michael blunck wrote:No, "copyright" doesn´t depend on the amount of money you make with the copyrighted material, even if you don´t take money at all. It´s a common myth that copyright cannot be claimed if you don´t charge but it will be written on this forum again and again, undoubtedly.
No money has to be involved to claim copyright over your own work. However, the situation
does have to involve money somewhere if you want to use the courts to enforce it, because, when it comes down to it, the court is going to decide whether the defendant owes you money and how much - mothing more, and nothing less. If you have lost nothing more than the cost of coming to court, the judge will rule against you for filing frivolous suit and wasting the court's time (this has actaully been tested). If anything, the fact that there's no money involved should be all the more reason for you to be the better man and offer a polite word, instead of lowering yourself to the filthy level of making threats and demands of people. Remember your policy of "ask and you shall receive"? Well, you can't expect people to ask you politely first if you won't offer the same courtesy in return. If you ask them nicely to stop doing things with your work, they'll be more inclined to do it. Demands and threats typically don't get you anywhere.
Yes, (international) copyright law does allow for the copyright holder to allow whatever he wants because "per se" nothing is allowed for the public and there are only very little exceptions from this e.g. the U.K. "fair dealing", which allows for the purpose of criticism or review or decompilation of computer programs "to gain information vital to creating an independent program to interact with the decompiled program". But nothing else.
True, people can only do things which they have been granted the right to do. If you don't grant them the right to modify your sprites, then if nothing else grants them that right, they don't have the right. The problem is that, in your constant attacks against this site, you are treating your licence as if it's the only thing which gives people any rights over your work. Remember, licences cannot
deny or
restrict rights. They can
grant and
withhold rights. You
can't assert that someone does not ever have the right to do something. You
can assert that you won't be the one to grant them that right. Important difference. People are granted rights by many things, and you can't prevent people from being granted those rights (this is covered in the UK in, amongst other things, the Unfair Contracts Act, which states that no agreement can force someone to give up their legal rights, nor can it force someone to commit a criminal offence).
Consumer law in the US and the UK, and probably elsewhere in Western Europe grants legal users of software certain rights (you don't even have to pay for it to have these rights). These may well be rights which your licence withholds from people, but you can't deny them what is coming to them in law. These include the right to use it for any purpose, back it up, decompile it, recompile it, run it, and modify any of its component parts, without requiring anyone's permission. You cannot tell people they can't do something they have the legal right to do. Unfortunately, the rights the law provides may not necessarily be the right thing to do, but since you seem more worried about whether what you are doing is legally right rather than morally right, you are not legally entitled to a polite response, so I feel I might be expending too much effort in giving you one.
And yes, "With 256 colours and an area of 512 square pixels I bet there is A LOT of difference possible". I´ve shown this here [*] in a fruitless attempt to convince the talkers.
I can't see how anything in your maths is in any way relevant to sprites here. If anything, it's a disassembly of the "infinite monkeys" theory on a specific example. Clearly this doesn't apply here, because we're not monkeys generating random pixel patterns in an attempt to look like something. The "infinite monkeys" don't have direction or a goal. The entire works of Shakespeare is, as the saying suggests, a by-product. People here are not randomly generating pixel patterns, they're actively seeking to represent a given object. The only way you could reject independent work (BTW, the burden of proof falls to you to prove that someone else has copied your work, and not on them to prove they haven't) citing your "prior art" would be if you had some form of patent over the sprite art. You do not account for the fact that almost all of the possible combinations would be unacceptable, and that different people's styles don't come into it when things need to fit into the TT style (George's Long Vehicles are an example of something which is innovative and interesting, but doesn't fit the TT style, whereas if you didn't know any better, you might think that the vehicles in the DB set came with the original game). Getting closer to the TT look reduces the number of combinations drastically, to the point where in actual fact there are only a handful of ways to represent something faithfully in TT style, of which yours may already be the most obvious and predictable. If you take that away from other people, you are needlessly creating work for them.
You were asking for some of the canadian locos from the old ArcticSet but I didn´t find them good enough to be included into the US Set.
In all fairness, whether they are "good enough" for someone else's set is their decision, and not yours.
All in all, I don´t think that "copyright" is a bad thing a priori. Even your own US institutions say that the ultimate purpose of copyrights "is to encourage the production of creative works".
Yet again, you're missing the bigger picture. At one point, a major obstacle to publishing your work was that you typically couldn't afford to do it, someone else would offer to do it if they could take large profits, and if you didn't agree, they did it anyway. So of course nobody wants to publish anything if they know they'll just get ripped off and used by someone as a tool for profit. Copyright was designed to
remove obstacles like this. You seem to be abusing it to
create obstacles for other people.
Ultimately, TTDPAtch graphics are a finite resource. There are only so many things out there to recreate, and many trains, planes, buses, etc. look very much alike on this small scale. If everyone insisted on applying restrictive conditions to their sprites, we would quickly end up with a tragedy of the commons where nobody can draw anything without someone complaining. The fact that not everyone is doing it is
not a valid excuse to do it yourself.
There is a big thing here about the differences between the legal position and the moral one. Michael, the thing you need to remember is that there are people here who idolise you. If they could get within half a mile, they'd worship the very ground you walk on. Despite this, you still find it necessary to not only see fit to have their work destroyed, but to do such things
behind their backs. What kind of way is that to treat people that obviously think your work is so good that nothing else will do? If anything, you should be
grateful that someone thought
your work was good enough for
them. To do anything less is nothing short of sheer arrogance.
People make mistakes. Sometimes it's beyond their control, and sometimes it's because they've been ignorant of some small fact. Are you somehow saying that people are not allowed to make mistakes when it comes to your work? Do these people not at least deserve the basic respect and dignity of you addressing them directly with your problems? Do they not deserve to be addressed politely? Is it entirely beyond you to forgive people, or do you consider that to be below youself?
And today's prize for Quote Of The Day goes to George:
It is a moral question. I vote with two hands for respect to each other. But not everyone think so
I agree here. You can't ask for respect from other people and not be willing to give it back. It's a two-way process.
))
