Discussing Intellectual Property

[MisakaMikoto]

It takes me a really long time to read so many replies

@Arch

which have been highlighted with the joining of a new member from the Japanese hacking community

To be honest, I am not a really new member, I have been in the English community for several years. I also hacked English rom once and shared some patches on the forum. (Of course the ID is different) But I am new here.

@namelessRegent

Also, @MisakaMikoto, I have to say that your English is actually pretty good! I mean, it’s not quite as accurate as our native English speaker’s writing, but we can understand what you’re saying and you seem to understand what we’re saying, and that’s what matters most.

Thanks for your appreciation but I confirm I still need to improve myself.

@dancer_A

Frankly I’m tired of doing this because all I ever wanted was to know why any old member can’t do exactly what you do and just join a community and ask. If you don’t understand the language, ask someone who does/use a translator; there are options.

It can be more difficult than your expectation. Still remember the “no secondary distribution” policy most Japanese hackers request?

※二次配布はご遠慮ください。

It is fairly common that people find good things in a place and share it with his or her friends. That is excatly what “secondary distribution” means. Just try to imagine a situation following:

A guy find sth quite interesting and inform his or her friends. Then he says:" download from sites oversea yourself. " “But I cannot read foreign language ,could you please download it for us?” That is why the phenomenon of secondary distribution especially common when it comes to works oversea. It is quite difficult for them to know who the original author is sometimes, instead they only know it is from foreign FE fans.

What’s worse, if someone use your work in his or her hack, and the second one copy some from the first one, it is less possible to know who is the actual author of things he or she uses.

@ghast

It’s just common sense in this community- don’t use something that isn’t yours without asking.

Common sense? Maybe it is true here, but not everywhere, so they may really have no consciousness of it. In that case communication is necessary.

@Arch

I think it’s only fitting that the conclusion to a “seminar on cultural differences” is “we’re really not that different at all.” Nobody condones theft.

Yeah. Of course Japanese also pay attention to the copyright, there is no difference(even stricter) in this point. For an instance, the usage of P2P software is illegal in Japan. You may be arrested by police for sharing sth by P2P. I noticed some resources in Serenes Forest such as CD tracks, manga or sth else, obviously it violates Japanese laws on copyright, but considering it is quite expensive for foreigners to buy those via EMS and we just want it for the love of FE, so I don’t think it severe. I think developing a emulator,dumping ,spreading and hacking a commercial rom is also a behaviour which violates laws of copyrights to some degree (maybe you are supposed to ask Nintendo & IS for permission before hacking), so don’t always make copyright a weapon against game fans.

Though I am against the sprite stealing but I don’t want to blame or hurt them too much by a weapon called copyrights. Don’t be so grim to them, please.

And there is also a difference in the standard of stealing.

In rom hacking, many people don’t think using sth in other games, no profits earned and giving credits is stealing, while using without credits or claiming it is created by himself is.

By the way, many Japanese dislike sprite theft, too. If asking for a permission can make anyone satisfied, why not?

@Arch

MisakaMikoto:
By the way, the author of FE7if deleted all useful documentation included in his package and claimed not to release them again, which makes me feel a pity.(He has known your anger at his behaviour already.)

Quite a shame, yes. Do you know if he did that in response to the English community’s outcry, or was there some other reason? If so, that’s rather unfortunate.

I found this in his readme:
前のアニメーションとか全ての資料を入れたファイルは第三者によって削除依頼が出され
そのまま削除されたようなので、資料に関するファイル、データはもう添付しません
He deleted all his animations, documentation and data released with his hack in response of someone’s requests(No doubt whose requests). I felt what a pity it was because the documentation on FE7(J) rom is pretty little and maybe I can find sth useful to my hack if he haven’t deleted those.

That is also the way they handle the problem concerned with copyright:
Use it and give credits, if the author inform him for that, they will delete it, which is the same rule as the Chinese comunity. They respect others’ work by deleting resources which causes problems.

[Agro]

@Klokinator

I see you lack the ability to speculate on cultural differences and what-if scenarios, Ghast. Makes for lame conversations.

@Klokinator, I think this might be you breaking the “don’t be a dick rule”.

@Klokinator

Furthermore, aren’t you forgetting the fact that mediocre projects will stay mediocre and they will receive limited attention?

