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Marnetmar

Is it etiquette...

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But this bring up a good point: What if the original author cannot be reached for one of hundreds of reasons?(Including, but not limited too: Death, no Email, Mormonism, any Religion, loss of hands, or a bunch of more serious explanations)

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If they don't grant permission, then you can't use their resources. Read that again.

However, if the assets they have used are not original (i.e. they got it from somewhere else), then you can find them in the original form and see if the original authors grant free-use. That's pretty much the only way to circumvent this situation.

Regarding the original post, it's not generally frowned upon (provided you have permissions), although your final work may be judged depending on the amount of unoriginal content used (Realm667 monsters, Nick Baker textures, etc). However, if your project calls for very specific needs, you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel by creating new or identical resources when someone else has already done the work. Try not to include stuff just because you can; make sure your project has a need for it.

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Through the years I have lost respect for intellectual-property-rights/permissions for a variety of reasons...

The vast majority of custom graphics in the doom community are based on copyrighted sources like hexen/duke nukem/various other 90's games, as well as google image searches where textures/skies will be made out of random uncredited photos, or even other doom fan projects that do not grant

So these graphics find their way into well-liked wads, where the authors will claim copyright and/or sole property, and nobody ever seems to object (from the little that I've paid attention to).

Therefore, it makes little sense to adhere to essentially false copyright claims of these fan projects (teamtnt's eternal and the gothic team's series immediately spring to mind).

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Vorpal said:

Therefore, it makes little sense to adhere to essentially false copyright claims of these fan projects (teamtnt's eternal and the gothic team's series immediately spring to mind).


Scythe 2 comes to mind...

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Vorpal said:

Therefore, it makes little sense to adhere to essentially false copyright claims of these fan projects (teamtnt's eternal and the gothic team's series immediately spring to mind).

Keep in mind that if people find out through their own research that the resources are not yours, without you mentioning anything, they'll either be mildly disappointed in you, or hate your guts for doing it. Credit pages are there for a reason, to make you look OK and trustworthy, at the very least.

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At this point I have a question:

Let's say I use 100 new textures from 10 other authors.

Shell I express in the credit the source of each single resource or just a "credit to" followed by the names of the 10 authors?

Lorenzo

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Lorenzo said:

Shell I express in the credit the source of each single resource or just a "credit to" followed by the names of the 10 authors?

This interests me as well. Do I have to place all the credits in a detailed manner in the accompanying text file? Problem is that if I list each credited resource up front, it will spoil surprises; I'd rather do it at a game finale credits screen or another, optional textfile.

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My approach would be to credit just the authors of the various resources in the main text file, and have an exhaustive list as an additional file or lump.

Further, you may as well bundle a zip containing the various text files from the original resources.

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Represent texture artists/WAD authors in the credits part of description. We'll see what happens, but even better than claiming them as yours or even not saying anything.

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Clonehunter said:

What if the original author cannot be reached for one of hundreds of reasons?


If you feel that your project would be severley worsened without said resources then use them anyway, credit the original author in the text file and hope for the best.

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^Now thar's entitlement for ya! Harrr!

Don't let me catch you stealing from my front yard just because I wouldn't answer the door (for one of hundreds of reasons) and you thought the stolen object would look good in YOUR yard.

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bytor said:

^Now thar's entitlement for ya! Harrr!

Don't let me catch you stealing from my front yard just because I wouldn't answer the door (for one of hundreds of reasons) and you thought the stolen object would look good in YOUR yard.


Well, if we are to go with this analogy, many other people would have a sign up in their yard saying "help yourself to whatever you want".

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If people could just take whatever I put in my front yard and essentially end up with a duplicate of that anything without me losing anything, I'd just put some food, ask everyone to come and help themselves and solve world hunger just like that.

By contrast, that guy who's not letting anyone else use his resources / take from his front yard is essentially some wanker who'd rather let people starve because he wants to feel special, he wants to have something more than his neighbor.

