> Did I mention how much I hate copyright laws? It really holds art back a lot I think.
Quite the opposite; ignorance of copyright law, which includes licensing, holds a lot of art back. It leads to people using unsuitable and custom licenses, which lead to this problem in the first place. If more people used widely-accepted and tested licenses like CC then we'd have less of this problem. I've spoken to several artists about these issues who were eventually happy to relicense under an equivalent CC license.
> I honestly don't think a Japanese copyright is valid at all in the United States.
Japan, like most of the world, is a signatory of the Berne Convention which grants automatic copyright among all signatories, so its copyright absolutely holds in USA. This has nothing to do with TPP.
I think we should continue what's being done now, that is, submitting alternate licenses under compatible ones. The only problem I see is that the compatibility combinations aren't clear, we really need (a) legal advice, or (b) a notable precedence, before deciding whether license-foo is compatible with license-bar. Note however licenses like MIT/BSD are clearly compatible with GPL at least, as FSF has already weighed into this particular combination and it has plenty of precedence.
Here's what I see:
CC licenses were designed to be flexible in their attribution, being compatible with other licenses is one of its design goals
I don't see any ethical problem with relicensing, as long as the original license terms are satisfied. For example, GPL has no qualms against reselling, and even encourages it as an alternate business model. If I wanted to use GPL and not allow users to resell, then I should have picked a non-commercial (and hence non-free) license. All I care about is whether my chosen license was adhered to. There's some hostility with relicensing because it's seen as a form of "stealing credit", but this is easily solved if the original author chose an attribution-required license. Again, if you don't want something, don't grant it in the license you picked! Complaining about users following your license is hypocrisy.
We shouldn't add more licenses than strictly necessary. It's very simple to follow CC licenses. Adding other licenses makes it more confusing for users, puts the onus on them to understand what their rights and obligations are, makes searchability worse. If I want to search for art that only requires attribution, I don't want to have to check 10 boxes.
You need to get written permission from authors. Usually an email from them stating such in clear terms is fine, for example get them to reply "I hereby give permission for my work XYZ to be licensed under the foobar license".
I believe we should make things easy and foolproof when we can and it doesn't detract from anything else, because why not? And in this case we can: by improving the styling, whether it's link colours as OP suggested or some other method.
The reference to "bikeshedders" was made in haste but what I meant to say is, debating what colours to use is the kind of trivial matter that attracts more noise than signal, so it's better to just get a single competent designer to come up with a solution and implement it.
The complaint is valid and comes up every now and then. Realise that a few people who bother to complain about it, means there's a silent majority who can't figure it out and give up.
Maybe a different link colour will work, but there are other methods like adding a border around the download list. This is a UX question and is better left for professionals rather than bikeshedders.
After submitting your art, I highly recommend adding useful tags as they will greatly improve the visibility of your work. Basically put yourself in the shoes of a game maker looking for art for her game; she will have very specific requirements for that art so if you tag accordingly, your art will appear at the top of the search results.
For pixel art, the tile size is a very obvious one, as 16x16 works poorly when upscaled to 32x32, and downscaling is poor too because pixel art is finicky like that. Another important one is perspective - top down, side view (platformer), isometric. Sometimes palette is important (e.g. the dawnbringer palette seems popular), but if you're not too picky you can always do a palette replacement.
Tags about the kind of game that the art will fit in, are generally useful. Staves and wizard hats don't fit in sci-fi games, hence tags like "sci-fi" or "fantasy" are good.
When you have room, include a few items in your art pack in the tags. A lot of the time, a game maker will be looking for a specific piece of art - maybe a statue, or a lamp - and including those in your tags will make you stand out. For example, you migh create a "military vehicles" art pack, but if you include "tank" and "jeep" in your tags, you'll get more hits. The best submissions I find via searching often have loads of tags.
So have as many tags as you can think of, especially those that are relevant for your audience.
> Did I mention how much I hate copyright laws? It really holds art back a lot I think.
Quite the opposite; ignorance of copyright law, which includes licensing, holds a lot of art back. It leads to people using unsuitable and custom licenses, which lead to this problem in the first place. If more people used widely-accepted and tested licenses like CC then we'd have less of this problem. I've spoken to several artists about these issues who were eventually happy to relicense under an equivalent CC license.
> I honestly don't think a Japanese copyright is valid at all in the United States.
Japan, like most of the world, is a signatory of the Berne Convention which grants automatic copyright among all signatories, so its copyright absolutely holds in USA. This has nothing to do with TPP.
I think we should continue what's being done now, that is, submitting alternate licenses under compatible ones. The only problem I see is that the compatibility combinations aren't clear, we really need (a) legal advice, or (b) a notable precedence, before deciding whether license-foo is compatible with license-bar. Note however licenses like MIT/BSD are clearly compatible with GPL at least, as FSF has already weighed into this particular combination and it has plenty of precedence.
Here's what I see:
Interesting; reminds me of Skafandr's work
Thanks usr_share! Would you like to share your addition under the listed licenses?
You need to get written permission from authors. Usually an email from them stating such in clear terms is fine, for example get them to reply "I hereby give permission for my work XYZ to be licensed under the foobar license".
Well it's not just one person; take a look at these:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/download-super-newbie-question
http://opengameart.org/content/epic-fantasy-music
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/how-to-download-sound-files-on-this-site
http://opengameart.org/content/windmill
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/download-music
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/help-with-downloading-the-files-0
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/download-help
I believe we should make things easy and foolproof when we can and it doesn't detract from anything else, because why not? And in this case we can: by improving the styling, whether it's link colours as OP suggested or some other method.
The reference to "bikeshedders" was made in haste but what I meant to say is, debating what colours to use is the kind of trivial matter that attracts more noise than signal, so it's better to just get a single competent designer to come up with a solution and implement it.
Thanks for this; this background is used in the game FreeBlocks
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4zXAk4pyx4
Very nice; this is used in the game FreeBlocks by the way: https://github.com/dorkster/freeblocks
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARM0KPaD7sQ
The complaint is valid and comes up every now and then. Realise that a few people who bother to complain about it, means there's a silent majority who can't figure it out and give up.
Maybe a different link colour will work, but there are other methods like adding a border around the download list. This is a UX question and is better left for professionals rather than bikeshedders.
There's another related complaint that sometimes clicking the links will open up a media player rather than download. This can be fixed on the server by setting .htaccess accordingly: http://www.htaccess-guide.com/ensuring-media-files-are-downloaded-instea...
After submitting your art, I highly recommend adding useful tags as they will greatly improve the visibility of your work. Basically put yourself in the shoes of a game maker looking for art for her game; she will have very specific requirements for that art so if you tag accordingly, your art will appear at the top of the search results.
For pixel art, the tile size is a very obvious one, as 16x16 works poorly when upscaled to 32x32, and downscaling is poor too because pixel art is finicky like that. Another important one is perspective - top down, side view (platformer), isometric. Sometimes palette is important (e.g. the dawnbringer palette seems popular), but if you're not too picky you can always do a palette replacement.
Tags about the kind of game that the art will fit in, are generally useful. Staves and wizard hats don't fit in sci-fi games, hence tags like "sci-fi" or "fantasy" are good.
When you have room, include a few items in your art pack in the tags. A lot of the time, a game maker will be looking for a specific piece of art - maybe a statue, or a lamp - and including those in your tags will make you stand out. For example, you migh create a "military vehicles" art pack, but if you include "tank" and "jeep" in your tags, you'll get more hits. The best submissions I find via searching often have loads of tags.
So have as many tags as you can think of, especially those that are relevant for your audience.
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