

Each ringtone's detail page links back to its original source on the Internet Archive (or our other source partner), where you can confirm the exact license attached to that recording.

What you can do with ToneVault audio

For personal use as a phone ringtone, alarm tone, or notification sound, every file in the catalog is freely usable. That's the use case the entire site is designed around, and it falls comfortably within the terms of every license we accept into the archive.

For broader reuse — building the audio into a YouTube video, a podcast, a film, a piece of software, a commercial product — you'll need to honor the specific terms of the license attached to that recording. The two questions to ask are: (1) Is attribution required? and (2) Is commercial use permitted? Both answers are visible on the source page linked from every ringtone.

How to credit a recording

If a recording requires attribution and you're using it in a public-facing work, the standard form is:

“[Title of recording]” by [Original Creator], used under [License Name]. Sourced via the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/[identifier]).

Linking the license name to its full text on creativecommons.org is good practice; for a YouTube video, a credit line in the video description is usually sufficient.

What ToneVault does not license

Importantly, ToneVault as a service does not own and cannot license the underlying audio. We are a curator and indexer; the licenses are issued by the original rights holders (or have lapsed into the public domain by operation of law). If you have any doubt about whether a particular reuse is permitted, defer to the source page and the license terms there, not to anything on this site.

Questions

If you're unsure whether a planned reuse falls within a recording's license, the safest path is to consult an intellectual property attorney familiar with your jurisdiction. We're happy to point you to the source materials, but we can't give legal advice. For everything else, the contact page is the best place to reach us.