Real life analogies work so well with digital materials. Really highlights how much of a dick certain people can be, while also claiming moral high ground.

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bytor said:

Don't let me catch you stealing from my front yard just because I wouldn't answer the door (for one of hundreds of reasons) and you thought the stolen object would look good in YOUR yard.


Huh? We're talking about copying, not stealing. If you want to use a lawn example, it would be more along the lines of you cutting an elephant in your hedges, then I see that and also cut an elephant in my hedges.

It's still a bad example, but better than the stealing-related one.

printz said:

Keep in mind that if people find out through their own research that the resources are not yours, without you mentioning anything, they'll either be mildly disappointed in you, or hate your guts for doing it. Credit pages are there for a reason, to make you look OK and trustworthy, at the very least.


What's your point? Check gothictx.txt, a staple in the doom community, for any sort of credit to their "stolen" hexen/quake/whatever graphics. It's not there, not even a thanks or anything to their sources, they only mention themselves as the creators of the work.

I'm all for citing sources, sorry if my previous post implied otherwise. But when people start claiming ownership (e.g. TeamTNT and eternal doom) of a derived work, I think it is fair game to ignore such claims and incorporate said derived-work in your own stuff. And situations where people actually claim authorship of a derived work (e.g. gothic team in gothicdm) then certainly any sort of copyright should be tossed out the window.

But yeah, crediting sources is the way to go through life, as printz emphasized. But in order to claim copyrights, you actually have to be the creator of the thing in question.

Still, the idea of copyright is a bit silly, as humans inherently copy things/ideas and use them in different ways (aka "technology"); the whole industrial revolution in America was thanks to perhaps the first violation of copyright (Samuel Slater), but this is probably a dangerous conversation to continue! ;-P

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Vorpal said:
So these graphics find their way into well-liked wads, where the authors will claim copyright and/or sole property, and nobody ever seems to object (from the little that I've paid attention to).

Not true, I've bashed quite a few otherwise decent stuff for lame resource mashing, and people do bring this issue up in specific cases. AV, for example, for all its gameplay goodness, looks kind of shitty (in general) compared to projects where people put more effort and care into making the resources work together. Just compare it to The Darkening II or Plutonia 2, two WADs that have more attention in that respect, partially driven by attention to copyrights.

Losing track of any benefits of copyright principles just because some companies abuse them with financial or legal weight is self-defeating. Copyright is also helpful in communities like ours, applied in ways that are reasonable to our practices.

Copyright does two things. It makes people think twice about just taking stuff from anywhere and it embellishes works with effort put into them by making them stand apart.

One way to show respect to someone's work is to follow up with what they requested about it. If someone says "please don't use this as a base for derivative works, I'm sharing it under the condition that it shine by itself for its distinctive qualities" you're insulting them when you do otherwise, discouraging them from sharing again.

If you like the idea of sharing things to a point of letting others re-use the materials, share your own and make it explicit in your project text files. Do not take what someone else did not share. If we do that, sharing is compulsory, thus not sharing anymore, and the community is shittier.

Do you see people ripping each other's maps? Why should other resources be treated differently?

They aren't treated differently, really. If someone rips textures from another author's WAD, and there's a complaint to idgames, the WAD with the rips gets nuked.

What does happen is that generally, commercial entities do not look at or care about idgames, so they generally don't complain about rips. But that does not apply to works by other fans, our immediate peers, forming part of the "DOOM community".

Do we have to care for the companies that make games? Maybe to a degree; we are related to them, but not really part of them. Do we have to care for each other's work? Yes; we are the community, directly.

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This a good thread to bring up a question I've had for a while: if a project has resources that it's strictly forbidden to re-use, is it acceptable to remake some of those resources from scratch?

For example, if there were some textures you really wanted to use, but couldn't due to the permissions in the .wad file, would the community at large deem to okay for you to create your own versions of those textures?

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It would depend on the original author and Ty, more than the community at large, if you wanted your project on idgames.

