Banjooie wrote:
Hey, Erik. If I wanted to be fancy and do some more of these, (because now I'm all inspired and whatnot), do I have to keep emailing you like, when I do every batch, or is the 'I am going to make animated gifs with JtRH and not use them for profit' email I sent at first good enough for you? :O
I'm honestly having a lot of trouble with this. Not you in particular, Banjooie. Just the whole question of making derivative work from protected game graphics. Let me explain the general problem better. And also, my apologies for using your simple request to springboard into a rant. I'm not finding fault in you.
A lot of people are accustomed to grabbing graphics from other games and using them. Like you see movies generated from gameplay, screenshots with comic strip captions, game art on fan sites all over the place. The publishers and developers don't seem to care, and why would they? Creativity from fans like this really helps them out. But most times, they haven't really granted legal permission--the use is simply not causing them a problem so they unofficially allow it. Typically the unspoken boundary of acceptable use is just whether it's commercial or noncommercial. But still there are these corporations that are reserving the right to suddenly say "
we don't like that mod you spent 2 months working on, so you'll just have to stop or get sued"
. I think this approach is terrible, and don't want to use it. It's bad because it promotes ignorance of legal rights. It's bad because someone who creates things based on other's work can't guard against their time being wasted when the creator unexpectedly objects.
Another approach that some companies use is to specify upfront what derivative works are allowed. To some extent, we've done this. The source code for DROD is all under one open source license. The media in DROD:AE was released into public domain. But then came along JtRH, a real commercial product, and we wanted
something to be protected or any old buttinski could clone our project and start selling alongside us with 2 days of effort. It had to be the media. Can we also make some kind of general license that allows for fans to use the media? Yes, technically we could, but we'd need to take pains to distinguish all the allowed and disallowed uses. It requires time, legal expertise, and an exhaustive imagination for all the ways people can exploit allowed uses to produce something that competes against our products--both right now and ten years from now. We don't have the resources to do that. If we were Blizzard or Microsoft, sure, we'd just get a lawyer to spend a week on it, and then presto, a whole legal framework for fan-based creativity gets dropped into the EULA.
Which brings up the next problem. Suppose all that perfect lawyer magic has been carved into the EULA, who will read and understand it? Lawyers--that's who! Not Jeff Ray. Not Banjooie. Probably not even me. I hate that. Legal agreements should not be some kind of mystical pentagram you draw around your intellectual property to protect it. It should be something easily understandable.
It may take some time, but I have ideas involving use of the Creative Commons licensing to address these problems. In the mean time, people should still e-mail me for permission for posting (or otherwise distributing) works based on JtRH graphics and other media to which we've reserved rights.
Back to poor Banjooie, who is wiping spit off his face from all my excited ranting. Looking up the old e-mail I sent you... Okay, I grant permission for
Banjooie to distribute other animated GIFs that use JtRH graphics under the same terms we discussed in e-mail.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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