Maybe a better solution is to recategorise the submission under "Concept Art", which - even though it clearly isn't concept art, it's screenshots from a completed game - at least means the art is not meant to be game ready.
What about this alternative: show the artist or submitter name in the thumbnail preview title?
I would like to see this feature especially for music/sound; in this case the preview sucks because you have to click the play button, wait a while for it to load, and most people just use the music/sound alone for the preview instead of a representative excerpt, so it may take a while for me to decide whether I'm interested. However, I know a few musicians' reputations by username, so simply seeing who made that piece of music gives me a good idea of how much I'd like that submission.
There are no "copyright trolls" in this case, whatever that means. The problem is that the original author chose some strange custom license. If it were in plain English, a widely used license, then there would be no problem. Perhaps you can contact them, and say that a lot of good work is missing out because the license is unclear.
This reminds me of that "evil JSON" license bs. An author felt the need to use a custom but legally vague license, and as a result no one could practically use the work, and it was rewritten repeatedly, resulting in countless hours of duplicate effort. This also reminds me of someone who spent a lot of time making a game based on ZDoom, with the intention to sell it, but thanks to its custom non-commercial license, all that work was gone to waste.
To protect people from becoming victims like them (and to an extent, you!) we have to disallow these custom, non-free licenses. Because if we do allow them, apart from devaluing OGA and its mission, we simply attract more potential victims, who use these assets and think they are clear, but oops! The license doesn't let you do what you think it does!
This is a big reason why OGA is such a valuable resource: all the art is free, free as in speech, free as in free culture. You can use the art here for any purpose, derive and adapt it in any way, sell it, package it, as long as you follow the simple license terms.
> 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".
Maybe a better solution is to recategorise the submission under "Concept Art", which - even though it clearly isn't concept art, it's screenshots from a completed game - at least means the art is not meant to be game ready.
What about this alternative: show the artist or submitter name in the thumbnail preview title?
I would like to see this feature especially for music/sound; in this case the preview sucks because you have to click the play button, wait a while for it to load, and most people just use the music/sound alone for the preview instead of a representative excerpt, so it may take a while for me to decide whether I'm interested. However, I know a few musicians' reputations by username, so simply seeing who made that piece of music gives me a good idea of how much I'd like that submission.
This should be very easy to implement.
Looks great, thanks for sharing!
Could you please merge this one with http://opengameart.org/content/sci-fi-top-down-centrifuge-space-station since they are the same kind?
Love these fruits, have an eggplant, which is not a fruit, but is CC0!
There are no "copyright trolls" in this case, whatever that means. The problem is that the original author chose some strange custom license. If it were in plain English, a widely used license, then there would be no problem. Perhaps you can contact them, and say that a lot of good work is missing out because the license is unclear.
This reminds me of that "evil JSON" license bs. An author felt the need to use a custom but legally vague license, and as a result no one could practically use the work, and it was rewritten repeatedly, resulting in countless hours of duplicate effort. This also reminds me of someone who spent a lot of time making a game based on ZDoom, with the intention to sell it, but thanks to its custom non-commercial license, all that work was gone to waste.
To protect people from becoming victims like them (and to an extent, you!) we have to disallow these custom, non-free licenses. Because if we do allow them, apart from devaluing OGA and its mission, we simply attract more potential victims, who use these assets and think they are clear, but oops! The license doesn't let you do what you think it does!
This is a big reason why OGA is such a valuable resource: all the art is free, free as in speech, free as in free culture. You can use the art here for any purpose, derive and adapt it in any way, sell it, package it, as long as you follow the simple license terms.
> 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".
Pages