Oolite Bulletins

El Viejo wrote:

Yeah, but I think he may respond. I also think that this is him.

Yup!

Given the license for Oolite why isn't the music for the game covered by that license?

Maybe it is. No-one asked that.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Given the license for Oolite why isn't the music for the game covered by that license?

I think we pretty much all figured it was.. but simply saying it, doesn't necessarily make it so. Being able to prove it to the anally-retentive types at youtube needs something a little more substantial. A statement to that effect from the artist concerned would be ideal.

Diziet Sma wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Given the license for Oolite why isn't the music for the game covered by that license?

I think we pretty much all figured it was.. but simply saying it, doesn't necessarily make it so. Being able to prove it to the anally-retentive types at youtube needs something a little more substantial. A statement to that effect from the artist concerned would be ideal.

Yeah, you'll basically need to contact Nigel. He's pretty easy to google.

I dug through my email archive (Nigel was my very first beta-tester!) We met over a few pints in the Angel off Denmark Street and I asked him if he could put together some theme music for the game but we didn't discuss licensing in any great detail. Basically he gave me permission to use the recordings in the game, with 'No Sleep' credited as the author of the music, and a line or two in the accompanying documentation reemphasising his copyright in the performance.

aegidian wrote:

… and a line or two in the accompanying documentation reemphasising his copyright in the performance.

It seems that this never happened, though. At least he's not mentioned in the readMe (and wasn't in the 1.65-readMe either).

At least he was in the first edition of the contributors list on the project pages. Woh, that list has grown since.

If you want a free, usable version of the Blue Danube, try here:

http://musopen.org/music/piece/1259

It's a recording from vinyl, but it might meet your needs.

Selezen wrote:

If you want a free, usable version of the Blue Danube, try here:

We already have two.. the version by NoSleep, and the one in Smivs' Delightful Docking. All we need is to be able to prove to youtube that the version built into Oolite is copyrighted to NoSleep and that Giles has permission to use it.

Replacing the BD with another would not help. The videos already on youtube contain NoSleep's version.

Ah, I see.

Shutting up now.

Little update from my side: I don't know if this is only temporary, but the notice is just gone now after my objection. Maybe they accepted it, maybe they just don't read it until someone claims the rights and stirs up trouble. Dunno.

Hopefully that will be the end of it. although it would be smart for Giles and the devs to get this properly documented to avoid similar hassles down the track.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. I post a lot of videos of my musician friends playing ragtime. Whenever a video of a Scott Joplin rag goes up, there are multiple copyright claims made to it (though the music is public domain).

In most cases, disputing the claim on the basis of it being public domain works to get the claim reversed (though the bigger companies won't do it right away, instead just failing to respond for the full 30 days until it is automatically removed). One company, however, rejected my dispute, claiming that they indeed did own the rights to Maple Leaf Rag on a video of some friends playing it on multiple pianos. I found the email address for their parent company (in the U.S. of course) and reminded them of the U.S. law about making fraudulent copyright claims and the penalties involved -- and oh by the way many ragtime musicians I know happen to be lawyers... I copied YouTube's legal department in the email. The claim was released within hours.

Thus, as it is known that the performer of this version of Blue Danube permitted its use in the game, and no one is intending to make money off the recording, there's no harm and no foul to using it in a video of the game. These claims are just automatic by crawlers that listen for certain melodies that recording companies have recorded some version of at some point. They aren't very accurate insofar as identifying the actual recording (or even instrumentation) -- only the notes involved. That's fine for catching people who post their own versions of pop songs, but makes life difficult for those who enjoy playing public-domain stuff like classical music and pre-1924 popular music.

To put this to rest… when we did the relicensing, I contacted Nigel about the music. He said it was done specifically for Oolite and he had no problem with distributing it under the terms we chose for Oolite. (Unfortunately I don’t seem to have the e-mail exchange archived, but I am willing to attest that that was the answer he gave me.)

As such, the two pieces of music delivered with Oolite can be used and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license, with No Sleep Nigel attributed as the performer (and composer in the case of the Oolite theme).

Thanks for clearing this up, Jens!