@Jaden: I think you are underestimating how many possibilities there are even in a limited space. Statements like "there is literally no other means of drawing high quality pixel art in those dimensions" are completely hyperbolic. Let me reiterate: there is no question that this was intended to be a close copy of the RPG Maker base and that the similarities go well beyond coincidence. This is simply not a matter of limited creative space. That becomes a serious factor at very small resolutions (16x16, etc) but at this size it isn't really that relevant.
@Undesired: First, stuff sometimes gets missed. Just making a post on the art itself may or may not get the attention of someone who can deal with it, and just making an allegation of copying without substantiation isn't really enough. For instance, on the sprites that you say are derived from FF6, while the faces do look similar the sprite as a whole doesn't really. As I mentioned above similarities like that are not terribly remarkable at very low resolutions--with a symmetrical face the effective pixel area is something like 3x4, which does impose serious limitations on what's possible. As as to the freezalike... it's a totally different kind of edge case which I feel even less confident about. I'll try to bring it to Bart's attention if I see him on the IRC. Btw, thanks for pointing out the spammer, I have deleted it.
@byeOGA: uh, bye. Sorry you feel like you need to leave. But making sure that the assets here are safe to use is a non-negotiable priority. I'd rather that we lean towards caution rather than endangering devs down the line.
@Gnudist: good question. OGA doesn't get that many spam submissions and they're usually caught pretty quickly, but it might be a good feature to request of Bart.
I don't have any direct experience, but I believe the RPG maker people charge money to license their assets for non-RPG-Maker usage, so I think we can guess pretty quickly what their resposne would be. I think the only solution would be to change the parts that are currently too similar. This is clearly not something that would be too difficult for Tap, but that's entirely up to him.
@riidom: the problem is that the similarities go well beyond just how the eye is drawn--the proportions and overall appearance of the face (including the exact or near-exact palette for the skin tone) are identical, with the exception of the ear which is moved over one pixel. While the internal clusters are different they're still placed to closely mimic the look of the proprietary assets. The result is that when you put them side by side it's very clear that it has similarities which go beyond inspiration--there is some careful copying of features here. It's not the same as directly tracing or anything like that, but at the same time it's not the same as making a completely different face either. It seems to me as it did to Sharm that there is enough similarity that it might, in its current form, plausibly be considered a derivative work in a legal sense. That is something that we generally want to avoid having in the archive here. We don't want to expose devs to that kind of risk if it's avoidble. Of course since there is an element of speculation here it really is a bit of a judgment call rather than something completely hard and fast. That's just the way it has to be. (Now of course if Bart thinks otherwise what he says goes--it's his site and he has the final say.)
"That there, that's a conflict of interest if I ever saw one."
Sharm is clearly acting in the interests of the OGA community here. Please don't impinge her motives.
""lack of shenanigans" Say what?"
To clarify, I was saying that it's clear you didn't do anything wrong or malicious. I'll have to agree with Sharm that it's probably too close for comfort, and the similarity obviously goes well beyond general inspiration, but I think it's obvious you placed every pixel by hand.
"If you deleted this so easily, what's to stop you from deleting anything else?"
First, it hasn't been deleted per se, it's just deactivated. And I think that the reasons for it have been very specifically laid out. But I think that you have it reversed--nobody wants to have to remove good assets from the archive. We all love to see quality assets go into the archives--it's great for the site, great for devs and great for us artists who want to have more things to play with. Unfortunately thanks to the legal realities we have to deal with stuff like this sometimes happens.
For people's reference, this is the asset in question with a quick comparison to an RPG Maker character:
As you can see the similarities are initially obvious (which isn't helped by the skin palette being identical, though of course palettes aren't copyrightable on their own). There are also significant differences even aside from the obvious ones of hair and outfit--but it's hard to get over that initial impression, and it may be close enough to be legally challenged. Bart may have a different take on it, but I suspect he will feel similarly.
Putting them side by side, I'm not 100% sure that it would actually constitute a copyright violation, but you're right that it might be seen as constituting one by the right judge. The internal clusters are clearly different to the point that I don't think Tap did any direct copying, but I can see how to the layman (laylawyer) that might not matter at all with how obvious the proportional sameness is. I mean, to some extent there's a limit to how many unique character base looks you can get in this resolution range, but it probably needs to be more different than this. So yeah, despite the lack of shenanigans I'll have to agree with that.
@Tap: Chill. Sharm is a great person, she's not meaning to attack you or treating you like a criminal. We have gotten a lot of RPG maker-derived assets submitted here with licenses wrongly applied to them, as I'm sure you can and have probably seen for yourself. You haven't been penalized in any way--flagging a licensing issue is just that, putting a note on a submission that there may be a problem with it which needs to be resolved one way or another. If there is in fact no problem it is just as quick to remove as it was to add.