Not true. Remember @AlfredKamon’s Midnight Sun? That thing was a joke the first time it was released. Freddy went back and took everyone’s feedback and transformed his project entirely. He was lucky enough to eventually befriend a spriter who was kind enough to lend her time to making him mugs. Let’s not forget the endless amounts of time Freddy spent pulling apart the bloody FE8 event system. So what if he wants to keep those mugs for himself? They were made for him.

@Klokinator

But hey, the discussion we’re having here is literally identical to the piracy discussion as a whole. Considering that discussion has been going on for years and is still unresolved, with vitriol from both sides and both sides taking extreme stances for and against it, I have no doubt nothing that happens in this topic will change the community as a whole. A big discussion with anger, and then business as usual.

No, no it is not. Piracy concerns people using things that they haven’t paid for, but were made for the general public regardless. Sprite theft is people using things outside of what the artist intended them to be used for. A sprite is much more than just a graphic - for some of us, it’s what makes our hacks unique. Every hacker, or project maker, or whatever you want to call them, is entitled to uniqueness. If all sprites become fair game then that uniqueness is immediately lost. Someone who spends that amount of time and effort in a project - in begging spriters to make their mugs, in taking years to win over public trust, has the right to call something their own.

When I look the endless amounts of time I spent pulling apart the goddamned FE7 music engine and ripping apart the FE12 ROM just so I could get 1 or 2 songs from it, and all the samples I had to rip and insert, all the research I had to do to get MIDI scripts to run, I’m like… fuck no, the general public is not getting these. Those songs are the result of literal years of work and I will not let some mook with his self-insert hack come along and use them. It devalues my own hack.

I think that we’re not even talking about intellectual property anymore–you’re talking about stripping projects of whatever makes them special, be it coding, or gameplay, or palettes, or battle animations, or music, or whatever. If someone’s put in time to make a hack unique and a cut above the rest, you goddamn let them have that and leave their graphics the fuck alone. It’s their prerogative as to whether or not someone else gets to use their resources.

[MisakaMikoto]

I couldn’t agree more. Many hackers try their best to make their hack unique and are not willing to share them with others. (That’s also why I spend lots of my leisure time to debugging and make skill system, because I don’t want it to be a common one.) However, once you distribute your work, you cannot avoid others’ research on it. For example, you find sth interesting in the Green Patch, can you inhibit your curious to research it? Isn’t that what you are going to do? It is hard to imagine you won’t apply what you find to your own hack. I bet the author of the Green Patch have spent lots of time for his hack to dispaly skill icons, so why not leaving his hack alone and it will be the unique hack in that aspect.

It may be the nature of a hacker

Of course people have their rights to keep his outcome only for his own use and refuse giving it to others. Nobody will blame him, but I think we should encourage people to share our work with others. Obviously there is hard work in anyone’s documentation, if we all consider that it takes me such a huge effort so I won’t share it with anyone, all of us must edit the rom just by a hex editor and search offsets of data ourselves to make a hack.

@Klokinator

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.

It seems a long story. I have never seen that before, so a link? I couldn’t believe they tease you only for this. There may exist other reasons.

[L95]

It’s a topic on Serenes, let me find it…

http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=43079 This I think?

(Oh, and hi hi hi, I am excited for new peeps)

[MisakaMikoto]

I remember that I have seen it before, but where is the jp replies? The number of reply is helpful.

[L95]

Page eight.

FE7ifの作り手へ

(IIRC, they posted this on 2chan or whatever, so… it’s not that surprising lol)

[MisakaMikoto]

2ch!? I am quite amazed that you take it seriously. If you are more familiar with it, you won’t be surprised at any words on it.

[ghast]

@L95

2chan or whatever, so… it’s not that surprising lol)

well its not like we had any other judgement to go off of until @MisakaMikoto showed up hahaha

[Arch]

@MisakaMikoto

前のアニメーションとか全ての資料を入れたファイルは第三者によって削除依頼が出されそのまま削除されたようなので、資料に関するファイル、データはもう添付しませんHe deleted all his animations, documentation and data released with his hack in response of someone’s requests(No doubt whose requests). I felt what a pity it was because the documentation on FE7(J) rom is pretty little and maybe I can find sth useful to my hack if he haven’t deleted those.

