Oolite Bulletins

I suspect that someone who says that Sung's textures are ripped from Homeworld 2 must be half-blind.

I just spent half an hour looking up Homeworld2 screenies from all the gaming sites and comparing the ship images to Sung's work and I must say that, like Sung himself said, the inspiration may be similar, but the final style of the textures is very different.

The colour shades are very different and the burn marks (do not seem to appear in Homeworld 2 models) on Sung's models show that Sung knows how to paint textures and he does not have to steal.

There may be some similarities between the styles, but styles cannot be copyrighted. It would be different if Sung had simply snagged copyrighted textures and then painted them on top of Oolite ships, but this is clearly not the case here.

Also, if anyone else wants to do Homeworld 2 style textures, the directions are available for anyone - you don't have to go and breach any copyrights to do it:

http://www.ericksmodels.com/paper/hw2/hw2.html

As far as I'm concerned, the case is closed and Sung must continue his wonderful work!

Thank you all for the good replies.

This morning i decide, that i will change all textures to delete any similar details to Homeworld. Oolite must get his own style with no similarity to anything. This takes some time, but i think it is the best way to get a clean work. I hope everybody understand this.

So don't worry if you see no new work in the next time. I'm working on.

Greetings
Sung

LittleBear wrote:

See the Doc's Your Ad here thread and OXP. Must be at least 20 breaches there! But Coca-Cola, Pesi-Cola, KFC, Tesco etc haven't come after the Doc yet.

Those ads should fall under parody, I believe. But even if they don't, I think that franchises like Star Wars would be even easier angered, since they actually have products like games with their ships in it. A possible breach which I'll look forward to, is when somebody does some ships inspired by Alien.

Perhaps some of this is like fan fiction. Strictly speaking it's a breach of copyright, but why sue people who show appreciation for your product without making money from it. Besides, wouldn't most companies initially just demand to have the material removed from the web?

What's really beginning to concern me with this copyright discussion going isn't any of our oxps or textures, but the game we're doing them for. I only heard of TNK on the search which brought me to Oolite. It was shut down by Braben or Bell, right? Could this happen to this small squat on a corner of their estates too?

Is Homeworld any good? The screen shot also looks somewhat like Frontier to me. The blueish stuff in Sungs textures does look like those areas in the screen shot, but honestly, even if it was a direct copy-paste job in those areas, I still can't imagine a company suing because of a small rectangle from an old game.

I like Homeworld - it's a space-based R.T.S. rather than a 3D shooter ( yes Oolite is much more than that! )

Well worth a look if you're into such games, I've heard some say it's a bit 'dull'.

Charlie wrote:

I've heard some say it's a bit 'dull'.

Thanks.

I like RTS games to be a bit dull - probably because I usually prefer strategy games to be turn based.

All my time for games is dedicated to the Ooniverse atm, but it's nice to have something else waiting to be tried.

I agree with the Doc, Wolfwood et al, you can hardly call a similarity in a tiny proportion of a texture 'copyright theft'. It's like saying that a sci-fi story with the phrase 'space station' is guilty of intellectual theft from Arthur C. Clarke! There are obvious 'rips' of the intellectual property of others (i.e. Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001:ASO and the Llama.oxp), but as has been said, no-one has raised comment or complaint on these and I'd bet if Giles or one of the Mods received even the sniff of a complaint, they'd pull said articles and post a statement on the BB. Maybe all OXP posters should add a proviso to their OXP's:
'All textures, models and AI's used are the authors own work. Similarities to other textures, models and AI's is purely coincidental (in some cases, Charlie! ) and the author is not gaining any benefit, monetary or otherwise, from the creation of this OXP. Any persons or organisations who feel some infringement to their intellectual property may contact the author at [email protected]'

It's sad, that in today's culture, the threat of legal/compensation actions is enough to stop people being creative.

Captain Hesperus(tm)
"I've trademarked my name so that anyone using it has to pay me royalties. It's a quick and easy way to get a good profit. The Magistrates owe me 800 Credits already."

" I think that franchises like Star Wars would be even easier angered,"

heh, no kidding. that dumb tw@ lucas pulled the long-running and hugely popular UK fanclub cos it wasn't "official" and probably therefore infringing on his ability to make money - yawn. the runner is now an ex-star wars fan, i believe.

LittleBear wrote:

But I thought under the Creative Commans Licence, the idea was anything we do for Oolite is for the project rather than somthing we would be entitled to sell or assert ownership over?

The source code of the game, and the included assets, are (mostly) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License version 2.0. This means that Giles and we contributors retain full copyright, but license anyone to use it under the terms of that document. (Some parts of the code have slightly less restrictive licenses; for instance, the Mac sound code doesn’t have the NonCommercial term.)