So please, for a moment, look at it from her perspective. People like her and I look through the archives with an eye out for these kinds of common issues so they can be flagged and dealt with before someone tries to use them. So she sees this set which is obviously very similar to the proprietary set with an unusually professional look to it, it's very easy to jump to the wrong conclusion. You did a very good job of mimicing the RPG maker's base--without putting them side by side it looks really very much like an edit of their assets rather than a from-scratch piece.
You are probably thinking that you, as a very legit artist and long-time contributor, should get preferential treatment and a bit more respect. And yes, you should, but Sharm probably didn't see and recognize who you were when she flagged it. She's busy these days and probably runs through the gallery quickly because of that. So please, chill out a bit and cut her some slack. We're all human here and trying our best in what time we have to keep the forums clear of spam and make sure that everything in the gallery is complying with the licenses applied to it. If the site ever gets a reputation for hosting stuff that turns out to bite people later on it will rather ruin what Bart set out to do here, not to mention the pain for the devs involved.
That said, I'd recommend rephrasing a few things here. I understand that you're upset and that one's attachment both to individual art pieces and to your hard-earned skills as a whole is a very emotional issue. And you are of course absolutely free to host or not host your art here as you please, and I think we all appreciate you being willing to share them so freely regardless of which venue you post them on. However, I think the general image of leaving in a huff over a minor misunderstanding may play against you if a potential employer came across this thread. Regardless, best of luck in your future ventures.
@Demetrius: As I understand it from Bart, it is the general policy of OGA to not host art against an artist's will even if it is legal.
@Arcanorum: actually using medieval english would be totally untenable. They spoke Middle English, which is a different language for all intents and purposes. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Chaucer's canterbury tales, which were relatively late in the Middle English game. See if it makes any sense:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
Not to mention that in addition to that things like spelling, usage of capitalization, grammar, etc were not standardized in any way back then either.
We tend to think of "thee"s and "thou"s when talking about olde tyme talk but Shakespeare and the King James are both much later and written in Modern English. It's still a handy shorthand if it's applied carefully, but unless you're going to put the time in to make it believable and consistent I'd recommend just sticking to avoiding idioms and references that will feel too modern and otherwise write in modern American English.
This makes me very happy :) (Except for the wonky resizing, but I assume that's a quick-n-dirty testing kind of thing)
I keep meaning to do more RPG enemies, but I'm so far behind on things thanks to grad school time commitments that I haven't been able to touch it again. But I'm super glad to see them in use this way, and do hope to return to them.
I don't think anything about that is legally actionable (but I am not a lawyer, and I'm only talking about Malifer's post because the original is removed).
@Jaden: I think you are underestimating how many possibilities there are even in a limited space. Statements like "there is literally no other means of drawing high quality pixel art in those dimensions" are completely hyperbolic. Let me reiterate: there is no question that this was intended to be a close copy of the RPG Maker base and that the similarities go well beyond coincidence. This is simply not a matter of limited creative space. That becomes a serious factor at very small resolutions (16x16, etc) but at this size it isn't really that relevant.
@Undesired: First, stuff sometimes gets missed. Just making a post on the art itself may or may not get the attention of someone who can deal with it, and just making an allegation of copying without substantiation isn't really enough. For instance, on the sprites that you say are derived from FF6, while the faces do look similar the sprite as a whole doesn't really. As I mentioned above similarities like that are not terribly remarkable at very low resolutions--with a symmetrical face the effective pixel area is something like 3x4, which does impose serious limitations on what's possible. As as to the freezalike... it's a totally different kind of edge case which I feel even less confident about. I'll try to bring it to Bart's attention if I see him on the IRC. Btw, thanks for pointing out the spammer, I have deleted it.
@byeOGA: uh, bye. Sorry you feel like you need to leave. But making sure that the assets here are safe to use is a non-negotiable priority. I'd rather that we lean towards caution rather than endangering devs down the line.
@Gnudist: good question. OGA doesn't get that many spam submissions and they're usually caught pretty quickly, but it might be a good feature to request of Bart.
I don't have any direct experience, but I believe the RPG maker people charge money to license their assets for non-RPG-Maker usage, so I think we can guess pretty quickly what their resposne would be. I think the only solution would be to change the parts that are currently too similar. This is clearly not something that would be too difficult for Tap, but that's entirely up to him.
@riidom: the problem is that the similarities go well beyond just how the eye is drawn--the proportions and overall appearance of the face (including the exact or near-exact palette for the skin tone) are identical, with the exception of the ear which is moved over one pixel. While the internal clusters are different they're still placed to closely mimic the look of the proprietary assets. The result is that when you put them side by side it's very clear that it has similarities which go beyond inspiration--there is some careful copying of features here. It's not the same as directly tracing or anything like that, but at the same time it's not the same as making a completely different face either. It seems to me as it did to Sharm that there is enough similarity that it might, in its current form, plausibly be considered a derivative work in a legal sense. That is something that we generally want to avoid having in the archive here. We don't want to expose devs to that kind of risk if it's avoidble. Of course since there is an element of speculation here it really is a bit of a judgment call rather than something completely hard and fast. That's just the way it has to be. (Now of course if Bart thinks otherwise what he says goes--it's his site and he has the final say.)
