Downloadable Graphics from servers?

[Moriarty]

Yes, sure. Because my license (and there may be others as well) requires to redistribute the whole package, consisting of the .grf and the donotreadme including the licence. The .grf may not be re-distributed without the license, which I put, maliciously, into the donotreadme.

regards
Michael

Ok. Except that when a person uses option 2 (sending the grf themselves) they're very unlikely to send a copy of the readme solely because the license says so. I know I never do. We're not talking "commercial scale" here after all.

I'm not saying you're wrong to chose your license, just that it's impractical for players to abide by it, so why should OTTD have an artificial limitation placed into it? It smells very similar to DRM in premise.


Several potential solutions come to mind, several others have come up with here:
- A flag (as already mentioned). Enable/disable distribution with it.
- Include the license in the GRF.
- Have the GRF contain a URL which can point to the pretty little license that the player is never going to read.
- Keep the GRF within a zip file along with "neverGoingToReadMe.txt" and "licensesAreIrrelevent.txt". The game gets the GRF out of the zip on load time as needed. Distribute the zip file within the game automatically and then you're abiding by the licenses.


Personally I'd skip all of them, and have a simple transfer, but I never was one for lawyerese.

[stewis]

well cant you do a system where its downloaded only after the user has accepted the license?

[Wolf01]

and who is sure that the user accepts the license?
is like the commercial softwares, most of them have the EULA, end user license agreement, i always press "accept", but i never read the license, so i don't know if some actions i do with those softwares are illegal

the same for the grfs, the license says "don't distribute, don't disassemble, don't modify in any of the parts, only the automathic download is permitted" and the user press "i accept" and then he modify it because the running cost of vehicle xxx is too high, the speed of vehicle yyy is too low, he want to put the vehicle zzz in another set, then puts the new or derived grf on his site and the license goes tfu

[NukeBuster]

...
the same for the grfs, the license says "don't distribute, don't disassemble, don't modify in any of the parts, only the automathic download is permitted" and the user press "i accept" and then he modify it because the running cost of vehicle xxx is too high, the speed of vehicle yyy is too low, he want to put the vehicle zzz in another set, then puts the new or derived grf on his site and the license goes tfu

And this isn't possible when getting the grf from the original(author's, distributor's) site?

[athanasios]

Who can read a EULA? It will take you 20 -30 minutes. Only thing I read is parts of some questionable licences of freeware products that may include malware plugins like toolbars for browsers etc.

[Moriarty]

Who can read a EULA? It will take you 20 -30 minutes. Only thing I read is parts of some questionable licences of freeware products that may include malware plugins like toolbars for browsers etc.

It's not just can. Who Does?

Here:
http://pcpitstop.com/spycheck/eula.asp
They put a clause in their EULA - "we'll give you $1000 if you send us a message". It took 3000 downloads and 4 months before someone did it.

[Bilbo]

Who can read a EULA? It will take you 20 -30 minutes. Only thing I read is parts of some questionable licences of freeware products that may include malware plugins like toolbars for browsers etc.

It's not just can. Who Does?

Here:
http://pcpitstop.com/spycheck/eula.asp
They put a clause in their EULA - "we'll give you $1000 if you send us a message". It took 3000 downloads and 4 months before someone did it.

Well, the program manufacturers are often making very hard for the users not to read eula's. They display them in window of tiny size, with no possibility to resize it to some larger and comfortable size (hey! We have 1600x1200 screens, not 320x200 ...). Sometimes there is possibility to select the license text and copy it elsewhere for better reading, but that is rather rarely.

Why not show the eula in fullscreen? Nope. Rather obscure it so nobody actually read it. Duh!

[Wolf01]

...and maybe with a questionnaire of 10 questions instead of the accept button

[NukeBuster]

Why not show the eula in fullscreen? Nope. Rather obscure it so nobody actually read it. Duh!

Because You're not suppossed to decline. They have no way to sue you then.

[Korenn]

regarding EULA's: I was installing a Sony application a while back, and it actually had a short and readable EULA. It was such a strange experience, that I actually ended up reading it

More like artist issues. A lot of time goes into developing this stuff, the least an user can do is get into their webpages and get the content (via grfcrawler or whatever). Auto-download gives little to no credit to these heroes of TT.

