Just throwing it out there that I asked this same question a few years ago and did end up making a backup, sort of. My method didn't work too well though and is obviously not a proper way to backup the website, but I'll explain what I did. https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/backing-up-the-entire-website
The first task was to get all of the submission page links. I separated these into the same categories that OGA uses such as 2D, 3D, Music, etc. I made a script that would go through each of the search result pages for each category and copy the submission page links. This is not a good way of doing it though as the search results are a bit weird. Some submissions showed up on multiple pages and it seems a few never showed up. It's like each generated page is cached differently.
The second phase was taking those submission page links and creating a script to scrape those pages. It would create a folder named after the submission. It would copy the submitter name, license, attribution, etc to a text file in the folder. Finally it would copy the actual asset files to the folder. In order to save OGA some bandwidth, I ran the script against the Wayback Machine to download what it had archived. In the end it downloaded approximately 20% of all submissions from the Wayback Machine.
The third phase was downloading from OGA. MedicineStorm and I talked about it and decided the best option was to do a trickle download. I limited my download to 1 Megabit per second. Overall about 25GB was downloaded from the Wayback Machine and about 85GB was downloaded from OGA.
The fourth phase was cleaning up the disaster that I just scraped. Because OGA submission titles allow for characters that can't be used in folder names, I ran into issues where multiple submissions merged into the same folder. I also discovered that the HTML on the submission pages is inconsistent. Some older submissions have different HTML tags and such. This messed up the script in different ways such as not downloading the files, wrong things parsed into the credits files, etc. Thankfully, many of these issues were something I could programically detect and then manually fix or delete the folder and rerun an updated scraping script that would avoid the issue. If I remember correctly, there was one category, I think 2D images, that had about 500 submissions that ended up having a few HTML tags appear next to the author names and in some cases without an author name. I couldn't bring myself to fixing that many manually, so I left them as is.
The archive itself is pretty handy to have. The way I structured the folders and text files makes it easy for most file explorers to parse keywords and show useful results. But with all the issues I encountered, I would be very hesitant to release the archive publicly. If I did, I would have to include a big warning that credits/files were scraped with a script and might be incorrect. Use at your own risk. With that being said, randomly checking submissions showed that they were correct when compared to OGA. Since the whole thing is around 110GB, it's not as big as I expected. But OGA has obviously had new submissions in the past 4 years since the archive was made so a newer archive would be bigger. So if OGA did go down in the near future, there is at least a partial backup that exists and could be shared online if needed. I would prefer that we work towards a more proper backup instead of my hacky mess.
The people making the videos are responsible for determining if their use qualifies as Fair Use, not the developer of the game they're featuring in the videos. There are videos of every closed source commercial game on the market, but the creators of those videos aren't getting sued either, even though the license of the assets featured in the game are proprietary.
However, if you use CC assets or similarly licensed assets, you won't have the same level of control. You would have to make it clear which assets require attribution. If you're only using one, it's not that difficult. If you're using hundreds of assets, now it starts become harder for video creators to include all of the attributions.
Videos of GPL content, or MIT content, would be just as liable for failing to include a copy of the license text in their videos.
If it sounds like I'm picking on just CC, I'm not. The difference here is that MIT and GPL are usually only used for code. Likewise, CC is usually only used for textures and audio, not code. Because most videos about games won't show the code, that's why I'm more focused on the assets.
I'm surprised that Public Domain works are even used in games at all, even open source games because copyright trolls can release an asset as PD, wait for someone to use it, then remove the asset from whever they were sharing it and sue while pointing to the proprietary-licensed royalties-due copy they had posted elsewhere earlier. "prove you had permission to use this!"
People can sue for any reason. But this feels like a straw man argument. If you're concerned about a public domain work being turned against you, use services, like the Wayback Machine, to make a copy of the page. Use more than one service to have back ups to refer to. Make your own local copy and have links to the online archives as well. The point of my argument is that as a game developer using licenses with attributions might not be in your best interest if you want players to freely share videos. Some countries, like Japan, don't have fair use to fallback on as a safety net. Ironically, as a closed source propritary game you can actually provide more rights to users than what CC provides. Or the opposite end of the spectrum is to use public domain assets instead.
