b0rsuk
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Hi

I just wanted to ask what content is allowed in user holds ?

1. Can I use freely available midis such as:

http://www.laurasmidiheaven.com/0vg/PCNS.shtml

(I would convert them to wav then to ogg) ?

2. Is it allowed to insert short quotes (several sec) from clearly commercial music pieces ?



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MeckMeck GRE
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German laws are about this :

If there is no restriction you can do anything you want to do with.

If there is just a restriction on commercial use you may use it for private and public are (sumbit it) but however not as Smitemasters Selection (which would be a commercial use).

If its all rights reserved you may just use it private.

I think their pretty the same as in the world.

Maurog
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I am taking a course on patents/copyright, and to my understanding, it boils down to a very simple rule - anything is ok as long as you don't make any money on it The author theoretically has the right to restrict anyone from using his creations, but this involves going to court and taking legal action. And nobody will sue you as long as you aren't making any money. So yeah, Smitemasters Selection can't contain copyrighted stuff. Erik is making money, so he is a target. You don't, so you are not

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ErikH2000
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We go by US laws about copyright infringement since that is where Caravel is based.

b0rsuk wrote:
Hi

I just wanted to ask what content is allowed in user holds ?

1. Can I use freely available midis such as:

http://www.laurasmidiheaven.com/0vg/PCNS.shtml

I haven't looked at these, but you just have to follow whatever terms the copyright holder sets. So if the copyright holder say, "you can use them for whatever you like" then that's fine. If she says, "you have to include a notice that songs were written by Laura Laurowski" then we also expect you to do that, maybe on a scroll or someplace. If the song is stated to be in the public domain, then you can do whatever you like. If no terms are specified for how you can distribute the song, then you should assume that you aren't able to or contact the copyright holder to get permission.

(I would convert them to wav then to ogg) ?

Technically speaking, that sounds like a good plan. Also, you want to make sure the copyright holder allows for distributing the media in a modified form like that.

2. Is it allowed to insert short quotes (several sec) from clearly commercial music pieces ?

No, not unless permission is granted by the copyright holder.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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Maurog wrote:
I am taking a course on patents/copyright, and to my understanding, it boils down to a very simple rule - anything is ok as long as you don't make any money on it The author theoretically has the right to restrict anyone from using his creations, but this involves going to court and taking legal action. And nobody will sue you as long as you aren't making any money. So yeah, Smitemasters Selection can't contain copyrighted stuff. Erik is making money, so he is a target. You don't, so you are not

Maurog, I appreciate your view, but it doesn't match what we'll be doing here. It may be simply that our policies will be more strict than the practical steps one should take to avoid getting into legal trouble. I feel strongly that the terms an author sets for the use of his work should be followed or his work not used at all, and whether money is being made doesn't really enter into it.

-Erik

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Maurog
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Hey, it has nothing to do with my views. In fact, I'm against using unoriginal content at all - I draw my own roaches. All I was saying, is that you won't get in legal trouble... never said it was the right thing to do. I believe nobody will have a problem with your policies in music, just like nobody built holds with content unsuitable for children (I surely hope). There is enough amazing music in JtRH for our needs. Music is generally a weak point though - anybody can design a hold, but writing music is a special skill.

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ErikH2000
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Sorry, Maurog, I didn't mean to sound defensive, and I don't hold anything against you. No worries!

-Erik

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Tscott
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Is this in regards to using the actual music or do quotes count to? Say short line or two quoted in a level text intro or on a scroll?

____________________________
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its bearings on Cair Paravel. O my love, O it was a funny little thing to be the ones to've seen.
-Joanna Newsom "Bridges and Balloons"

b0rsuk
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That "Laura" website contains game music (oldies, midi).

I use midi game music in my Notrium mod. I tried to contact several people about permissions, but no one cares to repply. At the moment I use it, but I put credits (composer, game company) in both game and readme. Also my @mail and note that I'll remove midis if asked.
It's hard enough to determine who the copyright holder is. For example if a game was made by a company

 <<<LINK DELETED>>>

, gone bankrupt, was bought by another one (repeat several times), it's a bit confusing.
I guess it's not so bad because the game is fully non-profit.

The site puzzles me. They provide (no money charged) midi ringtones, sheets etc.
I mean, the site is up for years, they provide hundreds or thousands of midis... and the admins are not in jail, somehow.
If I used it on smaller scale, why should it be bad ? About commercial part (Selection): I don't think my holds can be good enough to even consider it.

2nd case clearly isn't allowed, I guess. Most probably they won't even repply.