This does not affect third parties. If you create an OXP with completely original content, that belongs to you.¹ You can license it under any terms you wish, charge for it, sue anyone copying stuff from it etc. if you wish. If you copy content from Oolite, you are bound by the license and must redistribute your content under the same terms (because that’s a condition of the license). If you want to copy stuff from another OXP, or from another game, you are required to adhere to the license of that OXP or game.

CaptKev wrote:

It's considered "Fair Use" if it's a least 50% different from the copyrighted material. So there shouldn't be a problem with Sung's work.

“Fair use” is a specifically US concept. Commonwealth countries have a related but distinct concept of fair dealing. Neither has a hard and fast 50% rule. In most jurisdictions, a small portion (well under 50%) may be copied. Also, copyright does not come into play if what is being copied can’t reasonably be considered a “work”.

Stylistic copying, such as recreating the starship Enterprise from scratch, is in principle legal under most copyright laws. This of course won’t protect you from being sued if you attract Paramount’s attention. (The majority of copyright infringement cases don’t go as far as a trial; they work by intimidation. At that point, what the law actually says becomes relatively unimportant.)

Edit: as to the question of whether Sung’s textures violate the copyright for Homeworld, that looks like a very clear “no”.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. In particular, I am not your lawyer. I am merely a geek of so-called “intellectual property” law.

¹ There is case law in the US² to the effect that third-party additions to a game are derivative works of the game even if they do not include any actual content from the game itself, because they are designed specifically to work with the game. This is clearly batshit insane – by extension, all your PowerPoint documents are belong to Microsoft. In any case, I doubt Giles has any intention of applying that ruling to Oolite, or trying to get similar rulings in other countries.

² Micro Star v. FormGen Inc., 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 22061, 48 U.S.P.Q.2D(BNA) 1026

@Ahruman

A very clear, very concise answer.

I was very definitely playing the parody card in my contributions to the AD-X campaign.

Oo-Haul, Accoorist, Oopen Ooniversity, Tescoo (Oxpress), FedOox, Oops, theOO and (just missing out) voodoofoone.

Even Thargon Wars is clearly a (based on) Space Invaders(R) rip.

I certainly did not mean to be mean in my emails to Sung. I'm concerned primarily because of my experiences with Wesnoth, a free turn-based strategy game. Here, several graphics that had been in Wesnoth for years had to be changed, just because their heads were coincedentally similar to those of the skeletons in Final Fantasy 4. There is also a very strict policy on the Wesnoth forums (can be seen at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2014 ), which proscribes banning for any violation of copyright whatsoever.

As a matter of fact, the Wesnoth trailer was yesterday discovered to have been banned from YouTube because of alleged copyright infringement (thread is here).

Here are some of the graphical grounds for my concern. If they are not correct, I will gladly retract them. You can find other HW2 screenshots at http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/hom ... tml?page=1 for reference.

1. The engines are almost exact replicas of the Homeworld 2 ones (can be seen on a rear view of a HW2 ship).
2. Your Constrictor texture looks a lot like that of the HW2 resource collector (visible in the second row on the second page of the HW2 gallery).
3. The windows on the Worm, Anaconda and Python are very similar to those on the HW2 Hiigaran carrier (in your post on the Oolite forums).
4. There is a graphic on the bottom of your Cobra MKI that looks like that on the top of the Hiigaran Mothership (visible at http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_vie ... =undefined ).
5. The texture on the sides of the Asp Mark II is very similar to that on the side of the lower section of the Mothership (visible at http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_vie ... =undefined ).
6. The graphic on the top of the Cobra Mk I is similar to HW2's subsystem slot (visible on your shot of the
HW2 carrier).

I am also concerned because of what happened to Halogen, a Command & Conquer Generals modification that I was anticipating. Microsoft decided to fox it after three years of work. There is also FreeCraft, an attempted Warcraft II clone, and StarKiller, a port of Starcraft to C&C Generals, both of which Blizzard foxed. Killer Wolf gave another example of this. I do not want to see a similar fate happen to Sung or even to the entire Oolite project. Dr. Nil also raised this concern.

Also, I do not know German copyright laws, but American laws are indeed very strict (no, I'm not a lawyer either), to the point where a company sued 754 people in one day ( http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/12/ ... ues_1.html ). There are even automated computer programs that will detect copyright infringement, which were probably responsible for the Wesnoth trailer's banning (an example can be found here). And yes, I do agree with Ahruman in that a lot of this is clearly batshit insane, although I will not take up for music pirates.

@Wolfwood: I must admit to being slightly color-blind, but I have not had problems with this before (possibly until now). I may not be able to discern the differences in the color shades that you point out as well as you can. Also, HW2 is in full 3D, and has 3D lighting, meaning that a HW2 ship can take on many colors, depending on its team colors and how the virtual light hits it.

@Charlie: English is my native language (and only language of fluency).

