Oolite Bulletins

DMCA takedown against a 3D computer model.
http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/02/18/ ... ty-policy/

... the threat of this sort of stuff is part of why I keep wanting to explore replacing the ship-set.

Light at best I would say. We do live on unstable ground, well don't we all? However given the fact that Frontier has bigger fish to fry at the moment, and Ian Bell is by all accounts a very nice gent (whom we honor with praise and offerings).

I feel no need for immediate panic. That said a backup, torrent and quiet little news group based on a server in an accommodating country might be useful as an insurance policy. Maybe. Failing that a good e-mail list would probably do.

Honestly you have to ask yourself what would the original makers prefer; A past glory that is now a very dead thing, lawsuited into oblivion? Or a temple to a moment of genius, the walls clean, the floor swept by the faithful, kept for the awaiting new generations?

I'm envious to be honest, I would love acolytes to support my work.

Anyway none of us can plan for the unknown; so How much concern is this sort of thing? Well at about the same level of concern I have for me dropping dead from an undetected blood clot. If I dwelled on it probably slightly higher than if I didn't

P.S. Good to see your still with us I hear your country got kicked by a quake.

i think a major factor here is we do what we do out of love of the game - what happened there involves money. someone spent time creating a 3d model to make money off. if someone copies it and uploads it, someone else can upload it to shapeways and make money that should have gone to the creator. if someone took my Vampire DAT models to use in a game, go for it. if i was selling shapeway models of it, and they took/created the OBJ for it thereby potentially allowing someone else to create Vampire models and impact on the money i'd be making, i'd be takiing the same action.

i raised a similar concern about the Cobra models etc, as they presumably are intellectual property of Frontier/DB/IB etc and there's the potential for them not being happy at people selling stuff they thought up.

Which is why it pays to ask the author. I'm glad i asked Griff for permission to convert his models to Freelancer. If he'd said no, they wouldn't have been converted. I'm not the sort of guy to just grab what i want from the net and call it my own.

The interesting thing about the original post is the legal threat only holds on sites hosted in the US as it comes under US copyright law. It's a problem that plagues the net tbh, and isn't limited to 3D models sadly.

In the realworld i'm a musician, and my albums are ripped off on a regular basis and available for free download from mainly russian websites. Nothing i can do about it apart from seethe inwardly. My distributor can't do a thing about it apart from moan about lost profits. It's something i've learnt to live with especially as i'm the copyright owner.

Yeah - a bunch of people I know in Canterbury found out how unstable the ground was :/ ...

I have noticed that many people slap a non-commercial notice on their OXPs, and I understand the POV.
There are threads about copyright and licensing someplace - link anyone? - so I don't have to repeat that stuff here. I do think it is a good idea to stay alert for developments in this area.

You are quite right about the penrose triangle - many commentators have misunderstood the claim that the geometric object is infringing when it is a particular expression of the geometric object. Was someone actually selling the image then?

Even giving away infringing copies can result in legal action ... fortunately we have not seen the paranoia of the movie and music industries so much in 3D models. Here's hoping it stays that way.

Any yeah - asking the author is always polite - even if the author has used a permissive licence, they usually are interested to see what people are doing with their work.

So, would it be an idea for someone, with the right knowledge, to make one or more standard "licence folders" with the appropriate licenses that OXP and graphics makers can stick into their ZIP-files. I don't make much, but I try to take care to use free source material when I do. If anyone then would like to use the layered source files for something I would be happy to share but rather unhappy if they then claim rights to my rather basic and amature work. If I could zip up the files with some sort of licence I would be, not protected, but slightly better off. I suppose that Creative Commons would be one package and GNU GPL would be another.

Edit: Of course, if the person chooses to do this!

Simon B wrote:

There are threads about copyright and licensing someplace - link anyone?

My pleasure.
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=93485#p93485

Everything you need to know about licenses, including links to licenses you perhaps would want to use, is already summed up in this sticky: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7047

It is a sticky, so it will always appear among the top posts on this very Expansion Pack forum. In fact, it is a mere two topics above this one, as soon as I hit the "submit" button. Stickies are explicitly created for everything the forum denizens deem important enough that everybody who joins the debate should read them before. So in context of the forum, if you're looking for important things like FAQs, guides to this-and-that, or licensing, they're the natural place to visit first. Please do.

Commander McLane wrote:

Everything you need to know about licenses, including links to licenses you perhaps would want to use, is already summed up in this sticky: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7047

It is a sticky, so it will always appear among the top posts on this very Expansion Pack forum. In fact, it is a mere two topics above this one, as soon as I hit the "submit" button. Stickies are explicitly created for everything the forum denizens deem important enough that everybody who joins the debate should read them before. So in context of the forum, if you're looking for important things like FAQs, guides to this-and-that, or licensing, they're the natural place to visit first. Please do.

I was aware of this thread when I wrote my message above, and I have read it. But even the information there can be quite daunting and my idea was a sort of simple plug-in for the ZIP-file thing that lets people do whatever they want with my work while giving me credit and not for commercial gain. (the last one probably being the complicated one). Creative commons does this for art/stories/books etc. I believe. The idea is based on some of the problems we see with abandoned OXP's. With a sort of "standard" licence in force (should it be present in the OXP) other OXP authors can use the work giving due credit when they do. Now there are gray areas, such as the YAH ad-sets. Putting any sort of licence on that is probably not a good idea.

Edit: I just tried the licence chooser by the Creative Commons people, and that is probably the answer to my request. Might I suggest then that the content of Ahruman's first and last post in the Licence sticky are promoted to be among the Announcement threads.

Gimi wrote:

lets people do whatever they want with my work while giving me credit and not for commercial gain. (the last one probably being the complicated one). Creative commons does this for art/stories/books etc. I believe.

It does it for OXPs as well. Ahruman explicitly names the CC licenses as an easy-to-handle tool for OXPers.

All my stuff is CC by-nc-sa 3.0, which seems exactly like what you specified.

How to implement it into your OXP? Click the "Use this license for your own work." at the bottom of that page. Because you don't want to license a website, click on the link in "Offline Work? To mark a document not on the web, add this text to your work." at the right side of the page. This opens a pop-up window which contains the exact text you need to put in your OXP. It even has a convenient "Highlight to copy"-button. So all you have to do is copy this text and paste it into your OXP's readMe file. Voilà, you're done.

You can choose other variants of the license with CC's license chooser. The process is always the same. Clicking on the relevant texts on the upcoming pages ultimately brings you to a c&p-short-version of the text you want to use in your OXP. And the place to use it is in the readMe. I also put the small text into my scripts, so that everybody who opens a script of mine in order to copy an idea can know that he's entitled to. If you write plists in XML, there is also a link somewhere along the way which gives you some c&p metatags containing the license information. I find it really convenient. I could figure all this information out myself, just by visiting the CC website.

EDIT: I see you've found it yourself. Great!