On 07/13/09 07:09, Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan<m.n### [at] ieeeorg>  wrote:
>>          Were those mods technically illegal? Valve hadn't given permission in
>> general to make mods?
>
>    I think that if Valve had wanted, they could have prohibited all mods of
> their game. It's not unprecedent.

	Yes, but what I'm asking is did they give explicit permission before 
those mods were released, or did they simply accept them after the fact?

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On 07/13/09 07:14, Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan<m.n### [at] ieeeorg>  wrote:
>> On 07/12/09 22:14, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> Even the Associated Press is asserting their copyright over *news*
>>> materials.  It's ridiculous.
>
>>          That's different, and perhaps misleading. While I agree the AP is being
>> unreasonable in what they're saying, they're complaining about the
>> copyright of the content, not of the events. Someone took the trouble to
>> draft that article, etc.
>
>    You can't copy a news article written by someone else verbatim. However,
> you can certainly write your own article in your own words describing the
> same event. You can even use short verbatim citations from the original
> article if you want (as long as you clearly mark them as such).

	Yes, and AP isn't going after people for doing the former (writing in 
own words). They were saying others shouldn't link to their content or 
post extracts (your second point), claiming that fair use doesn't apply.

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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> On 07/13/09 07:09, Warp wrote:
> > Neeum Zawan<m.n### [at] ieeeorg>  wrote:
> >>          Were those mods technically illegal? Valve hadn't given permission in
> >> general to make mods?
> >
> >    I think that if Valve had wanted, they could have prohibited all mods of
> > their game. It's not unprecedent.

>         Yes, but what I'm asking is did they give explicit permission before 
> those mods were released, or did they simply accept them after the fact?

  I don't know, but given that modding of FPS games is quite hard without
explicit support from the game, I'd say they supported modding from the
start (similarly to how, for example, Id Software has always done).

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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> They were saying others shouldn't link to their content or 
> post extracts (your second point), claiming that fair use doesn't apply.

  Prohibiting deep-linking of articles is a curious internet phenomenon.
Many companies have this kind of prohibition in their license agreement
(which you "accept" by simply going to their website, even if you never
actually read it).

  The funny thing is that deep-linking cannot be legally prohibited. There's
no legal basis, and a lawsuit on the issue would never hold in court in any
country I know of.

  In Finland in particular, it has been *officially* and *explicitly* stated
that deep-linking is legal and prohibiting it has no legal basis. Yet there
are tons of Finnish company websites out there with the prohibition in their
license agreement.

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                                                          - Warp

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>>>>          Were those mods technically illegal? Valve hadn't given permission in
>>>> general to make mods?
>>>    I think that if Valve had wanted, they could have prohibited all mods of
>>> their game. It's not unprecedent.
> 
>>         Yes, but what I'm asking is did they give explicit permission before 
>> those mods were released, or did they simply accept them after the fact?
> 
>   I don't know, but given that modding of FPS games is quite hard without
> explicit support from the game, I'd say they supported modding from the
> start (similarly to how, for example, Id Software has always done).

As I understand it, currently if you purchase any Valve game powered by 
the Source engine, you can download the Source Developer's Kit for free 
and play around with it. (What I don't know, however, is what if 
anything you're allowed to do with the content you generate. But for 
example, every major update to Team Fortress II includes at least one 
user-produced map...)

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On Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:51:14 -0500, Neeum Zawan wrote:

> On 07/12/09 22:15, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:26:22 -0600, somebody wrote:
>>
>>> Why would it then be any more
>>> disasterous if Marriage of Figaro were currently copyrighted as well?
>>
>> Actually, there are editions that are under copyright at the moment.
>> Just go to your local music store and buy a score - you'll see that
>> there is in fact a copyright notice.
> 
> 	But is that a copyright of the printed form, or of the actual 
music
> represented by the score? Perhaps they're just saying that you can't
> simply photocopy and reproduce, but it's OK for you to rewrite it
> yourself.

I know that photocopying it is a violation of the copyright, but yeah, I 
think you could probably transcribe it yourself.  That's kinda hard to do 
without another score, though, so I'm not quite sure what the difference 
technically would be.

Jim

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On Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:47:18 -0500, Neeum Zawan wrote:

> On 07/12/09 22:14, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Even the Associated Press is asserting their copyright over *news*
>> materials.  It's ridiculous.
> 
> 	That's different, and perhaps misleading. While I agree the AP is 
being
> unreasonable in what they're saying, they're complaining about the
> copyright of the content, not of the events. Someone took the trouble to
> draft that article, etc.

Yes, I know that's the difference; the problem is that if I write a news 
story that uses phrasing similar to the AP, I could get into trouble, 
even if my reporting is completely independent.

If they quote a source and I use (I think it is) more than 20 words from 
the quotes, that puts me in violation of AP's copyright, even though they 
can't legally assert copyright on someone else's quotes.  (IOW, they sue 
me, or threaten to, and I have to prove that they can't - and if I can't 
afford to, then *I* end up paying for their incorrect assertion of 
copyright).

It's not dissimilar to the way DMCA is applied - if a DMCA takedown 
request is issued, you have to comply or prove that your content isn't 
infringing.

In both cases:  So much for the presumption of innocence.

Jim

Jim

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John VanSickle wrote:
> In any event, work-for-hire agreements would be replaced by agreements 
> under which the payee got the first option for licensing.

Yet someone complained about patents, and that's 100% exactly how patents 
work, so I'm not sure what the benefit would be.


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Warp wrote:
>   I don't know, but given that modding of FPS games is quite hard without
> explicit support from the game, 

Most of the time it's a PITA even with support from the game. I can't 
believe how craptastic most level editors are. I can understand why everyone 
uses Unreal.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Warp wrote:
>   The funny thing is that deep-linking cannot be legally prohibited. 

There was actually a lawsuit in the USA over this, with someone deep-linking 
to Ticketmaster's concert sale pages without going thru the top page. The 
judge decided that since the concert information was "fact", having the 
program scrape that information wasn't copyright violation, in part because 
the program held onto the scraped page only long enough to extract the 
factual information.  Plus, in presenting the link into ticketmaster, the 
originating site made it clear it was a link to an external site and didn't 
try to look like part of ticketmaster, so there was no trademark or 
copyright problem with that.

That's one of the few bits that actually *have* set a precedent here.

>   In Finland in particular, it has been *officially* and *explicitly* stated
> that deep-linking is legal and prohibiting it has no legal basis. Yet there
> are tons of Finnish company websites out there with the prohibition in their
> license agreement.

But if you agree not to do it, you're violating other laws, like breach of 
content. (Assuming that the click-through license agreement can be enforced.)

That's another of those funky copyright questions: Who is doing the 
"copying" if it's all 100% automated. If I post something to a newsgroup and 
it gets distributed and google news picks it up and then you look at it, who 
made "the copy"?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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