Wow. It’s not like we wanted him to throw everything away, it seems like a tremendous loss. Just hoped that after reaching out to the author, he might try to find some replacement sprites and update the patch. We could have helped him reach out to the original artists and request permission (the golden rule is just to ask and honor the answer you get), and maybe even could have found artists willing to do replacements as a gesture of good faith. We’re not mean people, I promise. I feel like this was a big miscommunication problem.

[Siuloir]

Sounds like he was a serious drama llama and threw a passive-aggressive hissy fit, actually.

[Artix]

I guess just to throw my two cents in, I’ll start by saying that I am not the one responsible for Awful Emblem’s sprites, or animations, or really anything of note outside of the story. I don’t put hours of work into our mugs or anything, and I appreciate everything that Tyty and Ryu have done on those fronts, and I absolutely do not speak for them.

With that said, I agree mostly with Klok. Should there be a “grace period” where no one but us can use our stuff? Absolutely, it would be ridiculous to find one of our mugs in some random hack before ours was even out. And yes, if you commissioned a mug or an animation, then it’s…well, yours. You paid for it, and if someone else really wants to use it as well, they can pay for it too. But aside from those situations, why not put these sprites back out there for people to use? As long as they’re properly credited to the artist in question, is anyone really going to get indignant over Mediocre Hack #579 that that no one is ever going to remember using a mug that was made far more famous in Dream of Five or Elibean Nights? Especially since in a community as close as this one, that hack is going to get called out on it anyway.

Sure, it “devalues” your hack if someone else uses your mugs and/or animations, but if those were the only things your hack had going for it, maybe you’ve got bigger problems. Hell, if you have a mug that looked so good that someone else said “Yes, I want this for my hack too,” guess what? Even if that hack crashes and burns, even if a thousand other hacks use that sprite and subsequently crash and burn, that sprite has not stopped looking good in your hack. And I think that’s something to be proud of.

And hey, if this really is such an epidemic, there are plenty of existing ways you can deal with it. Look at Gamemaker, Unity, or RPG Maker - if you have the knowledge to make your own custom stuff, great! If you don’t (and I imagine that’s a lot of us here), that’s okay too. You can use the built-in stuff if you really have to (which in this case would be the existing sprites in-game), or you can go into the asset store and get whatever you need. Some stuff is free, some stuff you have to toss a couple bucks out for, but there is a library of stuff out there for those of us who don’t have the chops to do everything and there’s no reason that we couldn’t put together some kind of “storefront” for FE Hacking. You don’t want your mugs being “devalued” by showing up in every hack under the sun? Put an unusable jpg preview of it up and ask for a couple bucks if someone wants the real deal. Unless you absolutely, positively do not want anyone ever using it and fuck you for asking, that seems to be a win-win for everyone - a larger library of stuff out there that anyone can use (whether as a base or to just pop it right in), and it means that there’s a use for some of those old practice mugs or animations that were made for a project that didn’t make it.

Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass here, I don’t know. But I fundamentally agree that the existing library of stuff out there for public use isn’t great (especially for mugs) and it would be nice if we were able to recirculate some of the older or unused stuff to make everyone’s lives a little easier.

[Brendor]

This is why I’m not as active anymore

[Siuloir]

Then people should get on contacting the people whose stuff they want to use. They just have to do the legwork.

[Siuloir]

It would be nice if you stopped emulating Hextator down to his speech patterns when you are active.

If I find it creepy, I can’t imagine how he finds it.

[Arch]

Putting on my admin hat for a sec just to say that we should all strive to maintain positive vibes and a welcoming community atmosphere. Not directed at any one person, and nobody’s in trouble cuz it’s FEU nobody’s ever gotten in trouble before.

[Crazycolorz5]

@Arch

cuz it’s FEU nobody’s ever gotten in trouble before.

Screw you Serenes and your “Spamming” warnings for posting OOOOONNNEE post.

Fite me Arch.

[L95]

I still wonder how I’ve managed 0 warns and I’m sure I’ve posted stupider things

[Klokinator]

@L95

posted stupider things

stupider isn’t a word

go back to jupiter

[namelessRegent]

@Crazycolorz5

Fite me Arch.

Does @Arch have a weapon triangle advantage against you? Are you sure you’ll survive? You might want to be careful.
Also, has there ever been an argument like this in here before?