Finally, please note that I have absolutely no concerns with the models, only the textures. And also, I do think that Sung is a very good artist, and I never sought to question his artistic skill.

@MM - I understand your concerns but even you use phrases like "very similiar", "looks a lot like". They're not very quantifiable.

I've looked at your screenshots - yup, similarities - but I'd definitely say more "inspired by" rather than "copied from" - it's a space game - things are metallic, things glow, things have scorch marks and pock marks - there really is just so few ways to get "nice", "realistic" spaceships without them starting to look the same.

To be honest I always thought Homeworld (I've not got/played 2 just the first one) looked remarkably similar to Chris Foss's work from the 70s on much of EE Doc Smith's literary works (especially the Subspace and D'Alembert stuff) - so Sung could just claim to be inspired by Chris Foss (which he may well be), or its possible he's never seen HW2 and its completely coincidental that the lowest common denominator of nice looking space ships is metallic-glowing-scorch-marked textures that all look pretty much the same!

As you said IANAL...

Just to clarify my previous post:

I wasn't supporting or refuting any claims that anybody had made use of anybody else's work. I was just correcting a misunderstanding of copyright.

For what it's worth, I believe Sung's work to be both original and of the highest quality.

@MM.

I can see your concerns, but there is a real danger that any sort of art is stifiled if this is taken to extreems. The only part that looks similar to my eye is the windows. How many different ways of doing a window on a space ship can there be?

On the point about the engines, Snug has retextured the orginal wire-frame model from Elite (Bell & Baraben 1984), of which the engines are part. So if the Homeworld engines look similar, then it is surely more correct to say that Homeworld might have a copyright problem with Acornsoft and B & B as they got there first.

I just looked at the cover of Isaac Asimov's novel "Foundation & Empire" (1952). I cannot post a screen-shot as its from a book, but both the Space Ship and the city-scape in the background look very similar to the Homeworld ships.

None of this is meant to accuse the Homeworld authers of copying (I'm sure they haven't) and neither has Snug. But I don't think that anybody who is in the business of desgining space-ships for games can really complain that their ships looks similar to another persons. All artists are trying to build a ship that looks realistic, so there will be features in common.

In the real world, many Cars and Aircraft look similar as the desginers are all bound by the same laws of physics. Military Missiles look almost identical! But Ford cannot complain that VW also produce cars with headlights, bonnets, windscreen wipers etc as these are features of a car.

Personally I don't think there is a similairy save for the fact that both desginers are trying to make space-craft and to that extent there are similarities between the desgines.

LittleBear wrote:

On the point about the engines, Snug has retextured the orginal wire-frame model from Elite (Bell & Baraben 1984), of which the engines are part. So if the Homeworld engines look similar, then it is surely more correct to say that Homeworld might have a copyright problem with Acornsoft and B & B as they got there first.

I'm not quite sure about that you're right here - but please remember that I'm no law specialist. I just remembered King Diamond being sued by Kiss and forced to change his make-up style, even though he maintained that it was mostly inspired by Alice Cooper who used it before Kiss. Also this was not a matter of a direct copy, but simply the use of a certain style of black and white face paint...

I suppose that this is different from country to country. I'm not even sure how it works with the Internet and all. Can companies just choose to sue in the country that gives them the most beneficial tilt of the playing field or does it depend on the physical location of the offender or the server with the material in question?

I still think that the main worry is Oolite itself, not any expansions. I would have no big problem removing an ad or 50 from Your Ad Here if it became necessary, but I would really hate to see Oolite being forced underground.

I agree on that! If any copyright is infiged by Oolite its B&B's. However, I'm sure B&B must be aware of Oolite as its been around for a while (over 4 years) and I've allways assumed that they take it in the spirt it is intended:- A homage to their great game and, being none commercial, not an attempt to rip off their work. Indeed, if Elite IV ever does come out, many players of Oolite will buy it having been introduced to the Elite concepet by Oolite.

If they objected to Oolite (as a matter of strick "moral rights" they would be entitled to), then Oolite would have to stop. But I've always assumed they don't object. I start the readme to any OXP I submit with "Based on Elite by Ian Bell and David Braben" and "An AddOn for Oolite by Giles Williams". This isn't due to a fear either will sue me, but it just seems polite to acknolge their work. Both Bell and Barben have made both Elite (for emulator play) and FFE available as free downloads on their websites. This is NOT the same as B&B waving copyright, but it does indicate their attidude to use of their work for non-commercial purposes.

I'm no expert either (I do Criminal law!), but I think the KISS suit had to do with "passing off" which is not quite the same as copyright. As one UK Judge put it when dismissing a passing off claim (I think this had to do with French Champange manufactors trying to sue the makers of a fizzy non-alocholic drink called Elderflower Champage) "Only a moron in a hurry would be mislead" (into thinking that the fizzy drink was Champage!)