1. I wasn't sure if this should be it's own thread as the concerns are not about copyleft trolls going after developers. The concern is that even if you comply, your game community can still be affected. If you'd rather merge this topic with the other one, that's fine.
To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is speculation about "side effects" of using Creative Commons licenses.
2. I hope I'm not the only one that finds this problematic. Here's an example. Minetest, an open source voxel game engine, by default comes with "Minetest Game." It's a basic voxel game. It's loaded with hundreds of textures with different creators. Many of them are under version 3.0 licenses due to the age of the project. All it takes is one of those people to become upset with the Minetest community and suddenly any video that shows their textures could have legal action taken? That's insane! There's thousands of videos about Minetest.
I'm also not convinced that the version 4.0 licenses are much better either. Below is an exerpt from https://creativecommons.org/faq/:
"How can I lose my rights under a Creative Commons license? If that happens, how do I get them back?
All of the CC licenses terminate if you fail to follow the license conditions. If this happens, you no longer have a license to use the material.
In the 4.0 licenses, your rights under the license are automatically reinstated if you correct this failure within 30 days of discovering the violation (either on your own or because the licensor or someone else has told you). Under the 3.0 and earlier licenses, there is no automatic reinstatement.
If you have lost your rights under a CC license and are not entitled to automatic reinstatement, you may regain your rights under the license if the licensor expressly grants you permission. You cannot simply re-download the material to get a new license.
Note that you may still be liable for damages for copyright infringement for the period where you were not in compliance with the license."
So if someone fails to comply with the license conditions in 30 days, perhaps they recieve an email about it but haven't checked their email in awhile, you still lose all your rights to the material. You'll literally never be able to use the material again unless the licensor grants you permission. Even if you do comply, you still might be liable for damages for the period that you were not in compliance.
I'm surprised that the Creative Commons attribution licensing is even used in games at all, even open source games. Having people stream your game on Twitch, make videos on YouTube, etc are at this point to be expected. Many developers even want this to happen and encourage people to share videos. No open source game I've seen have ever mentioned you need to include the game asset credits or you can be sued when sharing video.
I don't know much about NTFs either, but some people have said NTFs don't actually sell the copyright. The only way to transfer copyrights is a seperate contract. NTFs remind me of those websites that let you "buy a star" and name it. The name obviously only appears on the website that is selling it" because your not actually buying it.
My license is exactly the same as CC by Attribution 4.0 with one restriction: The use of my music in any media that violates Youtube community standards is prohibited. In other words, you can't use my music in obscene material. Please see my About page for the full license.
I understand you wanting to not have your work used in obscene material, but YouTube Community Standards is not a license. YouTube Community Standard can change at any time they want. And while I doubt you would take legal action against someone for a misunderstanding, this is a huge red flag. From a legal perspective, it would not be wise to use music with those kinds of terms and conditions.
I was just thinking that it might be easier than I thought and I could download every file from https://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/* via the Wayback Machine since it allows wildcards and listing every file/URL it knows with wildcards. It would be as easy as downloading every file from the list of URLs it gives. But then I realized that wouldn't get the licensing for the files. I would instead need to look at https://opengameart.org/content/* pages to get the licensing and then scan those for the file links.
I'm honestly not that great of a scripter. I was gifted a bunch of storage space and have been making backups of things that I think might get lost to time.
I suppose if I had to, I could download what archive.org has saved. That would obviously not be all the files, but it would be a start. The other hard part is downloading the licensing for each file. Not a lot of good having a back up if the you don't know the licensing to use it.
