NFT's have a fantastic potential, but I personally believe that potential is not as broad as internet culture thinks it is:
The Good: Creating artificial scarcity in an artificial economy.
In the real world economy, scarcity handles itself. You do not need to destroy an apple every time someone eats an apple; the consumer destroys it themselves by consuming it. In artificial economies, like in video games, the items and resources in the game NEED to be scarce for the game to even function or be interesting, but there is no real reason the resources are scarce. In StarCraft, if all players automatically got infinite minerals with which to build infinite buildings and infinite units, it would destroy the gameplay. But it doesn't cost the players or the developers any actual resources or money to simply generate infinite wealth, infinite items, infinite units. The only thing stopping that from happening is an artificial limit in the code.
If you've ever played Old School RuneScape (OSRS), you may remember various seasonal items becoming highly sought after. These items often fetch a price thousands- or even millions- of times higher than their original market value. Having an item like a Purple Party Hat was a sign of prestige in the game. Why, though?
Only because of scarcity. The seasonal items were only generated by the game engine for a special holiday, then never produced again. That means you can't grind monsters hoping for one more of them as a rare drop. The only ones in existence where the ones already in circulation. In fact, such items became the ONLY items that obeyed the scarcity rules of a realistic economy. All other items were effectively renewable and ultimately infinite. If the demand for copper ingots ever went too high, you could just go mine more of them from the game server's infinite supply of them.
The demand (and therefore price) of rare seasonal items in OSRS abruptly plummeted when someone found, and exploited, an item duplication glitch. The finite supply of certain Party Hats became infinite. It didn't cause any sort of real-world recession or something, but it did hurt a lot of gameplay and piss off a lot of players. The games we play may just be for play, but we all take our fun seriously. No one wants to play a game that isn't fair, and a thriving community of friends can quickly become an abandoned wasteland due to scams in an artificial economy.
If an item is intended to be scarce in an artificial game economy, there is no better way to enforce its scarcity than with NFT technology. If the party hats had been on a block chain, there is really no way that an item duplication glitch would have worked. 'Oh, you now have two Pink Party Hat #23 of 100?' That is an obvious falsehood easily detectable by both players and developers. The NFT can only belong to one item, not two, so the ownership of the item would collapse back into a single player's inventory and the duplicator/scammer would be found out and punished immediately. Without associating the seasonal "unique" items with an NFT, the game engine has no way to tell the difference between an illegally duplicated item, and a proper copy of the item that was fairly created by the game and legitimately owned and traded by players.
Magic: The Gathering (MTG) did something similar to this when they digitized a card game that previously had physical cards. The Physical cards of MTG are tangible items that just can't be magically duplicated. Scarcity handles itself so long as MTG chooses not to print infinite cards. When they ported the game to a digital format, there stopped being any real reason they couldn't duplicate cards infinitely. No player is going to invest in a $10,000 digital copy of an ultra-rare card unless they can be sure the game company won't just print millions of them for a quick profit and at the same time devaluing the player's investment. Making the digital versions of the cards into something like an NFT, the rarity of cards is assured. Players can see the public ledger of cards, how many are in circulation, and rest easy knowing that
the developers are not creating value deflation by producing more than they said they would, and...
other players are not able to exploit a glitch that duplicates rare cards; every card has a specific identifier that cannot be duplicated or faked.
The Bad: The thieves are self-righteous and the buyers are falsely entitled.
In my opinion, NFT's don't even make sense outside of the kind of micro-economies outlined above. There is a place for them in specific environments where they provide something those environments couldn't otherwise have. But placing artificial scarcity in a real-world global economy isn't leveraging an untapped market, it's creating an artificial market, with artificial demand, and drip feeding the demand from an infinite supply. It's begging people to donate to your heroic cause to stop the orphan-crushing machine to nobly save the orphans! It only works so long as no one asks why you created the machine in the first place, or why you can't just stop using it to crush orphans that were already safe before you came along.
I have no issue with people seeking to make a fortune from the perceived scarcity of digital art. The problem comes when the people who are selling the digital art don't actually have any right to sell it in the first place. Even when the artwork is Public Domain, it is a problem. Public Domain allows all uses, even reselling it, though, right? Yes, but the problem is twofold:
An artist who dedicates their art to the public domain wants it to be free, forever, for everyone. Selling it as an NFT is the opposite of that.
