Very cool, thanks for CC0 :) Looks very similar to my game Anarch, I think the assets could be interswapped between the games as an experiment, might be interesting.
Nice parable, I don't think it would be good for me to comment on it here. (My views on censorship in name of "privacy" are available a few links away)
Well, if you allow to host proprietary art you will get even more art hosted here -- most people don't share their art here out of fear of sharing it under a free license. I would say let's just not host art of artists who are afraid of setting their art free. As an user of OGA art I would rather prefer to not even be in danger of downloading art of someone who wants to keep the priviledge of retroactively taking down the art -- these are the kinds of people who have a higher probability of starting to make trouble, despite free license. I would rather have fewer submissions on this site that are by people who mean it.
Anyway I don't think I will convice you of changing the rules or even your mind, no one on the Internet can be convinced about anything, I think it's even a named rule of something. I just feel obliged to leave my disagreement here, it's good to have it recorded and visible. We may leave this at agree to disagree :)
Also let me say I still love OGA, thank you for running it <3
Yeah well this is diving into another topic, I'll just say that I think the point of free culture is that it is always ethical for anyone to reshare anyone else's work, even against the author's will, and it is always unethical to prevent anyone from resharing any work. I don't believe any resharing can ever be unethical, it can only be illegal.
That's all pretty fair, I just find the OGA rule for not hosting files against the author's will kind of anti free-culture. Of course, OGA may legally impose such a rule, just as it is legal to create proprietary software for example, but it's a rule against free culture spirit directly violating one of the four essential freedoms, specifically anyone's right to redistribute art. If an author decides to use a free license, he chooses to give up the right to decide who and where can redistribute this art, and OGA reinstates this right (even if just in its own territory), taking a step back towards permission culture. I don't believe there is malicious intent behind that rule, but in my opinion it doesn't consider the in-depth consequences and it doesn't fit at all here. Just saying, I'd be glad if that rule could perhap be discussed and reconsidered.
Yes I was also thinking about trademarks which WMC simply ignores but I know you told me OGA doesn't ignore. But apart from that I personally trust WMC (not necessarily Wikipedia) more than most other websites, they have very clear licensing info, discussions, archives of email proofs, editing logs and a great number of eyes checking the validity of licensing. I am not trusting it 100%, but if I would have to choose to trust anyone with a license, it would be WMC.
Well, I'm probably not going to post this in near future as I'm a bit lazy :p But I wanted to hear the opinions. For now I'll leave this legal experiment to anyone who's willing to go for it -- if it's going to be posted, don't forget to provide extensive info in the comments linking to all the evidence of the license etcetc.
I would personally never use these characters in my games and wouldn't recommend it, even if it was reasonably verified to be legally possible anyway. I just found this an interesting thing to discuss. Would it really be possible for "intellectual property" possibly worh millions of dollars to slip into the free realm by a misclick of some Warner Bros social media manager that checked the wrong license checkbox when posting a trailer on youtube? Would one of the biggest world corporations be unable to do something against this? They might be able to prove it was a mistake or incompetence of the media manager and court might order this to be reverted in which case these characters would go back from free to proprietary in which case potentially free media created with these characters might become proprietary overnight :) Which has happened with some public domain works already BTW. I don't know, I find it funny that the power of a corporationg here seems to be stronger than a free license, at least to me.
I found that page too but it's probably wrong, people confuse the terms a lot and it also commonly happens that companies try to claim copyrights on anything even if they have no right to. It is better to look at the site of Middle-earth Enterprises itself where they say these names fall under trademark -- from https://www.middleearth.com/faq.html:
"To use any of those names (trademarks) as a business name without permission is unlawful."
Single words or even short sentences cannot be copyrighted but they can be registered as a trademark, here we are talking about the trademark issue with Balrog.
@VRS1 the situation with trademarks is extremely complicated, for example Wikimedia Commons just decides to ignore trademarks because it is impossible to tell if something is not violating a trademark considering even simple words, shapes or possibly even just colors can be trademarked somewhere in the world. A lot of free content clones -- e.g. that of Freedoom or OpenArena -- might very likely violate trademark (specificall trade dress) if they appeared as a product on the market, but such content is still allowed on many sites with free culture content because these sites usually only look at the copyright status. Trademark issues are left to be handled by any individual who takes such content to the market. I suppose it's similar here on OGA. With Balrog it seems to me it has become a kind of generic fantasy creature like a dwarf or an orc, it seems to me just using this name alone couldn't get anyone into any trouble, but your advice of renaming it is also good, it's always better to play it safe.
Awesome, I love these, thanks :) BTW those low poly effects are called Gouraud and flat shading.