As others sort of mentioned, I would say the best way is to find an artist who has the style you like and look at their other work. I understand what you mean though. When I was creating a bunch of pixel art assets for one giant submission, I kept pushing myself to add as many useful things as I could. I wanted my submission to have enough art to get a person started on a game without having to look for more art assets. Some other people post art packs like that as well.
Just throwing it out there that I asked this same question a few years ago and did end up making a backup, sort of. My method didn't work too well though and is obviously not a proper way to backup the website, but I'll explain what I did. https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/backing-up-the-entire-website
The first task was to get all of the submission page links. I separated these into the same categories that OGA uses such as 2D, 3D, Music, etc. I made a script that would go through each of the search result pages for each category and copy the submission page links. This is not a good way of doing it though as the search results are a bit weird. Some submissions showed up on multiple pages and it seems a few never showed up. It's like each generated page is cached differently.
The second phase was taking those submission page links and creating a script to scrape those pages. It would create a folder named after the submission. It would copy the submitter name, license, attribution, etc to a text file in the folder. Finally it would copy the actual asset files to the folder. In order to save OGA some bandwidth, I ran the script against the Wayback Machine to download what it had archived. In the end it downloaded approximately 20% of all submissions from the Wayback Machine.
The third phase was downloading from OGA. MedicineStorm and I talked about it and decided the best option was to do a trickle download. I limited my download to 1 Megabit per second. Overall about 25GB was downloaded from the Wayback Machine and about 85GB was downloaded from OGA.
The fourth phase was cleaning up the disaster that I just scraped. Because OGA submission titles allow for characters that can't be used in folder names, I ran into issues where multiple submissions merged into the same folder. I also discovered that the HTML on the submission pages is inconsistent. Some older submissions have different HTML tags and such. This messed up the script in different ways such as not downloading the files, wrong things parsed into the credits files, etc. Thankfully, many of these issues were something I could programically detect and then manually fix or delete the folder and rerun an updated scraping script that would avoid the issue. If I remember correctly, there was one category, I think 2D images, that had about 500 submissions that ended up having a few HTML tags appear next to the author names and in some cases without an author name. I couldn't bring myself to fixing that many manually, so I left them as is.
The archive itself is pretty handy to have. The way I structured the folders and text files makes it easy for most file explorers to parse keywords and show useful results. But with all the issues I encountered, I would be very hesitant to release the archive publicly. If I did, I would have to include a big warning that credits/files were scraped with a script and might be incorrect. Use at your own risk. With that being said, randomly checking submissions showed that they were correct when compared to OGA. Since the whole thing is around 110GB, it's not as big as I expected. But OGA has obviously had new submissions in the past 4 years since the archive was made so a newer archive would be bigger. So if OGA did go down in the near future, there is at least a partial backup that exists and could be shared online if needed. I would prefer that we work towards a more proper backup instead of my hacky mess.
Many closed source games do have streaming/video policies. https://account.mojang.com/documents/commercial_guidelines
However, if you use CC assets or similarly licensed assets, you won't have the same level of control. You would have to make it clear which assets require attribution. If you're only using one, it's not that difficult. If you're using hundreds of assets, now it starts become harder for video creators to include all of the attributions.
If it sounds like I'm picking on just CC, I'm not. The difference here is that MIT and GPL are usually only used for code. Likewise, CC is usually only used for textures and audio, not code. Because most videos about games won't show the code, that's why I'm more focused on the assets.
People can sue for any reason. But this feels like a straw man argument. If you're concerned about a public domain work being turned against you, use services, like the Wayback Machine, to make a copy of the page. Use more than one service to have back ups to refer to. Make your own local copy and have links to the online archives as well. The point of my argument is that as a game developer using licenses with attributions might not be in your best interest if you want players to freely share videos. Some countries, like Japan, don't have fair use to fallback on as a safety net. Ironically, as a closed source propritary game you can actually provide more rights to users than what CC provides. Or the opposite end of the spectrum is to use public domain assets instead.
1. I wasn't sure if this should be it's own thread as the concerns are not about copyleft trolls going after developers. The concern is that even if you comply, your game community can still be affected. If you'd rather merge this topic with the other one, that's fine.
