I see what you mean but i wrote to it already:

He sais it is in general not ethical so i guess most would agree to it.

However as he sais he does not care it means it is an implicite go ahead which means it is not unethical in this case since the developer allowed it (while not endorsing it)

My stance on this is that "we don't care" is not at all the same as "we want our art to be reused in other games". All art here should be available with pride from the original artists.

Broforce is a closed commercial game. It would be confusing to share their art and plain illegal to use their Trademark without permission. Unless that team wants to publicly share usable game art instead of screenshots, we will not include it in our collection.

Situations like this is why it's always good to ask before uploading art that is not your own. We hold our collection to a higher standard than simply "trust what the license says".

 Sure it is good to ask but in any way i think in the majority of cases it should be sufficient to make sure its legal. I think most people who upload cc-by do it for the reasoning that it can be used.Wikimedia might be the exception in some cases, however there i would really ask if there is something great of high value for the community, and its perfect legal to take it while the author might not like it to see his work uploadet here - however most likely niver find out anyways  since he is a artist not a developer and wont come here in all his life - should we have that high standart of not taking it because of an idea which is hard to put into words?  Surely to adapt screensots is a "very special" story.

We should have the high standard. Our entire site is based around passionately respecting licenses, which also means respecting the intentions and rights of the original artists. Few other sites are as strict. And people using art from our site can feel secure that they do have permission and consent to use our art.

We could instead only allow artists to upload their own art. Most other sites operate this way. It would remove any question about whether an artist is choosing the correct license or intending their art to be used in competing games. Then adding new art to OpenGameArt would be contacting an artist and inviting them to also share their art with us.

But we allow people to upload art made by others, because the sharing licenses are for this. Original members like qubodup helped build this collection by asking artists nicely, even if the license was clear.

This wikipedia case is an extreme example of a source for CC-BY-SA art that we would decline by default. We haven't even considered this before, because everyone assumed wikipedia promo screenshots are not meant for reuse in other games.

For me its way more important to have high standards in terms of legality than in terms of maybe injured feelings.

So i think it MUST respect licenses everything MUST be Legal but most artist dont even know their own intentions maybe they have the subconcious intention to share their work with all the world so to try to respect intentions is guessing work i dont think anyone can hold to this standart and me for myself i dont even want to try. Sure if you want to make sure that the intention of the artist is that i can be uploadet here you can go ahead and do it for me: the "anime potraits" were posted on wikimedia by niabot. I did not get a reaction from him about using them and i wont ask him because i simply dont care since they were normally licesed with CC-BY and he must assume that anyone uses them (nothing illegal here.)

Legality is good, but injured feelings lead to being sued.

Even if it's a lawsuit our users or our website might win, being sued is expensive. Being sued could crush an indie team/project even if it's a lawsuit they could definitely win.

What happens to our reputation as a website if someone starts suing games that use their art, uploaded to OpenGameArt without their permission? Even if they are wrong, that would probably mean no one ever uses OpenGameArt again.

Well then you should ask broforce with the intend to make sure they dont sue....

@Rainbow Design: No one is talking about your posts or saying wikimedia art is never appropriate for OGA.

We're talking about pixel scrapping sprites off screenshots and promo art which the artists themselves have acknowledged was only mistakenly released as CC-BY.

As far as legal vs ethical standards, Clint's already made the point that the goal of OGA is to be BOTH legal AND ethical.  Sometimes one sets the higher bar, sometimes the other, here we strive to always meet them both.

I think if Broforce does not object to use the art and there is no danger for the site It should be Nikitas decision. But i guess most was said from my side as well and if he still want to have them published Nikita should either continue this thread or rest the issue...

I hope there's an exception for orphaned works; it would be a shame to exclude free-licensed content from OGA simply because the artists are dead! Getting their permission beforehand would be good, but perhaps we can amend that requirement to an attempt to contact them.