About original content: My 6 room hold is around 70kb not because I didn't make any images. Of course I'll optimise them.
Most probably I wouldn't use music, because the download would be too much. But no "sound quotes" - that's a pain.

I wonder what exactly makes it different from posting such stuff on forums. No one makes money both ways, and technically both are illegal. For example someone attached Futurama quote on Anything forum.

[Edited by b0rsuk at Local Time:04-16-2005 at 10:24 PM]

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schep
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Tscott wrote:
Say short line or two quoted in a level text intro or on a scroll?

This probably counts as "fair use," which is a lawyer term I do not pretend to understand. But I doubt it would cause trouble in most countries, including the US.

ErikH2000
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b0rsuk wrote:
That "Laura" website contains game music (oldies, midi).

I use midi game music in my Notrium mod. I tried to contact several people about permissions, but no one cares to repply. At the moment I use it, but I put credits (composer, game company) in both game and readme. Also my @mail and note that I'll remove midis if asked.

Yeah, you are like Home of the Underdogs in that respect--they have a quite similar policy. It is an ethical approach that I can almost admire, but for what Caravel hosts on our site I would insist you have permission to distribute the music.

I guess it's not so bad because the game is fully non-profit.

The site puzzles me. They provide (no money charged) midi ringtones, sheets etc.
I mean, the site is up for years, they provide hundreds or thousands of midis... and the admins are not in jail, somehow.
If I used it on smaller scale, why should it be bad ? About commercial part (Selection): I don't think my holds can be good enough to even consider it.

I wouldn't look at what other people are getting away with and use it to determine what you should do. That is my personal advice, and you can take it or leave it, B0rsuk. I just see a lot of people doing shady things on the internet, and whether they get away with it or not often depends on luck, being in a certain country, or other hidden factors.

For deciding what you will distribute, there are three things to consider:
1. What is legally acceptable to you, in other words--you don't want to put yourself at risk for being sued or incriminated.
2. What is morally acceptable to you.
3. What is acceptable for the people hosting your content, in other words, what will we allow you to put on our site.

You won't find me arguing about #1 and #2 with you--that is all up to you. But for #3, you have to respect the rules we set here if you want to distribute your hold or other files.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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Tscott wrote:
Is this in regards to using the actual music or do quotes count to? Say short line or two quoted in a level text intro or on a scroll?

Ugh. I'm not a lawyer and "fair use" stuff gets complicated. If you have a specific example of something you want to include I'll think about it, but I don't want to get bogged down in talking about grey areas. I'm sure there's way too many of them.

Generally speaking, if you want to use something created by somebody else that will be distributed here, then you need permission from the copyright holder. The permission might be granted in a public license or it could be something you have to obtain by asking. An exception would be if the work were in the public domain. For example, all of the media from DROD:AE was put in the public domain and can be used for any purpose.

If in doubt, it is probably best to err on the side of conservatism.

-Erik

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b0rsuk
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Obtaining permission is pretty much impossible. Sniff.

About text quotes: this is getting ridiculous. If it was meant to work this way, we'd soon run out of not copyrighted words. If someone says "How are you?" sue him, because it appeared in movie XYZ.

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gamer_extreme_101
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b0rsuk wrote:
Obtaining permission is pretty much impossible. Sniff.

It all depends on who the owner is. I know that Bjorn Lynne replied fairly quickly after I asked him permission to use some of his music in DRODiS, but some just aren't as caring or concerned to reply.

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agaricus5
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b0rsuk wrote:
About text quotes: this is getting ridiculous. If it was meant to work this way, we'd soon run out of not copyrighted words. If someone says "How are you?" sue him, because it appeared in movie XYZ.

Well, I think that's a bit of a grey area again. I believe it's not the words themselves that are the copyright, but the actual media they're incorporated in, i.e. the voice acting for that movie. So, you could "quote" the movie in text, but you couldn't use a recording of the quote from it without permission.

It's a bit like music; no-one "owns" the right to musical notes, symbols and staves - anyone can write music, but people can own the right to the music they create, both in the form of the sheet music and any performance of it.

For example, I could write music for DROD for you to listen to, but if you wanted to use it in modding Notrium without asking me first and put the sheet music to it up for free download, you'd be infringing on my copyright in both using the music out of context and distributing it. In a similar way, this music is probably not all public domain, so by copying it without permission, you'd be infringing on the copyright of the person who wrote it or holds the rights to it.

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Tscott
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ErikH2000 wrote:
If you have a specific example of something you want to include I'll think about it, but I don't want to get bogged down in talking about grey areas.