"From scratch" also excludes direct imitation "by hand." Thus, generally, that would not be okay. But if the graphics author just uses a general idea for the resources to be replaced and makes them evidently different ("wooden planks" or "a rusty wall") there wouldn't be a problem. The more generic the original artwork, the easier to create a similar one. If you make them distinctive enough it should be an improvement, at least, unlikely to draw controversy. TV did that to replace various TNT resources that were being used in Plutonia 2, for example. It's what Freedoom did, as well, although how well varies with the resources (some just look like a cheap imitation of id's while others have their own character.)

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NiGHTMARE said:

This a good thread to bring up a question I've had for a while: if a project has resources that it's strictly forbidden to re-use, is it acceptable to remake some of those resources from scratch?

For example, if there were some textures you really wanted to use, but couldn't due to the permissions in the .wad file, would the community at large deem to okay for you to create your own versions of those textures?

I think it'd be a gray area, both legally and morally. In a strict copyright sense, it'd fall under either counterfeit or plagiarism, I believe, and morally it'd be a sneaky way of skirting around the rules while still going against the original authors' wishes.

Creating something new from scratch that somewhat resembles or is inspired by an existing work, though, is not uncommon in any forms of creative art.

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NiGHTMARE said:

This a good thread to bring up a question I've had for a while: if a project has resources that it's strictly forbidden to re-use, is it acceptable to remake some of those resources from scratch?

For example, if there were some textures you really wanted to use, but couldn't due to the permissions in the .wad file, would the community at large deem to okay for you to create your own versions of those textures?

If you make the textures from scratch and credit the project that had the original textures, I personally don't think that's terrible, considering Doom editing is all done for free. Whether it's illegal or not, I really don't know.

myk said:

"From scratch" also excludes direct imitation "by hand."

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. Couldn't someone make something from scratch that's based on something else? It certainly isn't something "modified" from the original source.

If someone makes something based on something else and gives credit to the original something, is that really counterfeit or plagiarism? For example, I plan on uploading an oblige map to /idgames. Thing placement is different from the original oblige map, but the architecture/textures are almost identical. I had the oblige map open in an editor and then built the same map myself in another editor without copy/pasting.

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There's a massive, very active so-called "remix" music community. Techno for example, very often incorporates lines from movies/TV, or segments of other songs. There are also plenty of songs which are built from scratch, and only keep the original's chord progression.

I've never heard of either of these types of remixes getting slammed with litigation as long as the source is credited (though this must have happened, considering the sheer multitude of remixes). I'm no lawyer, but it *seems* to only be when a remixer doesn't credit/get permission from the source (Vanilla Ice lol) and makes money off the uncredited remix.

Then there's the whole issue of "cover bands", which are like 95% of all amateur (and even many professional) musicians. Their goal usually isn't to make something new at all, but to replicate the sound of the original artist as close as possible, and we clap and cheer the closer they get. This seems like a legal black hole to me, so I think I'll just avoid going into it ;-P

But yeah, if we can look at the colossal remix community as an example, where people rework from scratch mostly copyrighted songs, but do not sell them and do cite the source(s), and do not (as far as I am aware) get visited by lawyers for doing so, then I say NiGHTMARE is able to rework any graphics he wants.

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myk said:

Do we have to care for the companies that make games? Maybe to a degree; we are related to them, but not really part of them. Do we have to care for each other's work? Yes; we are the community, directly.


When I've looked at some "sprite resources" types of sites, full of spritesheets ripped from various games, I've always found the hypocrisy of their "ripped by Whoever, plz credit, don't steal!" notices -- especially if the sprites in question come from a game whose formats are well-known and have several utilities allowing easy access.

Credits go to the original artists for creating the images in the first place; and secondarily to the people who reverse engineered the file formats and written the tools that make ripping possible; but not for the guys who just upload copyrighted content.

