Discussing Intellectual Property

Community
19

And to be honest, that’s what I’ve always thought the English community should do.

Good one

But being honest there, plenty of people have stolen sprites and whatnot without credit, the English community just eventually realizes and shuns them until they remove the graphics or gain permission.

oh you

@Temp is actually working on a big FEditor update or side update that will allow us to rip from Japanese hacks.

I mean honestly, seeing it from the perspective of a Jap hacker makes things very different. I remember the one time we tried to contact them, it was when Sock wrote a letter to them asking them to treat our hard work with respect, ask permission before using, etc. We had a couple other japanese speakers in the community like @Agro help him fix the letter, then we pasted it on one of their forums. What happened? Well, if the japanese readers among us were correct, we were laughed and, mocked, and then promptly ignored. Not exactly the best first step to maintaining community relations.

On the other hand, now Misaka appears and says it was all a difference in cultural values. To be honest, I prefer the japanese way of doing things. Why can’t artists just make their art, animators make their animations, ASM hackers make their ASM hackers, we all feed into a pool, anyone who wants to use their things can use them, and not worry about this ‘asking for permission’ bollucks in the first place? Only one addendum: If someone makes something specifically for a project (Say, Yeti’s animations) then they have the right to have their works go unmolested until the full project is released, finished, or abandoned. Why forever lock out excellent resources from the rest of the fandom? Absolutely, you should have the right to use your stuff first and before anyone else. You should be known as the guy who originally made an animation or a sprite or whatever. We should give credit for anything we use.

But I think there’s no reason to act like on the internet, a place where the Barbara Streisand effect takes place on a daily basis, that we should lock our hard works from being used or altered by anyone else.

20

I see where you’re coming from, I’ve always been on the fence about this. Because like, on the one hand, there’s so many great mugs/other general art things that just fall into obscurity and I’m just like wow seriously is no one going to use this?

but on the other hand, as a spriter myself. To have my work being manipulated/recolored and having their context(?) for lack of a better term morphed without me knowing… I would not enjoy seeing it.

Thought I’d give my two cents :open_mouth:

21

Well, there could be a rule like “You may use someone’s art if you give credit, but you cannot alter it without their permission”. I mean, that sound perfectly reasonable. You don’t want Dewey to be used by hackers who like, recolor various parts to neon pink and dark black, it makes you look bad when they credit you with that animation.

22

Speaking as a native English speaker who learned Japanese, and is linguistically inclined in general…

Japanese is certainly not the most difficult language an English speaker will encounter, though it is moreso than say, a Romance language. Going from Japanese to English is also somewhat challenging. But if you want to really frustrate yourself as an English speaker, attempt something like Gaeilge.

On the actual subject, I’m of the same mind as @dancer_A. Join the community and ask. Despite the state of English education in Japanese being frustratingly poor, I have not met a single Japanese speaker both here and abroad who was incapable of asking a basic ‘Hey, can I use this?’ question.

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23

I’m kind of the other way when it comes to graphics. I have tilesets and sprites that I drew for Super Mario World or Super Metroid and it always humbles me whenever I see something I’ve made in someone else’s hack, regardless of whether or not I’ve put out a formal permissions or upload. It’s like, I’m flattered that someone thinks my stuff is good enough to use in their own project, especially because I probably don’t value what I’ve drawn enough.

I’m also very much in favor of sharing resources. Having that huge animations archive here is the only way our hack would have ever gotten as much visual progress as we already have. Once Awful Emblem is done or at least further along, I’d love to release our custom animations for general use.

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24

Sorry but I disagree

i just feel like the spriter shouldn’t need to abide by someone elses rules/rights when its their product to begin with. As a spriter i shouldn’t need to say “this is mine, no one can use this without consulting me first.”
It’s just common sense in this community- don’t use something that isn’t yours without asking.

Like, it’s there’s. You know?

(I hope I articulated that right, I’m getting drunk right now lol)

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25

Literally drunk? If so, D: I feel figuratively drunk all the time, but I’ve never actually knowingly consumed alcohol in my life. :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t think everyone gets that same feeling you describe. I (probably? I’ve always been terribly unsure of my beliefs, to the point where I’m unsure about whether I’m unsure at all) don’t seem to, though honestly I don’t know where I actually stand on this matter, and neither do some of the others posting in this thread apparently. It’s not just you - I’m sure there are others who feel the same way you do - but not everyone thinks such rules are, or should be, implicit. There’s something deeper I want to say but I can’t bring it out of my head…

(I’m probably not articulating this right either. I don’t know what I’m even saying three-quarters of the time and I end up just spewing out thoughts that come to mind without much cohesion. And I’m not sure exactly how you feel, of course.)

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26

I feel like we need to be less anal about sharing, but also not just take whatever we want, willy nilly. It’s more like, “Always give credit, ask where possible unless it’s unnecessary (ie: Open Source FEditor thread), and always give back to the community if you take from the community.”

Let me put it this way. There are people out there who makes good sprites, but they are awful at not just hacking, but possibly game balance, story, writing dialogue, etc. Everyone has one weakness or another. If you’re not ‘in’ and you’re not a part of one of the unspoken of cliques/hacking guilds, it’s really hard to get help. Furthermore, if you’re no good at creating resources, but you’re really good at using resources, and you can craft a game like no other but you lack the ability to create resources for the community, can your excellent game not serve as your own contribution?

Like, for example, there are people who are amazing at their job of picking vegetables. Maybe they can even cook a little. But if a master chef comes in with no ability to pull/grow vegetables, but he knows how to make a hell of an amazing dish, doesn’t his dish contribute to the community just as much as the resource gatherers do? Should he be excluded just because “You didn’t pick any vegetables so you don’t have the right to use any!”? I think not.

