instead of accepting this as a fact of life, it should definitely be discussed and debated. What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?
For instance, Star Wars fans have made the despecialized edition from footage from the various movie - the result is pretty good. People remix music all the time; there have been plenty of initiatives over the years to provide songs as separated tracks to allow for more advanced remixes. etc etc...
The good reason is that someone or some company paid for creating all those hundreds of hours of footage, so they get the first and final say over who gets to view and/or use it.
there is nothing obvious in that deduction.
For cinema for instance a loooot of the money that serves into making movies come directly from taxpayer money - a figure I can find in the US is 1.5 billion $ of tax per year for instance in one occurence : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/us/when-hollywood-comes-t... - and let's not get started about public tv which is pretty much mostly public funds.
Likewise for my country, France - only a minority of money invested in movies comes directly from private pockets: https://i.f1g.fr/media/figaro/704x319_cropupscale/2019/03/19...
Thank you for pointing this stuff out.
I don't quite get your point either. Are you implying you would like ownership to be transfered from your tax money to whatever is created afterward with that money?
Would you feel entitled to ask for reports of how your neighbor spends his unemployment grant, because that's partly paid with your tax money?
I'd rather have no notion of private ownership of ideas, knowledge and cultural goods at all.
> Would you feel entitled to ask for reports of how your neighbor spends his unemployment grant, because that's partly paid with your tax money?
I don't think it's really meaningful to compare something that allows human beings to (barely) stay alive, to the benefit of for-profit corporations.
But it is: The concept of "private property" is pervasive and deeply ingrained in modern Western civilization. You should have very, very good ethical and practical reasons for why this should be changed.
Let me try a different angle: If you put a two-minute video of an albatross gliding through the air on Youtube, should viewers of your video also have the right to see the other five hours of your holiday footage?
No, this has nothing to do with privacy. The context was "When you buy a DVD, you don't expect hundreds of hours of unedited footage to come along with the film so you can cut together your own version." [1] jcelerier argued that consumers of a movie should have the right to receive all unpublished footage, I argued against that. In my analogy, the "buying a DVD" part is viewing the albatros-video, and the unedited, unpublished footage is the unedited, unpublished footage.
I think it should be read that way. You are not conflating copyright and privacy, you are conflating scopes of content production (the licensed work vs the whole work of the artist).
In your example, the topic of the licensed video is the albatross, not the artist holidays. That clarification being made, there's probably some truth in the privacy issue (you brought that example for a reason): one must make a distinction between works of fiction and other works : reporting, biography, and perhaps other kinds. Games are works of fiction, just like movies and music, while someone's holidays isn't. Maybe one may see that as another form of scoping.
Ahh, I think I see the source of the confusion: in my analogy, the two-minute albatross video is cut and edited from the five-hour holiday footage. Sorry, that was my fault for being unclear.
For this holiday video, it was taken with the intent to -- privately -- document someone's holiday. Incidentally, the person taking the video happened to find a two-minute segment that they thought might be interesting to others, and they were comfortable giving away (because that portion of the video didn't intrude on their privacy).
The point I'm making here is that situations are different. Situations have nuance. You can't just presume equivalence and throw an argument in someone's face along the lines of "if you want someone to do X then you have to be comfortable with Y". Because no, you don't, and it's not logically inconsistent to hold that view.
(For the record, I don't think the studio should be required to give you all their unpolished, pre-cut footage. But I also don't think it's contradictory to imagine a world where that was the norm, but it was not the norm to expect people to post their entire holiday video when they just want to post a short segment.)
No one denies that whoever creates something has the right to dispose of it however they wish.
Having the legal right to annoy your own customers is not a good reason to annoy your own customers.
The question was why couldn't the material be packaged up in any other ways? What's the "good reason" it can't be? Does it kill any babies?
Re-read the original question by jcerelier, who explicitly asked why consumers don't have the right to view all the uncut footage: "What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?" [1]
> No one denies that whoever creates something has the right to dispose of it however they wish.
That's not correct. From another comment: "I'd rather have no notion of private ownership of ideas, knowledge and cultural goods at all." [2]
> What's the "good reason" it can't be? Does it kill any babies?
That's a really stupid argument to make. What's the "good reason" you don't send me 100 Euros? Would it kill any babies?
The people who made the movie have all the rights to it and then they make some DVDs and sell them. They only sold what's on the DVDs. They didn't sell the other stuff, so people don't have a right to that stuff.
Now, that is not to say that the products couldn't be different in the future. It might turn out that movies which include a footage "parts kit" do better in the market place, so much more so that it becomes the normal way of doing business and is what is the ordinary and expected product at the ordinary price. But there's no reason to expect we have any particular rights to stuff other people did, or that they can't carefully parcel out the rights at prices that they set.
Getting tired of such free use of the word “right”. [EDIT: see bottom of this post!]