The GothicDM textures are a good example of that same hypocrisy. How can you tell if the Hexen texture in my mod is taken from gothictx (deemed wrong) or straight from Hexen (deemed acceptable)?

About "caring for the companies" and "from scratch but inspired", it may be interesting to mention that Id's adoptive sister company Bethesda always had a clear stance about resource ripping in mods for their games. They do not allow resources from a game to be used in another, and have asked mod hosts such as PlanetElderScrolls (FilePlanet) or TESNexus to remove some that infringed on that point. But they have publicly stated that they're perfectly okay with from-scratch recreations of the coveted resources.

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TimeOfDeath said:
I'm not sure I totally agree with that. Couldn't someone make something from scratch that's based on something else? It certainly isn't something "modified" from the original source.

They could with permission or if the thing they're copying isn't copyrighted. "Based" is rather vague and just means you started from there in some relevant way; if the final product has little or no semblance to the original, no one's going to complain.

If someone makes something based on something else and gives credit to the original something, is that really counterfeit or plagiarism?

Counterfeit is the making and distribution of illegitimate copies, which may or may not involve changes. Counterfeit in our community only happens if the file's distribution is restricted, usually either because it's commercial, because the author wants it to be downloaded only from one place, or because the copy is a demo aimed at testers only. Plagiarism is the use of someone else's work to gain recognition and doesn't even need to involve copyright infringement; many academic environments may take action against it, but it's not really a crime.

Vorpal said:
Their goal usually isn't to make something new at all, but to replicate the sound of the original artist as close as possible, and we clap and cheer the closer they get.

Same goes here when we do an "E1 style" level set or the like. That isn't even directly covered by copyright, in any case, which is about identifiable works and not styles or ideas. Two bands in a certain scene may be imitating the Beatles and even playing some of their songs (where perhaps the Beatles could sue them if they don't get permission, but probably won't) along with some new "Beatles-styled" music of their own, but if one of those bands were to suddenly take a Beatles-like song from the other band without asking, there may be a bit of a problem.

Gez said:
When I've looked at some "sprite resources" types of sites, full of spritesheets ripped from various games, I've always found the hypocrisy of their "ripped by Whoever, plz credit, don't steal!" notices -- especially if the sprites in question come from a game whose formats are well-known and have several utilities allowing easy access.

Heh, like the DOOM 64 TC guys, which were concerned about "their work" being ripped by others. I mean, sure, it may have taken them some effort to do that, but it was fully illegitimate work.

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myk said:

Heh, like the DOOM 64 TC guys, which were concerned about "their work" being ripped by others. I mean, sure, it may have taken them some effort to do that, but it was fully illegitimate work.

Possibly, but I don't think Doom 64 was "a game whose formats are well-known and have several utilities allowing easy access" until Kaiser's work made it that way.

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But don't counterfeiting and plagiarism also involve deceiving people into believing the creation is something it isn't? Like if you counterfeit money, you're making people think your fake money is real money. If you plagiarize something, you're making people think you created something that someone else created. But if you give full credits to the original source and create an imitation or replica "from scratch", without using or modifying the original source in the imitation/replica, is that so bad? :)

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TimeOfDeath said:

But don't counterfeiting and plagiarism also involve deceiving people into believing the creation is something it isn't? Like if you counterfeit money, you're making people think your fake money is real money. If you plagiarize something, you're making people think you created something that someone else created. But if you give full credits to the original source and create an imitation or replica "from scratch", without using or modifying the original source in the imitation/replica, is that so bad? :)

It's still an infringement on the copyright of the work, because -- by virtue of it being a replica -- you used the design of it as a direct base for that of your replica. Crediting the source doesn't really make a difference here; you'd just be telling us whose work you ripped off without authorization.

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Assuming the author doesn't give permission for re-use, then yeah I agree with you. Except I definitely think there's a big difference between giving credit or not giving credit for the replica/imitation. Without credit, that's total plagiarism. With credit, you're telling everyone where it really came from. But we're still talking about textures, right?

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