Well, I sort of already included a couple lines in my intro to the hold Happy House (from a Siouxsie and the Banshees song of the same name), without it ever crossing my mind it could be a problem. Hence the "" in my previous post. I can rewrite the intro in my upcoming 2.0 version if you wish.

____________________________
And I can recall our caravel: a little wicker beetle shell with four fine maste and lateen sails,
its bearings on Cair Paravel. O my love, O it was a funny little thing to be the ones to've seen.
-Joanna Newsom "Bridges and Balloons"

ErikH2000
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b0rsuk wrote:
Obtaining permission is pretty much impossible. Sniff.

For those particular MIDIs maybe, but there are alternatives. There are musicians on DROD.net that can be asked. There's some guy named Bjorn Lynne that is getting remarkably overexposed. Hunt around on MP3.COM for a few hours and start sending e-mails to artists. Eventually somebody will say, "yeah, buddy! go ahead and use it!" It isn't that hard to do it the right way, and there can be unexpected rewards that come as a result.

About text quotes: this is getting ridiculous. If it was meant to work this way, we'd soon run out of not copyrighted words. If someone says "How are you?" sue him, because it appeared in movie XYZ.

I'm just saying I'm not interested in spelling out exactly what can be done with quoting other works. Give me a specific example intended for real use (not theoretical argument). Like if you wanted to use a quote from Mark Twain at the beginning of a hold, then that happens to be in the public domain because it was published a long time ago. If you quoted half of a Dave Barry column, then no, that doesn't work. And there's all sorts of examples in between, and I'm probably not qualified to distinguish what is fair use, so I'll be erring way on the side of not allowing it.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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Tscott wrote:
Well, I sort of already included a couple lines in my intro to the hold Happy House (from a Siouxsie and the Banshees song of the same name), without it ever crossing my mind it could be a problem. Hence the "" in my previous post. I can rewrite the intro in my upcoming 2.0 version if you wish.

This starts to get difficult. I went and read a bunch of stuff about Fair Use to see if I could just find a simple answer for the above case. Fat chance. Here's one of the more straightforward explanations of Fair Use:

http://www.publaw.com/work.html

...which goes on at length about how there isn't really any straightforward explanation of Fair Use.

It all seems fairly ridiculous to worry about quoting a few lines of a song on some backwater of the internet, but you never know how things will change in the future. I think your quote is fine, particularly because it is appearing in a noncommercial work and has no impact on the market value of the original material, but...

I don't really want to explore the boundaries of Fair Use. It just takes too much time to think about, and I'm not really qualified to figure it out. So I guess this Siouxsie quote might be an example for the limit of what I'm willing to do. A simple quote with attribution is okay. In Smitemaster's Selection, which might be interpreted as a commercial offering, we won't allow any quotes from other sources like that.

I don't mean to make it sound like you are a bad guy, Tscott. Thanks for bringing it up!

-Erik

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b0rsuk
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It's funny, but GPL'ed content is not allowed in JTRH holds either .

I mean, if you use a GPL'ed image, you're supposed to give it back, right ? But you can't export images from holds. You can only delete.

So if I take an image from GPL'ed game, I can be accused of being a hog. And sued.
I think the same applies to sounds.

[Edited by b0rsuk at Local Time:04-22-2005 at 03:11 PM]

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trick
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You shouldn't use the GPL for images. It's not what it was intended for. I asked RMS* about this once, and that's what he said.

The Creative Commons have some nice alternative licenses that are intended to be used for media.

Edit: Anyway, for some open source licenses it should be enough to provide an additional download of the images you've used in your hold, but I'm not sure if this applies to the GPL. That depends on if importing images into your holds, and importing holds into DROD, counts as linking or not.

- Gerry

* The man behind the GPL

[Edited by trick at Local Time:04-22-2005 at 03:38 PM]

Oneiromancer
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Resurrecting this old thread because I've been thinking about some random DROD projects. Being the video game buff that I am, I'd like to pay tribute to some old computer RPGs. I have the hint guides to, or the maps for, several of these games. Since they are generally tile-based maps, they can lend themselves well to DROD. In fact, with scripting, it's possible that one could recreate a good amount of content pretty faithfully.

So the question is, is it possible to go too far with this? Take the metDROiD hold as an example...it's a pretty faithful reinterpretation of the original Metroid map. I don't think there were ever any questions about its legality. If someone did the same thing for the original Zelda, reproducing the overworld map and all of the dungeons, is that going too far? It's obviously not the same game, it's just...well..."reinterpreting" some of the content.