As mentioned by others above, the point of an NFT is scarcity. Taking a freely available public piece of art, and claiming it is scarce, is a lie.
If the asset were contained within a micro-economy (like in a game) it would remain scarce, because the enforcement of the uniqueness of that item is automatic and backed up by the bounds of the micro-economy. In the world wide web, though, there are no such bounds and the asset associated with the NFT is functionally indistinguishable from any other copy of that asset, which is STILL FREE and still in the Public Domain.
If the buyer knows all that and still wants to buy the NFT, what is the harm? Well, the problem comes from the tendency of bad actors to be rewarded for bad behavior. The kind of people who take art that isn't theirs, and sell it as NFTs, are the kind of people who portray the NFT as scarce, and imply the buyer is getting exclusive rights over the asset, like... copyrights. These aren't just isolated victims falling for these claims/implications. These are a huge portion of buyers who believe they have the authority to tell all others to stop using the asset, or that they are the only person permitted to replicate and license the asset for use. This lie, in legal terms, can be called fraud.
What's worse is that the people minting the NFTs often act as if they're doing the artist a favor by stealing their art and selling it. "You get tons of exposure!"
OGA has lost a significant amount of quality assets because the artists were so frustrated by bad actors selling their assets as NFTs that they decided to erase all sources of their art from the internet. If the artist wanted to make money from it, they could easily do so themselves. Minting NFTs isn't difficult. Perhaps that's part of the problem; there are zero checks in place to make sure the minter actually has the authority to use the art. Despite significant outcry, multiple NFT hosting sites seem to intentionally ignore that need and continue to promote the theft of art for minting NFTs. Why would they stop something that makes them money?
I'm not saying all NFTs are stolen or immorally used against the artists wishes, but that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if NFTs are ever going to be more than a joke at best and an infuriating detriment to the reputation and livelihood of artists at worst.
The Ugly: Blockchains are Unsustainable.
Every time a piece of cryptocurrency, NFT, or other blockchain item is traded, the ledger for that trade is added to the blockchain. This means the older the NFT gets, the more it is traded, the harder it is to calculate the next transaction. The longer the chain gets, the more resources are required to process the same tiny token.
I don't know the exact numbers behind the resources being dedicated to crypto transactions, but I know it is way more than it should be, and only getting worse. There is a real, tangible energy cost to using blockchain technology. The framework behind the tech needs to be reworked on a fundamental level if we expect to use it for longer than the next 10 years. Otherwise, we will be dedicating so many resources to calculating the next set of transactions, that the value of the transaction itself will not even pay for its own cost. Kind of like the can't help myself robot spending so much time trying to maintain its own functionality that it has no time to do anything useful besides keep itself from dying.
Thanks for the information. We're aware of stable diffusion. There is already some AI generated art on the site. Would you be willing to give more detailed steps on generating Stable diffusion art? In it's current form, this tutorial doesn't have a lot of information on how people might get started with it
Sure! Keep in mind you're only able to reference the text file in your credits IF your players are able to access the text file. If they can't get to the game files directly, you can't use this method. If they download your game, the text file needs to be downloaded with it and they have to be able to easily open it. having to hunt for a buried file within my android phone's obscure file system is not really viable. Better would be if the game opens the text file for the user when they tap on "see CREDITS-crops.txt" on the screen.
@1800theWolf: In a similar fasion to how this submission refers to the CREDITS-crops.txt for its credit information, you may be able to refer to the same file within your credits screen. Something like:
"Boss Battle" song by ISAo, OGA-BY 3.0 "Space weapon" sprite by knik1985, CC-BY 3.0 "LPC Crops" sprites; See CREDITS-crops.txt, CC-BY-SA 3.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 or GPL 3.0 "Red Dragon" sprite by ZaPaper, CC-BY 3.0
Often, such credits files are used to list the credit that is due to every author that contributed to a work. These weren't just made by bluecarrot16 alone. Every author that helped must be credited in order to use the assets.