Unlike the above scenario though, our ‘vegetables’ are unlimited. You can “pick” a sprite off a board as many times as you want, and so can an infinite number of other people. Why not just let anyone do it, providing they credit the one who made it? Why hoard when we can share? Furthermore, if we encourage sharing instead of hoarding, perhaps the new people will say to themselves “Wow, this community has lots of sprites, I will try and make my own!” leading them to eventually contribute not just their game, but eventually their own resources.

At least, that’s my own viewpoint.

27

I’m of like mind when it comes to using other works without needing to ask as long as you give credit and require permission to alter said work, however if it was made for a hack, I would prefer to have that said hack be finished or at least playable before you can use said work so the author/artist can have that kind of bragging right to be the first to use it.
Sorry for not making sense as usual.

28

Pretty much what I said a few posts back actually.

29

Lies.

30

Herp a derp.

31

You realize that chef goes and buys the veggies right

32

define contribution? This sounds llike you’re alluding to CM so I’ll use that as an example.
How does using other people’s resources that aren’t yours (as you said) but making it into something yours (CM) contribute to the comm? Is it contributing something that people can use themselves? That they can benefit from? Or is it contributing as in “hey look what I did”?

33

So if you make a good game that many people enjoy, that’s not a contribution?

Tearing down examples, one stick at a time.

34

it was a flaw in your example; the chef does contribute
he pays for what he uses

35

I was actually thinking more of a community in the phase of pre-money society. Money isn’t a factor in the FE fandom, not extensively anyway. Nobody pays you to use an animation you’ve made, though they may pay you to custom make an animation for their game but again, that’s still extremely rare and it’s only been happening in the last few years. For at least 7 years following the release of FE7 in 2003, that was essentially never a factor.

36

What I was essentially referring was your Take from the comm- give to the comm mentality.
If I take a resource (matriarch sprite for example) and create a product (CM). How is someone else supposed to look at CM as something they can use?
Project-hacks aren’t really a resource to a community. They’re a contribution but a different kind. Sure, you can disassemble event files but that’s really not often done and is a lot less direct then going on a gallery and taking a sprite from there.
To place a hack as a contribution with a sprite as a contribution on the same level as each other, in my opinion, is a bit undermining for the latter.

edit-
Even Bloodlines isn’t contributing to anyone. People contribute to me to make it be what it is, rather than the other way around.

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37

Yeah, we are used to moving battle animation just by a hex editor. We directly move data between roms by a hex editor for the lack of special tools like you. I can move battle animation just by editing a rom, nothing else needed. Japanese hackers usually tell you whether you can use in the readme, and no extra requests such as email needed.

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38

But a project is the end goal. What good is a sprite by itself? You look at it once, you’re done. You look at a gallery of sprites once, you’re done. Even an animation. You see it once, you say “Wow, looks cool” and you move on. Making a project means giving life to those contributions and making them actually useful. If aything, making a project and using sprites is, as FPZero says, the highest compliment. It means someone thought your sprites/whatever were good enough to be included in their project. (Or they’re just lazy and grabbed the first thing they saw, I mean that totally happens too.)

Look at Death or Glory. Initially, other than his hack, NYZ contributed nothing to the community. Over time, he gained acceptance and now he gives back with map sprites, hacking insights and discoveries, etc. What if he had initially decided to use some of Merc’s mugs? With our current mentality, we’d have driven him out and thus lost a potentially amazing game creator. How many times have we (I’m including myself in this) driven out noobs who could have ascended to his level? I remember how his hack initially started, it was far from perfect. He had more knowledge than the average person, but it was still ugly and rough around the edges.

Yes, but if everyone had laughed and said “What, some dumb hack with a puppy gtfo noob” would you still be here? You were smart, you learned immediately not to take what wasn’t yours, but even if you hadn’t, should we have demonized you? Sometimes people aren’t raised to think of things in a “Yours/mine” way. They need to relearn. I am personally one of those people who have jumped on the bandwagon for ‘theft’. I still think anyone who takes someone else’s work and claims it was made by them is bad (Ie: Taking a Yeti animation and claiming I’m the creator) and pure scum, but if someone forgets to explicitly credit or doesn’t think to ask, in an age where grabbing images off of google is extremely common, can we really blame them?

I’m saying, stop the witch hunts. Stop acting like when you post something on the internet, it belongs 100% to you. I’ve actually had people grab pictures of me off my facebook page and edit them to be stupid or whatever. I posted it on the internet, so should I expect people to care about what I made? I mean, look at this image.

Ignoring whatever the picture says, that is still an image of a person, turned into a meme. That guy probably lives now and sees that image of himself in various meme circumstances and feels humiliated that he’s the butt of a joke. We don’t know who he is, he’s just that hilarious basement dwelling nerd meme image guy, but we still spread it around without concern for him. Are we not being hypocritical to expect perfect ownership of our own works when we hypocritically don’t respect ownership of others? I guarantee you that every person in this thread, at one time or another has thoughtlessly shared something in that same manner, or used it ‘inappropriately’.

With this in mind, you can’t expect people in this climate of internet free speech to respect your property. If you don’t want people using your mugs, don’t rely on forum rules to protect it. Share your images with a watermark, or shrink them down/jpeg them a little so as to be unusable in a hack. Stop witch hunting people for doing what the internet and years of social conditioning has taught them is acceptable, that’s all I’m saying here.

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