I don't understand this. An artist has spent lots and lots of time in making graphics for other people to use at no charge and then when it comes down to getting people to actually use his graphics, he would choose to make it difficult to acquire them?

Seems rather silly to me. The grf has the credit text incorporated in it (well at the least it has room for it), so people who care about credits will see it.

[athanasios]

It is silly. Since the grf is not sold (a commercial product) and is downloaded only to use for playing in a server game. It would be quite diffent of course to include it in the OpenTTD distro without the licence.

[DaleStan]

Distribution is distribution. And unlicensed distribution is unlicensed distribution. It doesn't matter how crazy the license is. You may obey the license, or you may do without. You don't have a third choice. Ease of use does not enter into the equation, nor does purpose-for-use. With, of course, the fair-use (aka fair dealing) exception. Which covers things like scholarship, parody, and review. Of which "Playing OpenTTD" is none.

[WWTBAM]

Would it work if you could only ise it on that server?

[DaleStan]

That depends. Would such distribution be in keeping with the terms of the license?

[NukeBuster]

Would it work if you could only ise it on that server?

That would be digital rights management*(DRM), which would not function in open source because anyone with a little code knowledge would be able undo the restrictions.

[Moriarty]

Would it work if you could only ise it on that server?

That would be digital rights management*(DRM), which would not function in open source because anyone with a little code knowledge would be able undo the restrictions.

They're essentially practicing DRM by not implementing it in the first place (a little extreme, but that's my perception). I suppose someone could create a patch, but then you'd have to make the devs see the error of their ways.
Just distribute the license with the thing as per many of the earlier suggestions if that's necessary.

[Rubidium]

Just distribute the license with the thing as per many of the earlier suggestions if that's necessary.

What if the license prohibits distribution by a third party? As happens on most, if not all, "famous" NewGRFs.

[Moriarty]

Just distribute the license with the thing as per many of the earlier suggestions if that's necessary.

What if the license prohibits distribution by a third party? As happens on most, if not all, "famous" NewGRFs.

Then have a grf flag or something.
Plus maybe we can all gripe at those grf creators.

Incidentally, wouldn't it be second party distribution if you're doing it yourself? I'm just guessing there.

[Wolf01]

one way should be to download the grf in an hidden folder, with random name and maybe with random extension, maybe something like c:\docs&settings\local settings\application data\temp\asdfasd.xyz
then the client keep trace of that file, it loads it in the grfs list, uses it and when the game is done the file is removed
like when you open a compressed folder to extract one file
this way, a normal user don't look for the grf because he don't know how it is called, he can still use the functions to search for "files created since 'last two minutes'" and grab it when playing
maybe also a cryptation for the file to make it readable only for the current match (so if the player want to use it in another game he must go to the grf site and download it)
the next game with the same grf, maybe also the same loaded game, will force to download again the grf so if the cryptation key change who interests?

ephemeral, encrypted grfs... better than this, you must know the name, position, key of the file and code a tool (not impossible as ottd is open source) to decrypt it (but this time impossible because the key is random, and you must know it, maybe a sort of gpl algorithm, i don't know the DES or RSA licenses, but if at least one of them is gpl we may use it)

[Rubidium]

Wolf01: OpenTTD needs to decrypt the NewGRF. At that stage you can (very) simply dump the NewGRF to a file. Furthermore, you are STILL redistributing the GRF. Ergo, encrypting is useless.

Furthermore: adding a flag to the GRF is useless, because in no time somebody writes a "tool" to add that flag. What to do when the flag isn't there? Exactly, not distribute the file. Which NewGRF author is going to add the flag to the newgrf? And still the problem remains: "why doesn't OTTD download all NewGRFs, but only a few?" So you still get the same complaints and it still wouldn't work in most cases (as the NewGRFs most used will not get this "allowed to be redistributed" flag). Ergo, the flag is useless.

The main reason why the NewGRF authors do not want people to redistribute their NewGRFs is the fact that they get bug reports about versions that have been released and fixed ages ago, but still swarm the server network.