In this case, however, there are extra details in the credits file (beyond just attribution information) that are there to help you determine the best license and attribution, depending on which parts you plan to use. If you plan to use the entire set, or if you just want to keep things simple by crediting all the authors regardless of which subcomponents you actually end up using, the first 20 lines of the file should be sufficient. Or this:
About 50 words. It's possible to reduce that further based on which parts you actually use, but for that you'll have to read and understand what the credits file is telling you, and not just count how many words it has in it. :P
Yes, however there maybe some restrictions and requirements depending upon the license under which it is submitted. Please see ''What do the licenses mean? Explanation of the licenses allowed on OpenGameArt.org' (link) above for a summary of the supported licenses as well as links to their full text.
Yes, I like that better. well put.
'Impose' sounds like it's implying a value judgement
Good point. Yes, 'use' or 'include' is better.
...It's just to highlight the fact that if you are working on a 'closed source, commercial' project than you should seek legal advice before using CC-BY-SA assets...
Ah. Ok, and closed source commercial projects are the ones more likely to be using other incompatibly licensed assets. Then the intent you had is right in line with the general guidelines goal.
Are there [lots of examples of what is and is not a derivative]?
Official FSF or CC examples? No, I guess not. I was referring to examples we (veterans of OGA) had used over the years to answer various questions on the forums from newer OGA users. In that case, my question is: Do we trust our own understanding of derivatives to provide our own examples in the FAQ? Or do we want to stick to official/expert examples only?
Agreed. I think this is moving toward more helpful and more correct.
Some proposed changes:
"I'm a commercial (closed-source) game developer. Can I use this art?'
This depends on the license under which it is submitted..."
Does it, though? How they use, credit, or share the art depends on the license, but whether or not it can be used in a commercial project doesn't depend on the license, does it? As a new visitor to OGA seeing this, my next question would be "ok, then which licenses don't allow commercial use?" but all of them say "commercial use is ok".
It is true that making a derivative out of two assets- one of which is not a compatible license with the other- is a problem, but it doesn't make the derivative Non-Commercial; it makes it Non-Usable, commercial or not.
Next proposed change: CC-BY-SA section.
If you are using art, that means commercial use is ok, so long as you provide appropriate credit, don't distribute the work in a way that includes DRM, and are prepared (and able) to release your project or parts of it as CC-SA-BY should they be deemed to constitute a derivative of the original work. Those working on projects for which this might be an issue (eg. closed source, commercial or non-CC-BY-SA open source development) are advised to seek qualified legal counsel before using CC-BY-SA 3.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 works in their project.
(ephasis mine) Perhaps I'm picking nits here. I feel like we should change "don't distribute the work in a way that includes DRM" to something like "distribute the work in a way that does not impose DRM". The difference being the former looks like it is recommending not distributing the derivative as an option for being compliant with the license.
Next: "closed source, commercial" - The conflicts that come up with using CC-BY-SA in some projects is not because they are commercial or closed source projects. It is because of the way the CC-BY-SA asstes may be combined with incompatibly-licensed assets in that project. An open source non-commercial project can still run afoul of derivative problems if the project derives CC-BY-SA assts with proprietary royalty-imposed assets.
It is possible I am missing a detail discovered in the talks with lawyers and FSF, so please let me know if I am wrong about this. I beleive closed/open source doesn't mean closed/open asset. An open source project can use non-libre assets and vice versa. The exceptions are when the assets are inseperable from the code, which is almost never: edge-cases only.
Next: CC-BY-SA and what constitutes a derivative:
"Generally speaking, an asset is considered a derivative if another asset was used in any way in the creation of the new asset. Generally speaking, simply displaying two game assets on the screen together does not constitute a derivative of the two. However, the definition of a derivative work is not black and white and there is some ambiguity about how the term applies to using art works in a video game or related project. For instance, one use case is clear and spelled out explicitly by the CC-SA-BY licenses: if you synchronize a moving image to a piece of music or sound effect licensed as CC-BY-SA, then you must distribute the resultant work* as CC-BY-SA also. Creative Commons has attempted to provide some guidance on the issue here."
I am still not super happy with this, but I feel like this gives more useful guidance on derivatives. There are a whole list of examples we can add to help outline what is- as is not- a derivative, but I'm not sure if we should list those on some other page (like a forum thread?) and just link to them from the FAQ, or if the examples should all be listed in the FAQ itself.