To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is speculation about "side effects" of using Creative Commons licenses.
2. I hope I'm not the only one that finds this problematic. Here's an example. Minetest, an open source voxel game engine, by default comes with "Minetest Game." It's a basic voxel game. It's loaded with hundreds of textures with different creators. Many of them are under version 3.0 licenses due to the age of the project. All it takes is one of those people to become upset with the Minetest community and suddenly any video that shows their textures could have legal action taken? That's insane! There's thousands of videos about Minetest.
I'm also not convinced that the version 4.0 licenses are much better either. Below is an exerpt from https://creativecommons.org/faq/:
"How can I lose my rights under a Creative Commons license? If that happens, how do I get them back?
All of the CC licenses terminate if you fail to follow the license conditions. If this happens, you no longer have a license to use the material.
In the 4.0 licenses, your rights under the license are automatically reinstated if you correct this failure within 30 days of discovering the violation (either on your own or because the licensor or someone else has told you). Under the 3.0 and earlier licenses, there is no automatic reinstatement.
If you have lost your rights under a CC license and are not entitled to automatic reinstatement, you may regain your rights under the license if the licensor expressly grants you permission. You cannot simply re-download the material to get a new license.
Note that you may still be liable for damages for copyright infringement for the period where you were not in compliance with the license."
So if someone fails to comply with the license conditions in 30 days, perhaps they recieve an email about it but haven't checked their email in awhile, you still lose all your rights to the material. You'll literally never be able to use the material again unless the licensor grants you permission. Even if you do comply, you still might be liable for damages for the period that you were not in compliance.
I'm surprised that the Creative Commons attribution licensing is even used in games at all, even open source games. Having people stream your game on Twitch, make videos on YouTube, etc are at this point to be expected. Many developers even want this to happen and encourage people to share videos. No open source game I've seen have ever mentioned you need to include the game asset credits or you can be sued when sharing video.
I don't know much about NTFs either, but some people have said NTFs don't actually sell the copyright. The only way to transfer copyrights is a seperate contract. NTFs remind me of those websites that let you "buy a star" and name it. The name obviously only appears on the website that is selling it" because your not actually buying it.
For me, everything looks normal both logged in and logged out.
From your website:
What license does your music fall under?
My license is exactly the same as CC by Attribution 4.0 with one restriction: The use of my music in any media that violates Youtube community standards is prohibited. In other words, you can't use my music in obscene material. Please see my About page for the full license.
I understand you wanting to not have your work used in obscene material, but YouTube Community Standards is not a license. YouTube Community Standard can change at any time they want. And while I doubt you would take legal action against someone for a misunderstanding, this is a huge red flag. From a legal perspective, it would not be wise to use music with those kinds of terms and conditions.
I was just thinking that it might be easier than I thought and I could download every file from https://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/* via the Wayback Machine since it allows wildcards and listing every file/URL it knows with wildcards. It would be as easy as downloading every file from the list of URLs it gives. But then I realized that wouldn't get the licensing for the files. I would instead need to look at https://opengameart.org/content/* pages to get the licensing and then scan those for the file links.
I'm honestly not that great of a scripter. I was gifted a bunch of storage space and have been making backups of things that I think might get lost to time.
I suppose if I had to, I could download what archive.org has saved. That would obviously not be all the files, but it would be a start. The other hard part is downloading the licensing for each file. Not a lot of good having a back up if the you don't know the licensing to use it.
This one seems to have some good sounds. The first and third in particular might match what you want. https://opengameart.org/content/magic-spell-sfx
As others sort of mentioned, I would say the best way is to find an artist who has the style you like and look at their other work. I understand what you mean though. When I was creating a bunch of pixel art assets for one giant submission, I kept pushing myself to add as many useful things as I could. I wanted my submission to have enough art to get a person started on a game without having to look for more art assets. Some other people post art packs like that as well.
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