@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).
Yeah, you have to be careful with filetype conversions and resizing to avoid getting those compression artifacts. Good luck on your edits--I put in a fair amount of time on these and I can testify that they're a lot of fun to work on.
I think that one thing you should probably reasses is the fact that there are more prospective game projects than there are qualified artists, and that of those projects the vast majority will never reach completion. Generally speaking you aren't doing an artist a favor by allowing them to work for free on your project--they are, in fact, doing you an enormous favor if they are at all experienced. Some artists do go for that sort of thing, though I suspect it's mostly people who are kind of new and need to get it out of their system.
All that to say, I think you may be overestimating the benefits you can offer to people who want to start in game making. Your company is certainly not at the point where you can have an 'intern' on one of your projects--interns are supposed to be learning in a professional environment from people with a lot of experience. As far as I can tell that isn't the case here. You mention Devils Inc Studio, but from what I can tell they were just founded last year by two guys without direct industry experience and have yet to complete a game. None of that means that you or they couldn't make a great game--everyone has to start somewhere--but it's definitely not going to be like working with a proven studio and it will be a learning process for everyone. And most relevantly it's unlikely to end up being something that will be terribly meaningful on an artist's portfolio relative to personal work or especially relative to paid work.
I'm not meaning to be a downer, and I really hope that you guys have a lot of success in your work. But I also think it's important for devs to understand that just having a project isn't enough to attract artists--if you don't have money to offer then it's on you to prove that working on your project is a better use of time and energy than working on any of the many other unpaid projects out there.
@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).
Yeah, you have to be careful with filetype conversions and resizing to avoid getting those compression artifacts. Good luck on your edits--I put in a fair amount of time on these and I can testify that they're a lot of fun to work on.
I think that one thing you should probably reasses is the fact that there are more prospective game projects than there are qualified artists, and that of those projects the vast majority will never reach completion. Generally speaking you aren't doing an artist a favor by allowing them to work for free on your project--they are, in fact, doing you an enormous favor if they are at all experienced. Some artists do go for that sort of thing, though I suspect it's mostly people who are kind of new and need to get it out of their system.
All that to say, I think you may be overestimating the benefits you can offer to people who want to start in game making. Your company is certainly not at the point where you can have an 'intern' on one of your projects--interns are supposed to be learning in a professional environment from people with a lot of experience. As far as I can tell that isn't the case here. You mention Devils Inc Studio, but from what I can tell they were just founded last year by two guys without direct industry experience and have yet to complete a game. None of that means that you or they couldn't make a great game--everyone has to start somewhere--but it's definitely not going to be like working with a proven studio and it will be a learning process for everyone. And most relevantly it's unlikely to end up being something that will be terribly meaningful on an artist's portfolio relative to personal work or especially relative to paid work.
I'm not meaning to be a downer, and I really hope that you guys have a lot of success in your work. But I also think it's important for devs to understand that just having a project isn't enough to attract artists--if you don't have money to offer then it's on you to prove that working on your project is a better use of time and energy than working on any of the many other unpaid projects out there.
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