@congusbongus:  Yeah, working on clarifying stuff like this in the Site docs:

 http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/site-faqsubmission-guidelines-updatesc...

but the general consenus was that contacting the original artists should only be a strong recommendation, not a requirement.  As you point out, there are plenty of cases you can think up where contacting the original author might not be possible.

@Clint Bellanger and Redshrike:

So are all Nikita_Sadkov's submissions restricted now?  

I just noticed that clicking on one of them gave an 'access denied' message.

I guess he did ask to have all his submissions removed, is that why?  or is this just the way it works when an account is banned? or did I just happen to click on a deleted submission?  just curious.

All of Nikita's submissions, except his comments in this thread, have been unpublished per his request.

The mods can still see the posts and art he's submitted. Someone is looking through those to see if we want to go back to those original art sources for permission. A lot of those submissions have issues for various reasons.

There are things easily overlooked when submitting art made by others. Some of us mods have experience in different areas of game art. E.g. us mods that work with 3D art know to watch out for textures from non-free archives like cgtextures. The mods that deal with 2D sprite sheets can regcognize popular trace-overs like those from Fire Emblem or Advance Warfare.

On a large set of art, sometimes we won't recognize issues right away. E.g. in an icon set eventually someone might recognize that a few of the icons basically identical to some obscure game. That puts us in a tough situation -- we can remove those specific icons and repost the art. But now every icon in that set is suspicious -- that artist has a workflow problem where creating unauthorized derivative works is not an issue for them. Derivative works are a big deal for us as a site. We can't prove the remaining icons are original or borrowed, and don't know if that artist is a valid source for art at all.

Maybe art submitted that isn't original art should always go to a moderation queue? There are so many things that can be missed.

Well when Nikita does not answer again i think you could bring the question of this Thread to this point: Taking something from a screenshot is not nice from something i would call an aesthetically point of view. It would feel a bit like the person you see on the road and would not want to be assiciated with him so rather avoid it.

This would still be valid when the authors of the screenshot "dont mind it"

Oga does not want to be associated with the method.

So i think it should be banned in general since if the Author support to publish his sprites he would just release them under a CC license, so there is no situation where i could imagine Oga would want this.

@Clint Bellanger: Gotcha, and certainly understand how that's going to take some time to get through.  On the plus side, maybe a few of the artists ya'll contact decide to join OGA and contribute the works themselves, which would be a happy outcome.

@Rainbow Design: 

Yeah, an explict ban might not be the worst idea.  

Maybe one of the long-timers can chime in, but I'm racking my brain here and I can't for the life of me think of a case where screenshots or sprites ripped from screenshots would make a good contribution to OGA.

"Someone is looking through those to see if we want to go back to those original art sources for permission. A lot of those submissions have issues for various reasons."

I knew several of nikita's submissions were questionable, but now that I am going through them in an attempt to get solid permission, I am finding a lot of the ones I thought were ok are riddled with commercial rips or other content the artists didn't intend to be shared risk-free. Nikita's list of viable submissions is smaller than I thought.

Fortunately I got the go-ahead from one artist so far. However, the first artist happens to be DENZI. his set is freaking huge, so organizing the artwork and uploading it is becoming quite a task. Also, it looks like Nikita wasn't really paying attention to what licenses DENZI was specifying. DENZI has some stuff that's CC0, some that's CC-BY-SA, and other stuff under a proprietary license not compatible with OGA. I am only working with the CC0 and CC-BY-SA stuff.

A little off topic, but I am thinking about making several submissions for DENZI's stuff, categorising each submission by style, like "16x16 oblique projection", "32x32 orthogonal view", "64x64 isometric", stuff like that. Then putting all stuff with DENZI's work in it into a DENZI collection. Whadda think?

@chaosesqueteam:

However there is a rub: a main contributor to that game hates feminists, and is pro-marry-girl-children, and often cites Deuteronomy 22 28-29 in the original hebrew.

I'm not familiar with Deuteronomy - could you explain that passage and its importance to your project's main contributor? What is its relevance to the project, and do you agree or disagree with it?