I can't say that I would actually do any of this stuff, since it would be crazily time-consuming, and most people here wouldn't even have played these games and thus wouldn't really appreciate it. But maybe someone else was thinking about doing something similar, so it would be good to get some opinions on whether or not this is something to worry about. It definitely wouldn't be Smitemaster's Selection material in my case, so there's no issue with making money off of someone else's intellectual property.

Game on,

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ErikH2000
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I guess this would be a borderline case I'm okay with. I don't want to see ripped graphics from the original game appearing in DROD--that is the main thing.

-Erik

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Oneiromancer
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Yeah, I'm not talking imported graphics or anything like that. Pretty much just stuff like map layouts and location names...certainly nothing that could substitute for playing the actual original game.

Game on,

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trick
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What if I made my own graphics, based on the original ? By based I mean designed to look similar, not using the original as a base.

Say I included images of roaches streaming out of pipes and attacking Mario, for example. I'd assume that wouldn't be allowed. But what about making Zelda-style trees, for example ?

(I'm not planning on doing this, btw).

- Gerry

ErikH2000
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Gerry, I don't want to take the time to nail down every possible case--there is unlimited grey area out there. I remember reading a guide to Fair Use laws that is supposed to provide simple rule-of-thumb guidelines for staying inside of the law. The thing was like 30 pages and very complex. The actual law itself is much worse. For authoring holds derived from other works, we are never going to have a simple pre-documented answer to every potentially infringing scenario unless that answer is just "No, you can't do it".

I would say that if you are using the likeness of Mario or game elements that you draw yourself then that's going too far. How do I know? I don't, really. IANAL and all that. It might be that the Metroid/DROD hybrid goes too far, but it seems a shame to exile the already-completed project when there is just a tiny, tiny weirdo chance of encountering legal problems.

If someone is really planning to spend a lot of time making a DROD-based tribute to some other game, I think it is okay if you do it in the way that Oneiromancer was talking about. By virtue of the translation to DROD, the end result should be enough different from the original data that it isn't considered a copyright infringement.

The title of your hold should also be distinct from the original, and here grey areas abound again. "MetDROID" seems fine although borderline. "DROD Metroid"--nope. "Super Mario DROD"--nope. "Beethro the Plumber"--fine. Titles are often more important than the actual content because they serve to alert litigious types that there might be some money for the taking.

Because I have only a layman's knowledge of the law, we will err very far on the side of not allowing things here.

-Erik

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trick
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Gerry, I don't want to take the time to nail down every possible case--there is unlimited grey area out there.

Yeah, I know. I'm just overly curious at times

Anyway, as I said, I'd never assume recreating Mario would be acceptable, I was more wondering about the possibility of making the graphics of DROD similar to something else, so it would be vaguely recognizable by fans of the original game. Putting Zelda-style trees in rooms, things like that.

In any case, since I'm not actually doing this we don't have to discuss it.

- Gerry

Tablesaw
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ErikH2000 wrote:
The title of your hold should also be distinct from the original, and here grey areas abound again. "MetDROID" seems fine although borderline. "DROD Metroid"--nope. "Super Mario DROD"--nope. "Beethro the Plumber"--fine. Titles are often more important than the actual content because they serve to alert litigious types that there might be some money for the taking.

More importantly, using the distinctive title of another computer game as the title of your computer game brings up trademark law. There are lots of distinctions, but the most important one is that trademarks have to be enforced by the owner or they will be considered "abandoned."

Companies are much more vigilant about stray uses of their trademarks than they are about occasional use of their copyrighted material. If, for example, Nintendo were to ignore a tiny freeware computer game called "Donkey Kong DROD," it could weaken its legal case against HackerCo when they release a game called "Donkey Kong Valley 8" for the PlayStation 3.

Companies defend their trademarks when they are being used on competing goods and services and when there's a possibility for confusion. So the folks that will be looking the hardest at DROD holds will be video-game companies. Something to keep in mind when titling.



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Svante
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Sorry if this is off topic or breaking any rule( still not familiar with the rules here).
Am I allowed to use the sounds from DROD( like the 'Neather sounds) as character dialouge in my hold.

-Svante

Mikko
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I'm using this old thread instead of making a new one, as it might contain relevant information.

What I'm wondering is if I'm allowed to make a hold containing a parody of the lyrics of a relatively well known song. If I understand things correctly, copyright laws are a lot more lenient towards parodies than simple copies of the original.