True, I feel the same, no drama intended, I'd also hate to go much deeper on this. My impression was, and please correct me if I am wrong, that the rules that are in place ARE indeed mostly based in ethical beliefs but at least some of them are (again, as I perceive it) of practical nature, aimed at keeping this website a peaceful place, which in my book is absolutely fine, but let's just say so. It's an admirable deed to run a website like this already and there's nothing wrong in wanting drama out of course.
- I think I have stated it previously somewhere that I am not a fan of the rule that states art cannot be shared here unless the original author approves of it, even if it's free-licensed. The reason is that this is reintroducing permission culture back to free culture, it is negating the original goal of free culture as stated in Lessig's book, his goal was to make the CC licenses exactly so that people wouldn't have to ask for permissions all the time, that was deemed to be a bad feature of our art culture, so I just find this rule strange because it perpetuates it, but again, I will respect it, in the end I can share anything on my own server. I have shared public domain art here made by people who have long been dead now by the way, we can never find out if they'd object to me doing it, so this is also another complication.
- A short explanation of my ethics for those who are wondering: I would like to add that I don't see it as rude or disrespectful to use someone else's art in any way, on the contrary to me it's a sign of highest respect if someone uses someone else's art, it means the art is good. I don't think an artist should have any more right to decide what happens with COPIES of his art than a parent has the right to dictate how his child should live its life, or that who planted a tree should have the right to dictate who is allowed to breathe the air the tree creates. The notion that the creator is somehow entitled to "own" and dictate how all the copies of the art in the world are used makes no sense, it's only ingrained in our culture by the long existing tradition of copyright law, but it's not at all anything natural.
Though RE:Clint Bellanger's statement, I mostly agree with it (and wholly understand this policy on OGA), but absolutely despise how it's phrased. Ethical/nonethical are deeply charged terms. Is it icky? Sure. Is it rude? Absolutely! But I can't bring myself to say someone using a piece of artwork that was licensed under a license that explicity allows remixing is unethical, it's stealing a balloon on Free Balloon Day. My general motto is to be respectful to people so it's not like I'd go down this route anyway. I realize this is generally a very petty thing to point out (I understand that legality as well as respect is important for OGA. it's a good policy to have.), but I have a tendency to hyperfocus on details to the point of obsession, so...lol.
Thank you for saying this, I actually wanted to say the same thing but figured no one would care, so I appreciate you brought it up. I would like to second that we may have different views about what's ethical, my personal ethics is that any and all form of restricting information in any way is unethical, so I would rather judge unethical anyone preventing even his own art to be used in any way, I would gladly reuse even proprietary assets against the will of their author and it's only the threat of punishment that forces me to not do so -- this is not me deciding to behave unethically (like it was argued in the linked thread) but me judging my behavior as ethical, and I understand others may have a different definition of ethics, I just am not completely happy about equating rules of this website with ethics itself. I will respect rules of this website but will object if they're simply called ethics, they are just another form of local law here. I am now actually in the middle of extracting the assets from these images (there are of lower quality like you say) and will post them elsewhere, even if I wouldn't use them myself, I believe that if anyone wants to use them on own risk, the freedom to do so should be there.
By the way please don't take this as any kind of drama stirring or criticism of this website, I love this place and will respect the rules, just wanted to react to what's been said on the topic of ethics.
As said webscraping is probably not a good idea but I'm waiting for something so I wrote a quick scraper as an exercise, not sure if it even works 100% but worked for me to download a few posts, maybe someone can find use or inspiration in it. I put 5 second delay inbetween requests and it doesn't download the actual files or additional resources such as images, just scrapes HTML and extracts information and makes a huge txt file with the metadata. Downloading the files is a matter of adding one wget line to the second loop or writing another script to just download all the links in the DB later on. With the 5 second waiting times it should take like 42 hours to complete, it's also possible to spread this even more if you can wait like a week or month, no need to put stress on the server, scraping can be done gently.
#!/bin/sh
print "" > tmp.txt
for i in `seq 1 1440`; do # collect all content links echo "$i" curl https://opengameart.org/latest?page=$i | grep -o "/content/[^\"]*\"" | uniq >> tmp.txt sleep 5 done
while read l; do # scrape each content page link="https://opengameart.org"`echo $l | tr -d '\"'` echo "downloading $link" curl "$link" > tmp.html
echo "-----\nlink: $l" >> oga.txt
cat tmp.html | grep -o "<title>[^<]*</title>\|Copyright/Attribution Notice: </div><div class=\"field-items\"><d[^<]*</div>\|>[^<]*\.\(ogg\|mp3\|jpg\|png\|gif\|zip\|rar\|blende\)</a>\|<meta name=\"dcterms.creator\" [^>]*>" | \ sed "s/^.*content=\"\(.*\)\" \/>$/autor: \1/g" | sed "s/^<title>\([^|]*\) |.*$/title: \1/g" | sed "s/^.*field-item even\">\(.*\)<\/div>/attrib: \1/g" | sed "s/^>\(.*\)<.*$/link: \1/g" >> oga.txt
sleep 5 done < tmp2.txt
BTW @MedicineStorm if you're not happy with me posting this, feel free to nuke this post, I was just bored and then didn't want to throw the code away :D
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.