I'm not familiar with Deuteronomy - could you explain that passage and its importance to your project's main contributor?

It's the bit that says that raping a girl is to be punished by paying 50 silver to her father and marrying said girl afterwards (I had to look that up too).

@MedicineStorm:  

> I am going through [Nikita's submissions] in an attempt to get solid permission

First, excellsior! to you for taking this on!   A heculean task no doubt!  Just don't burn yourself out it.  Feel free to pace yourself and take a break from it whenever you like.  There's no rush on getting that stuff back up here.  OGA was a great site before all those submissions and it'll be ok without for a while too ;)

>  I got the go-ahead from one artist so far

Yay!  Success!  That's awesome!

>  I am thinking about making several submissions for DENZI's stuff

I think that sounds great!  I did often wonder how 'searchable' those large collections would be.  Breaking them up by style/size would definitely help.    

One final thought, when you have stuff ready to re-submit, any thoughts on trickling it out, maybe throttling it to one submission every couple of days or so?  I guess my thinking is that one of the less obvious negatives to Nikita's approach was that his big runs of posting 3-5 submissions a day had the unfortunate side effect of burying alot of the original art submitted around the same time.  On the otherhand, considering what a project it's going to be sorting through all that, I'm guessing you're not anxious to make a long project out of actually submitting it too, so I guess it's just a thought, however you want to handle it is certainly fine with me.

Legally and ethically there's no such thing as "orphaned works". That was a term created by software pirates to try to justify stealing things.We absolutely should not use anything labeled as such here without first verifying clear intent of the owners to make the art reusable under a clear license.

The whole "but they're not going to sue us for this" argument (in this case because they are dead) does not hold up. Copyrights often change hands. Just because you do not immediately know who the new owner is does not mean there isn't one.

@capbros:

"...when you have stuff ready to re-submit, any thoughts on trickling it out, maybe throttling it to one submission every couple of days or so?..."

Yeah, I don't really like when other new submissions get buried. I think "trickling" submissions may occur naturally, anyway; As I get each category organized, I'll submit that, but it'll take me some time to get the next one up. I'll be sure to space them out intentionally if that isn't the case though. 

@dannorder: I dunno, man. I think there is such a thing as orphaned works. If the artist is dead, their artwork (child) is, by definition, orphaned. I don't think the suggestion is to disregard the license or their wishes just because the artist is dead. I thought the discussion was about looking at the license, but also asking for permission anyway just to be extra sure. If the artist is dead, we still adhere to the terms of the license they released it under before they died, but we can't do that extra step of asking their permission "just in case".

EDIT: I guess we're saying the same thing on this, because I actually agree with everything you just said. :)

I am not objecting to what you are saying, I am objecting to the use of the term "orphaned works" because it was created solely by people to try to justify using other people's work without proper permission even if they never licensed it in the first place. It's a tainted term.

And, technically, no, nothing is orphaned. Somebody owns it.* The company if there was one involved, people who bought the company, heirs of the artist's estate, etc. They may not know or even care about it, but who's to say they won't someday realize they have legal ownership and want to do something with it. They can still sue anyone who used it in the meantime.

(*Assuming it's not public domain for some other reason -- extremely old age, released without proper copyright notification back when that was required, etc.)

Ah. I see. In that case I think the only disagreement is about semantics regarding the word "orphan". I agree with what you're saying.

The Tyrian graphics were licensed properly, and the Seven Kingdoms ones, too; I had double-checked those at the time to be sure if I could use them.

Common sense should come before legality. In my opinion, authors' intention were clear when they released the screenshots under creative commons.

Always ask the author unless the license is explicitly stated.

> In my opinion, authors' intention were clear when
> they released the screenshots under creative commons.

Yes, they were clear: get some publicity by making their game more prominent by Wikipedia. It's what my common sense tells me.

If your common sense tells something different, it's just a demonstration of how unreliable common sense is.