"That there, that's a conflict of interest if I ever saw one."
Sharm is clearly acting in the interests of the OGA community here. Please don't impinge her motives.
""lack of shenanigans"
Say what?"
To clarify, I was saying that it's clear you didn't do anything wrong or malicious. I'll have to agree with Sharm that it's probably too close for comfort, and the similarity obviously goes well beyond general inspiration, but I think it's obvious you placed every pixel by hand.
"If you deleted this so easily, what's to stop you from deleting anything else?"
First, it hasn't been deleted per se, it's just deactivated. And I think that the reasons for it have been very specifically laid out. But I think that you have it reversed--nobody wants to have to remove good assets from the archive. We all love to see quality assets go into the archives--it's great for the site, great for devs and great for us artists who want to have more things to play with. Unfortunately thanks to the legal realities we have to deal with stuff like this sometimes happens.
For people's reference, this is the asset in question with a quick comparison to an RPG Maker character:
As you can see the similarities are initially obvious (which isn't helped by the skin palette being identical, though of course palettes aren't copyrightable on their own). There are also significant differences even aside from the obvious ones of hair and outfit--but it's hard to get over that initial impression, and it may be close enough to be legally challenged. Bart may have a different take on it, but I suspect he will feel similarly.
Putting them side by side, I'm not 100% sure that it would actually constitute a copyright violation, but you're right that it might be seen as constituting one by the right judge. The internal clusters are clearly different to the point that I don't think Tap did any direct copying, but I can see how to the layman (laylawyer) that might not matter at all with how obvious the proportional sameness is. I mean, to some extent there's a limit to how many unique character base looks you can get in this resolution range, but it probably needs to be more different than this. So yeah, despite the lack of shenanigans I'll have to agree with that.
@Tap: Chill. Sharm is a great person, she's not meaning to attack you or treating you like a criminal. We have gotten a lot of RPG maker-derived assets submitted here with licenses wrongly applied to them, as I'm sure you can and have probably seen for yourself. You haven't been penalized in any way--flagging a licensing issue is just that, putting a note on a submission that there may be a problem with it which needs to be resolved one way or another. If there is in fact no problem it is just as quick to remove as it was to add.
So please, for a moment, look at it from her perspective. People like her and I look through the archives with an eye out for these kinds of common issues so they can be flagged and dealt with before someone tries to use them. So she sees this set which is obviously very similar to the proprietary set with an unusually professional look to it, it's very easy to jump to the wrong conclusion. You did a very good job of mimicing the RPG maker's base--without putting them side by side it looks really very much like an edit of their assets rather than a from-scratch piece.
You are probably thinking that you, as a very legit artist and long-time contributor, should get preferential treatment and a bit more respect. And yes, you should, but Sharm probably didn't see and recognize who you were when she flagged it. She's busy these days and probably runs through the gallery quickly because of that. So please, chill out a bit and cut her some slack. We're all human here and trying our best in what time we have to keep the forums clear of spam and make sure that everything in the gallery is complying with the licenses applied to it. If the site ever gets a reputation for hosting stuff that turns out to bite people later on it will rather ruin what Bart set out to do here, not to mention the pain for the devs involved.
That said, I'd recommend rephrasing a few things here. I understand that you're upset and that one's attachment both to individual art pieces and to your hard-earned skills as a whole is a very emotional issue. And you are of course absolutely free to host or not host your art here as you please, and I think we all appreciate you being willing to share them so freely regardless of which venue you post them on. However, I think the general image of leaving in a huff over a minor misunderstanding may play against you if a potential employer came across this thread. Regardless, best of luck in your future ventures.
@Demetrius: As I understand it from Bart, it is the general policy of OGA to not host art against an artist's will even if it is legal.
@Arcanorum: actually using medieval english would be totally untenable. They spoke Middle English, which is a different language for all intents and purposes. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Chaucer's canterbury tales, which were relatively late in the Middle English game. See if it makes any sense:
Not to mention that in addition to that things like spelling, usage of capitalization, grammar, etc were not standardized in any way back then either.
We tend to think of "thee"s and "thou"s when talking about olde tyme talk but Shakespeare and the King James are both much later and written in Modern English. It's still a handy shorthand if it's applied carefully, but unless you're going to put the time in to make it believable and consistent I'd recommend just sticking to avoiding idioms and references that will feel too modern and otherwise write in modern American English.
I suspect that this will find widespread popularity and be used quite a bit. It looks very adaptable.
http://i.imgur.com/S1rpKM5.png
This makes me very happy :) (Except for the wonky resizing, but I assume that's a quick-n-dirty testing kind of thing)
I keep meaning to do more RPG enemies, but I'm so far behind on things thanks to grad school time commitments that I haven't been able to touch it again. But I'm super glad to see them in use this way, and do hope to return to them.
I don't think anything about that is legally actionable (but I am not a lawyer, and I'm only talking about Malifer's post because the original is removed).
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