True, I feel the same, no drama intended, I'd also hate to go much deeper on this. My impression was, and please correct me if I am wrong, that the rules that are in place ARE indeed mostly based in ethical beliefs but at least some of them are (again, as I perceive it) of practical nature, aimed at keeping this website a peaceful place, which in my book is absolutely fine, but let's just say so. It's an admirable deed to run a website like this already and there's nothing wrong in wanting drama out of course.
Also maybe two more points:
- I think I have stated it previously somewhere that I am not a fan of the rule that states art cannot be shared here unless the original author approves of it, even if it's free-licensed. The reason is that this is reintroducing permission culture back to free culture, it is negating the original goal of free culture as stated in Lessig's book, his goal was to make the CC licenses exactly so that people wouldn't have to ask for permissions all the time, that was deemed to be a bad feature of our art culture, so I just find this rule strange because it perpetuates it, but again, I will respect it, in the end I can share anything on my own server. I have shared public domain art here made by people who have long been dead now by the way, we can never find out if they'd object to me doing it, so this is also another complication.
- A short explanation of my ethics for those who are wondering: I would like to add that I don't see it as rude or disrespectful to use someone else's art in any way, on the contrary to me it's a sign of highest respect if someone uses someone else's art, it means the art is good. I don't think an artist should have any more right to decide what happens with COPIES of his art than a parent has the right to dictate how his child should live its life, or that who planted a tree should have the right to dictate who is allowed to breathe the air the tree creates. The notion that the creator is somehow entitled to "own" and dictate how all the copies of the art in the world are used makes no sense, it's only ingrained in our culture by the long existing tradition of copyright law, but it's not at all anything natural.
Thank you for saying this, I actually wanted to say the same thing but figured no one would care, so I appreciate you brought it up. I would like to second that we may have different views about what's ethical, my personal ethics is that any and all form of restricting information in any way is unethical, so I would rather judge unethical anyone preventing even his own art to be used in any way, I would gladly reuse even proprietary assets against the will of their author and it's only the threat of punishment that forces me to not do so -- this is not me deciding to behave unethically (like it was argued in the linked thread) but me judging my behavior as ethical, and I understand others may have a different definition of ethics, I just am not completely happy about equating rules of this website with ethics itself. I will respect rules of this website but will object if they're simply called ethics, they are just another form of local law here. I am now actually in the middle of extracting the assets from these images (there are of lower quality like you say) and will post them elsewhere, even if I wouldn't use them myself, I believe that if anyone wants to use them on own risk, the freedom to do so should be there.
By the way please don't take this as any kind of drama stirring or criticism of this website, I love this place and will respect the rules, just wanted to react to what's been said on the topic of ethics.
Thank you very much for a quick response. Yea I think technically it might pass as legal but it's potentially a little "nasty" :D
As said webscraping is probably not a good idea but I'm waiting for something so I wrote a quick scraper as an exercise, not sure if it even works 100% but worked for me to download a few posts, maybe someone can find use or inspiration in it. I put 5 second delay inbetween requests and it doesn't download the actual files or additional resources such as images, just scrapes HTML and extracts information and makes a huge txt file with the metadata. Downloading the files is a matter of adding one wget line to the second loop or writing another script to just download all the links in the DB later on. With the 5 second waiting times it should take like 42 hours to complete, it's also possible to spread this even more if you can wait like a week or month, no need to put stress on the server, scraping can be done gently.
#!/bin/sh
print "" > tmp.txt
for i in `seq 1 1440`; do # collect all content links
echo "$i"
curl https://opengameart.org/latest?page=$i | grep -o "/content/[^\"]*\"" | uniq >> tmp.txt
sleep 5
done
cat tmp.txt | sort | uniq > tmp2.txt # sort and remove duplicates
print "" > oga.txt
while read l; do # scrape each content page
link="https://opengameart.org"`echo $l | tr -d '\"'`
echo "downloading $link"
curl "$link" > tmp.html
echo "-----\nlink: $l" >> oga.txt
cat tmp.html | grep -o "<title>[^<]*</title>\|Copyright/Attribution Notice: </div><div class=\"field-items\"><d[^<]*</div>\|>[^<]*\.\(ogg\|mp3\|jpg\|png\|gif\|zip\|rar\|blende\)</a>\|<meta name=\"dcterms.creator\" [^>]*>" | \
sed "s/^.*content=\"\(.*\)\" \/>$/autor: \1/g" | sed "s/^<title>\([^|]*\) |.*$/title: \1/g" | sed "s/^.*field-item even\">\(.*\)<\/div>/attrib: \1/g" | sed "s/^>\(.*\)<.*$/link: \1/g" >> oga.txt
sleep 5
done < tmp2.txt
BTW @MedicineStorm if you're not happy with me posting this, feel free to nuke this post, I was just bored and then didn't want to throw the code away :D
Paypal donation no longer works? :/
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.
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