*Also, do we have a good handle on what "the resultant work" means in the sprite-synced-to-sound-effect example above? Can we tell people that syncing a sound effect to an animation makes the output the derivative, but not the inputs? Does the sound effect, and the animation spritesheet, need to be CC-BY-SA? or just the rendering of the two together? Is it only a derivative if someone saves that as a video? or is the thing that rendered them together (the game itself) the derivative? Even then, it would be the compiled game executable itself and not the source code that is the derivative, right? I'm not advocating one way or another, but the question of input vs output makes a huge difference here. We don't have to address these questions in the FAQ necessarily, but if we aren't able to address them at all, then we are adding more confusion by including that example. Not saying we just omit it, I'm saying we should know where we stand before we include it.
Are people still happy with the proposed changes above? Or does the response from CC and the attorney make it difficult to give an official firm answer?
After re-reading the full thread, I wonder if the language proposed for the CC-BY-SA section is really helpful to anyone. The goal is to provide guidance that is more clear than what we have now, but most of the blurb about what constitutes a derivative is just confirming that its very wishy-washy and ambiguous. However, that ambiguity seems to be mostly about edge-cases. I think we can provide a more summarized general guidance about what is and is not a derivative (covering 90% of circumstances), but also note that there are edge-cases and exceptions to be aware of.
What is the functional difference between "Tilesetize" and "Spritesheetize"?
NFT's have a fantastic potential, but I personally believe that potential is not as broad as internet culture thinks it is:
The Good: Creating artificial scarcity in an artificial economy.
In the real world economy, scarcity handles itself. You do not need to destroy an apple every time someone eats an apple; the consumer destroys it themselves by consuming it. In artificial economies, like in video games, the items and resources in the game NEED to be scarce for the game to even function or be interesting, but there is no real reason the resources are scarce. In StarCraft, if all players automatically got infinite minerals with which to build infinite buildings and infinite units, it would destroy the gameplay. But it doesn't cost the players or the developers any actual resources or money to simply generate infinite wealth, infinite items, infinite units. The only thing stopping that from happening is an artificial limit in the code.
If you've ever played Old School RuneScape (OSRS), you may remember various seasonal items becoming highly sought after. These items often fetch a price thousands- or even millions- of times higher than their original market value. Having an item like a Purple Party Hat was a sign of prestige in the game. Why, though?
Only because of scarcity. The seasonal items were only generated by the game engine for a special holiday, then never produced again. That means you can't grind monsters hoping for one more of them as a rare drop. The only ones in existence where the ones already in circulation. In fact, such items became the ONLY items that obeyed the scarcity rules of a realistic economy. All other items were effectively renewable and ultimately infinite. If the demand for copper ingots ever went too high, you could just go mine more of them from the game server's infinite supply of them.
The demand (and therefore price) of rare seasonal items in OSRS abruptly plummeted when someone found, and exploited, an item duplication glitch. The finite supply of certain Party Hats became infinite. It didn't cause any sort of real-world recession or something, but it did hurt a lot of gameplay and piss off a lot of players. The games we play may just be for play, but we all take our fun seriously. No one wants to play a game that isn't fair, and a thriving community of friends can quickly become an abandoned wasteland due to scams in an artificial economy.
If an item is intended to be scarce in an artificial game economy, there is no better way to enforce its scarcity than with NFT technology. If the party hats had been on a block chain, there is really no way that an item duplication glitch would have worked. 'Oh, you now have two Pink Party Hat #23 of 100?' That is an obvious falsehood easily detectable by both players and developers. The NFT can only belong to one item, not two, so the ownership of the item would collapse back into a single player's inventory and the duplicator/scammer would be found out and punished immediately. Without associating the seasonal "unique" items with an NFT, the game engine has no way to tell the difference between an illegally duplicated item, and a proper copy of the item that was fairly created by the game and legitimately owned and traded by players.
Magic: The Gathering (MTG) did something similar to this when they digitized a card game that previously had physical cards. The Physical cards of MTG are tangible items that just can't be magically duplicated. Scarcity handles itself so long as MTG chooses not to print infinite cards. When they ported the game to a digital format, there stopped being any real reason they couldn't duplicate cards infinitely. No player is going to invest in a $10,000 digital copy of an ultra-rare card unless they can be sure the game company won't just print millions of them for a quick profit and at the same time devaluing the player's investment. Making the digital versions of the cards into something like an NFT, the rarity of cards is assured. Players can see the public ledger of cards, how many are in circulation, and rest easy knowing that
The Bad: The thieves are self-righteous and the buyers are falsely entitled.
