Re: Fw: [tsc-devel] Signing-off commits on legal questions

Chris Jacobsen | Wed, 04 Feb 2015 18:50:58 UTC

For my understanding, if an artist learns git and uploads his files to github, without specifyng a license, does it default to the exclusive "special" license?  In this case, even the PNG's by Bugsbane are "special".  Otherwise we're just dealing with an issue for the fruit SVG's he didn't upload.
I just checked settings files for these items:* The title screen logo does not have a license specified
* The question block replacements do not have a license specified* The spin block replacements do not have a license specified
* The ground_3 image has no license specified* The coin hud image has no license specified* The jewel graphics do not have a license specified
* The power up replacements (fruit) do not have a license specified    * By extension, my stone fruit graphics would inherit any such problems (from the SVG license)---If someone can somehow find a license statement in a forum entry, that will also solve this, but I don't remember seeing one.
>  Our “special” license tag does not allow for adaptions, so the distributor can’t distribute
any assets licensed as “special”.
If a distributor becomes aware of this, they could actually refuse to distribute our game, which is a very big problem.  Obviously, if we don't mark the licenses as special, we'll probably never hear about it, but this is a very confusing (and arguably dishonest) legal situation.  Even Johan's songs may be a problem here.
> I have emailed Bugsbane (again) and asked him to clarify on the
licensing of the SVGs he created.
I don't doubt that we needed to email him, but I think it's best to discuss it before sending an email to him, especially if you are using the gmail account from the git log.  There are some other things I'd be interested in asking him, and he may only read so many emails from us.
> We should probably do something similar with regard to the title theme
song, but Johan’s latest idea of paying him might get us yet another
problem there.
If he wants payment, let's just do it.  These legal situations are more severe than having paid someone money for Secret Chronicles assets.  We could even pay him unofficially, from 2 or 3 of us, without it being an official project decision.  At that point, we could just buy his other songs and be done with the Mario music replacements for good.
> Another solution would be to strip all “special”-licensed assets right
now until we have a licensing confirmation.
Honestly, I think this is a really bad idea.  This means reintroducing a lot of Mario based assets.  These are derivative works of Nintendo assets, and we have already seen *historical evidence* of a Linux distribution refusing to package SMC because of this sort of thing.  I would go far as to say that having a replacement for the mushroom graphics is a "Blocker" task and that we cannot ship release 2.0 with Mario mushroom graphics present.  I think we would be much better off using Bugsbane's graphics in the release, even without a "good" license.
After finishing release 2.0, if we don't get a license confirmation from Bugsbane, we could create a task in the tracker to build new assets.  I would say we should wait until we actually have enough artist manpower to do it at that point, or we will never get anywhere in building graphics for new features in the game such as Dr. M and new types of levels.  It may take 3-6+ months just to get all the replacements we need from artists if Bugsbane's graphics are stripped out!  The only other option is to borrow artwork from permissive sites, but we will start to lose originality given how prominent many of these objects are.
> I agree with datahead in the regard that if someone forks the
game, he should swap out the title song because it is so much of an
identity for the game.
I guess my position is changing a little on this.  They "should" swap it, but to be truly open source, it'd be preferable if they didn't "have" to legally.  The distribution issue is of course more pressing here.
> You can’t “dump a PNG into an SVG”. Then you could just use the PNG
as-is. The Vectorize function of Inkscape is something that really
doesn’t work well.
Yes, you are right.  We need to try to get SVG's.  If someone dumps a PNG on us and then disappears, we can then decide if it is useful enough that we want to make a rare exception.  An example of this was the title logo.  We needed it so badly at the time that we accepted the PNG and created a task to recreate a new SVG later.
-datahead






 

     On Wednesday, February 4, 2015 5:13 AM, Quintus <…s@q…> wrote:
   

 > For my understanding, what problem does this cause for distributors?  I
> don't doubt you are correct; I just want to understand the
> implications.

Packaging the game is, you guess it, an adaption of the works included
in the game, i.e. of the code and of the graphics. Our “special” license
tag does not allow for adaptions, so the distributor can’t distribute
any assets licensed as “special”. Solution to this would be to expand
the meaning of the “special” license tag to allow distributors to do
this (which is exactly what we want). The problem we face is that we
can’t -- because we do not have the right to sublicense those assets. If
an author says the asset is not meant to be used by anyone else than us,
this excludes distributors. That’s a major problem. And this is why I
either want to minimize use of ths “special” license or get permission
from the authors to license the asset the way we deem it useful (→ right
to sublicense).

I have emailed Bugsbane (again) and asked him to clarify on the
licensing of the SVGs he created.

We should probably do something similar with regard to the title theme
song, but Johan’s latest idea of paying him might get us yet another
problem there.

One further note on that, datahead, because I remember you having asked
for that some time: Not each license is a viral license. If you have
something under CC-BY, you don’t have to license your adaption of it
under CC-BY as well. You can use any proprietary license you want, as
long as you name the original author. As I explained earlier, you need
permission from the author to adapt his work. But if you have the
permission, you can license your adaption under any license you want,
unless the author made his permission dependant on you obeying some
conditions (such as licensing your adaption under a specific license,
which is known as the “viral effect”).

>> I would have viewed it as a technical legal matter.  The title theme of
>> the game probably really should be changed if someone forks the game.
>>
> This is essentially the problem we're facing. The graphics can, with little
> doubt, be included in our game, and we may release the game with them.
> However, the game data cannot be considered fully Free and Open Source
> until we get all "special" licensed files clarified under real FLOSS
> licenses.

You are absolutely right on this, Luiji. Now just dig Bugsbane up again
so that he can clarify. We need a practical solution until he comes into
reach again, and the practical solution I suggested was that I take the
responsibility of a possible copyright infringement; I wouldn’t do that
if I wasn’t reasonably sure that what we’re doing is OK. The problem
with the game not being “forkable” persists with that solution,
though. Basically, we are in a situation similar to those numerous large
games by known publishers that licensed the code under GPL and did not
include the graphics, because they hadn’t the permission to do so (or
didn’t want to).

Another solution would be to strip all “special”-licensed assets right
now until we have a licensing confirmation. This would mean:

1. Removing all of Bugsbane’s SVGs
2. Removing the title and credit song by Johan
3. Removing all of the mushroom replacements, because we don’t have the
  SVGs which is against the policy.

To prevent 2) we’d need the permission to sublicense the songs from
Johan. I agree with datahead in the regard that if someone forks the
game, he should swap out the title song because it is so much of an
identity for the game. On the other hand we don’t want to get the
distributors into trouble. This requires a fine-grained license that
only applies to the title song, which can only be done if we have the
right to sublicense.

>> We may run into a situation where someone makes a case that something
>> has no need for layers in Inkscape and that a PNG "is good enough" In
>> this instance we could just ask them to dump the PNG file into
>> Inkscape and make a simple SVG, though.

You can’t “dump a PNG into an SVG”. Then you could just use the PNG
as-is. The Vectorize function of Inkscape is something that really
doesn’t work well.

> Quintus: I have a nasty habit of using the GMail web client when I'm not
> encrypting/singing messages (because GMail works horribly with IMAP
> clients). Reply goes directly to the last sender and Reply All goes to
> both. It looks like I'll have to manually set the To: line. :/

Quite a lot of people use GMail for posting to mailing lists (I can tell
that from monitoring the traffic on the Ruby-Talk ML). I can’t imagine
that there’s no option to get this correct automatically.

Vale,
Quintus

-- 
Blog: http://www.quintilianus.eu

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