I will assume you’re not from the US, or are using hyperbole when you use the term “right”. Here in the USA our rights are clearly defined in the Constitution & Bill of Rights and they have a special quality: Our military and politicians literally swear not to defend King or country, but the Constitution, which represents a set of rights no human is allowed to abridge.
Rights are things we send our sons and daughters to die for in war.
So maybe you mean something a bit less dramatic?
EDIT: After my bloviating I reversed my position based on something the parent posted regarding government subsidies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506982
yes
I dabble in game design and the plan is making the game code open/libre (not the assets or trademarks though) after some time passes (years or maybe even decades, depending on the success) so others can learn from it, extend it and maybe even sell it is quite a draw for me.
Some assets are code (procedural content, for example) though, how do you feel about those?
Also, one thing I've noticed is that for many ostensibly open source game code releases where assets are withheld, often no placeholder assets are provided either, without which the code sometimes can't be built, or if built can't be run or tested, which can present a significant barrier to the use or reuse of the code. All the more so when the original assets are in some idiosyncratic, non-standard, and possibly even undocumented, format.
> Some assets are code (procedural content, for example) though, how do you feel about those?
Code is code, if it produces output, it is owned by the user :) (assuming the "code" doesn't produce copyrighted content).
EDIT: Why do I treat code differently from assets? I have no clue tbh, but probably has to do with I can do code and thus can give it away, and can't do assets and thus can't.
Right, I'm thinking specifically of code like shaders that do produce copyrighted content.
> EDIT: Why do I treat code differently from assets? I have no clue tbh, but probably has to do with I can do code and thus can give it away, and can't do assets and thus can't.
I'll not claim to speak for your reasons, but in general the motivation seems to be defense of things like trademark/trade dress or restrictive franchise licensing and adaptations to other media.
Eg. If Doom's assets were entirely free of any and all restrictions, anyone could have produced a Doom movie (including an inevitable Rule 34 version), not to mention sequelae.
What do you mean by this exactly? What I meant was "code" that produces a Disney movie for example.
> anyone could have produced a Doom movie
This would actually be great if you ask me! What I fear the most is someone renaming the project and selling it as their own with no added value.
> What do you mean by this exactly?
Sorry for the delayed reply.
Procedural content is generally produced by code that generates somewhat randomized 'assets' on the fly, whether it is a generated map of game locations, a generated planetary system, generated alien plant & creatures, buildings and cities, people and clothing, weapon/robot/vehicle designs, etc.
The generating code can be just code, or sometimes the code recombines existing assets. In the latter case omitting the assets is sufficient for the purposes of distinguishing assets from code (without the assets in the first place, there is nothing for the code to recombine).
But the former case, where assets are procedurally generated (materials, textures, models, bump maps, locations, etc.) from code alone, is the more interesting one.
It is fairly clear that art assets being generated on-demand likely embody a game-specific look and feel that is subject to the usual copyright, trademark and trade dress issues even though any specific image doesn't exist ahead of time.
So if there is code that generates (within constraints) randomized textures used in the game, how do you see that code and the resulting assets being licensed?
Perhaps the code itself is treated like all the other code in the game, but the settings data that steers the generating code toward a particular 'look' is separated out and treated as an asset?
https://youtu.be/fbJdS-nLjQY?t=28
(WOLF3D, not Doom, and IIRC it was licensed from id, but still relevant I think)
This is something I'd have no problem with :)
NSFW review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNvQYiM6bw
There’s a reason games have (popular) modding cultures, where other mediums do not, and that same reason is why it is viable/reasonable for games to be libre.
That most games are treated and developed like movies, rather than like simulations, is a result of a fundamental misunderstanding by the game designers/developers.
Ok, now I'm offended.
When I buy a DVD, I can view it with my own software or on a dedicated device that is not a general purpose computer or connected to the internet.
I suspect that most people who try to carve out an exception for games are just rationalizing. They prefer free software, but don't want to give up their games. Then they often poo-poo someone for not wanting to give up $OtherPropreitaryApp.
The game content doesn't need to be libre, but the game engine benefits from it.
If it wasn't for Carmack it wouldn't ever have happened.
I do not think it is guaranteed. But there are no guarantees. Even Nintendo has had misses.
The point of free software isn't just for the companies but also for the end users.
Also, concerns about tracking and privacy.
A lot of games will be lost due to DRM like Starforce, where even running then under a VM and a crack is not granted gameplay.
OTOH, on libre games with propietary data, a lot of then are having lots of earnings with GOG and for example, ScummVM and open engines running unnoficially under Linux and OSX.
With ScummVM you can buy lots of adventures and now even some games like the ones from the Ultima saga up to VI are perfectly playable, (and integrating Exult for VII is not a big task). In a near future, engines like Little Big Adventure will be playable under ScummVM.
All that said, the market compensation for fully FOSS games (assets+code) is a drop in the bucket compared to proprietary games.