In my opinion, NFT's don't even make sense outside of the kind of micro-economies outlined above. There is a place for them in specific environments where they provide something those environments couldn't otherwise have. But placing artificial scarcity in a real-world global economy isn't leveraging an untapped market, it's creating an artificial market, with artificial demand, and drip feeding the demand from an infinite supply. It's begging people to donate to your heroic cause to stop the orphan-crushing machine to nobly save the orphans! It only works so long as no one asks why you created the machine in the first place, or why you can't just stop using it to crush orphans that were already safe before you came along.
I have no issue with people seeking to make a fortune from the perceived scarcity of digital art. The problem comes when the people who are selling the digital art don't actually have any right to sell it in the first place. Even when the artwork is Public Domain, it is a problem. Public Domain allows all uses, even reselling it, though, right? Yes, but the problem is twofold:
If the asset were contained within a micro-economy (like in a game) it would remain scarce, because the enforcement of the uniqueness of that item is automatic and backed up by the bounds of the micro-economy. In the world wide web, though, there are no such bounds and the asset associated with the NFT is functionally indistinguishable from any other copy of that asset, which is STILL FREE and still in the Public Domain.
If the buyer knows all that and still wants to buy the NFT, what is the harm? Well, the problem comes from the tendency of bad actors to be rewarded for bad behavior. The kind of people who take art that isn't theirs, and sell it as NFTs, are the kind of people who portray the NFT as scarce, and imply the buyer is getting exclusive rights over the asset, like... copyrights. These aren't just isolated victims falling for these claims/implications. These are a huge portion of buyers who believe they have the authority to tell all others to stop using the asset, or that they are the only person permitted to replicate and license the asset for use. This lie, in legal terms, can be called fraud.
What's worse is that the people minting the NFTs often act as if they're doing the artist a favor by stealing their art and selling it. "You get tons of exposure!"
OGA has lost a significant amount of quality assets because the artists were so frustrated by bad actors selling their assets as NFTs that they decided to erase all sources of their art from the internet. If the artist wanted to make money from it, they could easily do so themselves. Minting NFTs isn't difficult. Perhaps that's part of the problem; there are zero checks in place to make sure the minter actually has the authority to use the art. Despite significant outcry, multiple NFT hosting sites seem to intentionally ignore that need and continue to promote the theft of art for minting NFTs. Why would they stop something that makes them money?
I'm not saying all NFTs are stolen or immorally used against the artists wishes, but that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if NFTs are ever going to be more than a joke at best and an infuriating detriment to the reputation and livelihood of artists at worst.
The Ugly: Blockchains are Unsustainable.
Every time a piece of cryptocurrency, NFT, or other blockchain item is traded, the ledger for that trade is added to the blockchain. This means the older the NFT gets, the more it is traded, the harder it is to calculate the next transaction. The longer the chain gets, the more resources are required to process the same tiny token.
I don't know the exact numbers behind the resources being dedicated to crypto transactions, but I know it is way more than it should be, and only getting worse. There is a real, tangible energy cost to using blockchain technology. The framework behind the tech needs to be reworked on a fundamental level if we expect to use it for longer than the next 10 years. Otherwise, we will be dedicating so many resources to calculating the next set of transactions, that the value of the transaction itself will not even pay for its own cost. Kind of like the can't help myself robot spending so much time trying to maintain its own functionality that it has no time to do anything useful besides keep itself from dying.
Any chance these could be combined into a "turkey game art pack" instead of multiple individual submissions?EDIT: Fixed, thanks! :)
Thanks for the information. We're aware of stable diffusion. There is already some AI generated art on the site. Would you be willing to give more detailed steps on generating Stable diffusion art? In it's current form, this tutorial doesn't have a lot of information on how people might get started with it
Sure! Keep in mind you're only able to reference the text file in your credits IF your players are able to access the text file. If they can't get to the game files directly, you can't use this method. If they download your game, the text file needs to be downloaded with it and they have to be able to easily open it. having to hunt for a buried file within my android phone's obscure file system is not really viable. Better would be if the game opens the text file for the user when they tap on "see CREDITS-crops.txt" on the screen.
@1800theWolf: In a similar fasion to how this submission refers to the CREDITS-crops.txt for its credit information, you may be able to refer to the same file within your credits screen. Something like:
Often, such credits files are used to list the credit that is due to every author that contributed to a work. These weren't just made by bluecarrot16 alone. Every author that helped must be credited in order to use the assets.