Very cool, thanks for CC0 :) Looks very similar to my game Anarch, I think the assets could be interswapped between the games as an experiment, might be interesting.
Nice parable, I don't think it would be good for me to comment on it here. (My views on censorship in name of "privacy" are available a few links away)
Well, if you allow to host proprietary art you will get even more art hosted here -- most people don't share their art here out of fear of sharing it under a free license. I would say let's just not host art of artists who are afraid of setting their art free. As an user of OGA art I would rather prefer to not even be in danger of downloading art of someone who wants to keep the priviledge of retroactively taking down the art -- these are the kinds of people who have a higher probability of starting to make trouble, despite free license. I would rather have fewer submissions on this site that are by people who mean it.
Anyway I don't think I will convice you of changing the rules or even your mind, no one on the Internet can be convinced about anything, I think it's even a named rule of something. I just feel obliged to leave my disagreement here, it's good to have it recorded and visible. We may leave this at agree to disagree :)
Also let me say I still love OGA, thank you for running it <3
Yeah well this is diving into another topic, I'll just say that I think the point of free culture is that it is always ethical for anyone to reshare anyone else's work, even against the author's will, and it is always unethical to prevent anyone from resharing any work. I don't believe any resharing can ever be unethical, it can only be illegal.
That's all pretty fair, I just find the OGA rule for not hosting files against the author's will kind of anti free-culture. Of course, OGA may legally impose such a rule, just as it is legal to create proprietary software for example, but it's a rule against free culture spirit directly violating one of the four essential freedoms, specifically anyone's right to redistribute art. If an author decides to use a free license, he chooses to give up the right to decide who and where can redistribute this art, and OGA reinstates this right (even if just in its own territory), taking a step back towards permission culture. I don't believe there is malicious intent behind that rule, but in my opinion it doesn't consider the in-depth consequences and it doesn't fit at all here. Just saying, I'd be glad if that rule could perhap be discussed and reconsidered.
Yes I was also thinking about trademarks which WMC simply ignores but I know you told me OGA doesn't ignore. But apart from that I personally trust WMC (not necessarily Wikipedia) more than most other websites, they have very clear licensing info, discussions, archives of email proofs, editing logs and a great number of eyes checking the validity of licensing. I am not trusting it 100%, but if I would have to choose to trust anyone with a license, it would be WMC.
Well, I'm probably not going to post this in near future as I'm a bit lazy :p But I wanted to hear the opinions. For now I'll leave this legal experiment to anyone who's willing to go for it -- if it's going to be posted, don't forget to provide extensive info in the comments linking to all the evidence of the license etcetc.
I would personally never use these characters in my games and wouldn't recommend it, even if it was reasonably verified to be legally possible anyway. I just found this an interesting thing to discuss. Would it really be possible for "intellectual property" possibly worh millions of dollars to slip into the free realm by a misclick of some Warner Bros social media manager that checked the wrong license checkbox when posting a trailer on youtube? Would one of the biggest world corporations be unable to do something against this? They might be able to prove it was a mistake or incompetence of the media manager and court might order this to be reverted in which case these characters would go back from free to proprietary in which case potentially free media created with these characters might become proprietary overnight :) Which has happened with some public domain works already BTW. I don't know, I find it funny that the power of a corporationg here seems to be stronger than a free license, at least to me.
Characters are copyrightable, but never their names alone, these can only be trademarked.
I found that page too but it's probably wrong, people confuse the terms a lot and it also commonly happens that companies try to claim copyrights on anything even if they have no right to. It is better to look at the site of Middle-earth Enterprises itself where they say these names fall under trademark -- from https://www.middleearth.com/faq.html:
"To use any of those names (trademarks) as a business name without permission is unlawful."
If you don't believe me, official copyright office page states (https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html):
"Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases."
Single words or even short sentences cannot be copyrighted but they can be registered as a trademark, here we are talking about the trademark issue with Balrog.
@VRS1 the situation with trademarks is extremely complicated, for example Wikimedia Commons just decides to ignore trademarks because it is impossible to tell if something is not violating a trademark considering even simple words, shapes or possibly even just colors can be trademarked somewhere in the world. A lot of free content clones -- e.g. that of Freedoom or OpenArena -- might very likely violate trademark (specificall trade dress) if they appeared as a product on the market, but such content is still allowed on many sites with free culture content because these sites usually only look at the copyright status. Trademark issues are left to be handled by any individual who takes such content to the market. I suppose it's similar here on OGA. With Balrog it seems to me it has become a kind of generic fantasy creature like a dwarf or an orc, it seems to me just using this name alone couldn't get anyone into any trouble, but your advice of renaming it is also good, it's always better to play it safe.
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