In this case, however, there are extra details in the credits file (beyond just attribution information) that are there to help you determine the best license and attribution, depending on which parts you plan to use. If you plan to use the entire set, or if you just want to keep things simple by crediting all the authors regardless of which subcomponents you actually end up using, the first 20 lines of the file should be sufficient. Or this:
About 50 words. It's possible to reduce that further based on which parts you actually use, but for that you'll have to read and understand what the credits file is telling you, and not just count how many words it has in it. :P
Yes, I like that better. well put.
Good point. Yes, 'use' or 'include' is better.
Ah. Ok, and closed source commercial projects are the ones more likely to be using other incompatibly licensed assets. Then the intent you had is right in line with the general guidelines goal.
Official FSF or CC examples? No, I guess not. I was referring to examples we (veterans of OGA) had used over the years to answer various questions on the forums from newer OGA users. In that case, my question is: Do we trust our own understanding of derivatives to provide our own examples in the FAQ? Or do we want to stick to official/expert examples only?
Agreed. I think this is moving toward more helpful and more correct.
Some proposed changes:
Does it, though? How they use, credit, or share the art depends on the license, but whether or not it can be used in a commercial project doesn't depend on the license, does it? As a new visitor to OGA seeing this, my next question would be "ok, then which licenses don't allow commercial use?" but all of them say "commercial use is ok".
It is true that making a derivative out of two assets- one of which is not a compatible license with the other- is a problem, but it doesn't make the derivative Non-Commercial; it makes it Non-Usable, commercial or not.
Next proposed change: CC-BY-SA section.
(ephasis mine) Perhaps I'm picking nits here. I feel like we should change "don't distribute the work in a way that includes DRM" to something like "distribute the work in a way that does not impose DRM". The difference being the former looks like it is recommending not distributing the derivative as an option for being compliant with the license.
Next: "closed source, commercial" - The conflicts that come up with using CC-BY-SA in some projects is not because they are commercial or closed source projects. It is because of the way the CC-BY-SA asstes may be combined with incompatibly-licensed assets in that project. An open source non-commercial project can still run afoul of derivative problems if the project derives CC-BY-SA assts with proprietary royalty-imposed assets.
It is possible I am missing a detail discovered in the talks with lawyers and FSF, so please let me know if I am wrong about this. I beleive closed/open source doesn't mean closed/open asset. An open source project can use non-libre assets and vice versa. The exceptions are when the assets are inseperable from the code, which is almost never: edge-cases only.
Next: CC-BY-SA and what constitutes a derivative:
I am still not super happy with this, but I feel like this gives more useful guidance on derivatives. There are a whole list of examples we can add to help outline what is- as is not- a derivative, but I'm not sure if we should list those on some other page (like a forum thread?) and just link to them from the FAQ, or if the examples should all be listed in the FAQ itself.
*Also, do we have a good handle on what "the resultant work" means in the sprite-synced-to-sound-effect example above? Can we tell people that syncing a sound effect to an animation makes the output the derivative, but not the inputs? Does the sound effect, and the animation spritesheet, need to be CC-BY-SA? or just the rendering of the two together? Is it only a derivative if someone saves that as a video? or is the thing that rendered them together (the game itself) the derivative? Even then, it would be the compiled game executable itself and not the source code that is the derivative, right? I'm not advocating one way or another, but the question of input vs output makes a huge difference here. We don't have to address these questions in the FAQ necessarily, but if we aren't able to address them at all, then we are adding more confusion by including that example. Not saying we just omit it, I'm saying we should know where we stand before we include it.
Are people still happy with the proposed changes above? Or does the response from CC and the attorney make it difficult to give an official firm answer?
After re-reading the full thread, I wonder if the language proposed for the CC-BY-SA section is really helpful to anyone. The goal is to provide guidance that is more clear than what we have now, but most of the blurb about what constitutes a derivative is just confirming that its very wishy-washy and ambiguous. However, that ambiguity seems to be mostly about edge-cases. I think we can provide a more summarized general guidance about what is and is not a derivative (covering 90% of circumstances), but also note that there are edge-cases and exceptions to be aware of.
That is quite a fun puzzle game. Thanks for sharing it.
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