clyde

Stealing

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Did y'all see this article by Patrick Klepek about the copyright holder of the troll-meme?

http://kotaku.com/the-maker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-counting-his-money-1696228810

 

"Whoever wins, we lose."

 

A few of my games use music that I never got copyright for, I think it's pretty innocuous when it comes to dopey freeware hobbyist games that get released to audience of like 0-1000 people and then blow over, and I haven't gotten into trouble from it, but it has meant I have to be more circumscribed with their release afterlife than I'd maybe like. E.G. there are other games I can turn into zines and sell at local events, or bundle up into compilations and multicarts, or decide to charge for, or submit to festivals, but I wouldn't do any of those with games that have pilfered content, at least without stripping the illegal stuff out and probably substantially changing them in the process. Is not a big problem & I'm not complaining but I try to be more rigorous these days about usage rights just so I don't have to worry about being alienated from own games by hypothetical future legal complications. Having more control over the ability to distribute my own shit trumps, for me right now, having less control over what that shit can consist of (including perfect-yet-illegal-bgm-songs, stuff that's creative commons but only for noncommercial projects, etc).

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If anyone is having trouble finding legit resources then we could have a thread for it. I have quite few places bookmarked :)

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You can put in a disclaimer to say "I found all this stuff online" but people won't be taking you seriously if you do. To be honest they probably won't anyway with cut and paste photos. I don't wish to offend but I respect the crappiest MS Paint art more than even the best use of acquired photos because it shows that even if the creator isn't great at making art that they put themselves out there and made their own thing.

So don't steal because yes is crappy but also because if you don't then you can have something that you can truly be proud of and put and unqualified stamp on to say "this is my thing".

Even though I initially didn't have anything to say about this, I kept thinking about it and my response is related to one of the things I feel is lost from the constraints of using only images and sounds that you have licensed permission for.

Many of the aesthetics I enjoy involve pastiche. I enjoy collages and interesting uses of sound samples, especially when they seem to express pools of styles or eras that have been pulled from. I don't always think they look good, in fact I think a lot of that stuff looks crappy, but I like crappy. It's similar to how VHS corruption has a desirable aesthetic. HD movies look way better, but the distribution of media on various devices offers flavors that I appreciate.

Here is a game I made last December that seems relevant.

http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9011

Yes, it looks crappy, but I value that crappiness. It reminds me of cutting up Encyclopedias and putting the characters in my sketchbooks. It reminds me of the youth-pamphlets that I helped with at the church I went to. It also reminds me of reading the Book of the Subgenius in highschool. There exist aesthetics that require reappropriated images.

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Ok fair point, it is a perfectly valid aesthetic. With Zine you're using the collage/zine aesthetic, there's an element of curation there that elevates the cut and paste into some more, interestingly the player also takes part in that curation. Which is ok for a free game...

 

Regarding the collage style, magazine/newspaper clippings can be faked in photoshop/gimp and still achieve that style. Also a plus is that you don't need really high quality assets for that style so you could go out with just a phone and take some snaps and use those. This obviously won't always be an option, if you really need a picture of the Eiffel Tower and don't live near Paris for instance. In those cases though you could fall back on the free resources. 

I guess what I'm getting at is there's always another option, granted they are mostly harder than stealing though.

 

Thanks for the thread link, I'll see if I have any links not there already.

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I think it depends largely on the extent to which you do it and whether or not you're making any assertions that the content was wholly created by you.

 

If I'm working on a noncommercial personal project (or an internal mockup of something) and need some graphics/sounds/etc, I'll certainly toss in a handful of unlicensed elements with the aim of getting the desired effect when moving out of the greyboxing stage. If and when those projects ever start getting to the stage where they'll be evaluated as my original work - my selling them, utilizing them publicly in a commercial way, presenting mockups to a client, etc. - I'll take the time to go through and look at all the content. If something isn't mine, I'll look at whether I can license it (or adapt it under the creator's CC permissions), or - barring that - instead creating or licensing a similar commercially-available version. Regardless of whether it's illegal or unlawful, taking someone's work and letting others believe it's my own is something I'm just not comfortable with, just as I wouldn't be comfortable with someone else taking credit for mine.

 

Regarding the remixing/sampling element, that (for me) comes down to whether you're doing anything innovative with it. If I'm going to make a platformer, I won't just use sprites from Super Mario World, unless said platformer specifically requires them to make some sort of point (don't know what that would be, but you get the idea). In those cases, at the very least, I would compile and list the origins of the content in an accessible place (credits screen, readme file).

 

 

 

EDIT: In a case like your Zine design, where the usage of content is part of the point, I'd probably go through the files and attribute them as best as I could, ideally replacing those I couldn't find any source on. That way, despite the fact that you're not entirely within the realm of IP law, you're at least crediting them with their work. Additionally, it gives them an opportunity to locate the usage of their work and to request you remove it, should the usage concern them.

Edited by Molten Berle

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Would any of y'all empathize with an artist who gets pissed because their color-pallette was used by someone else when credit was given, but no compensation or permission occurred?

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Just color-palette? No. I don't see why that would even require permission or credit. What's the story there then?

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Just color-palette? No. I don't see why that would even require permission or credit. What's the story there then?

I'm working on something with a glitch-aesthetic. My method of getting a color-palette is looking up "glitch" on Tumblr and making color-swatches from the ones that look like they are using a glitchy pallete. Things like color-separation from VHS.

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I can't tell if the issue is gettin that money or if the original artists are devaluing the use of their stuff by others.

 

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/we-interviewed-bob-james-hip-hops-unlikely-godfather

 

He admits that no one cared about his stupid song in 1974. I think he should be thanking these hip-hop artists rather than charging them and suing if they don't pay.

 

http://gothamcityesq.com/case-at-hand/jazz-legend-bob-james-sues-hip-hop-producer-madlib-for-copyright-infringement-over-sampling-issue/

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4e4_OylWeE

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Right now I'm trying to modify a photo of a mocking bird beyond recognition, but then I decided to check the copyright stuff on doing that and found this.

http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/19341/using-a-picture-which-had-been-modified-beyond-recognition-is-that-copyright-in

 

I suppose I've already made it clear what I think about stuff like this, but I just feel compelled to say that I think this is bullshit. Copyright law is stupid. It encourages disingeniuty because it's ridiculous. This is just a game about not getting caught at this point.

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My initial reaction to clyde’s first post was similar to SBM’s; I found the web game a lot more approachable than that post, which I was pretty uncomfortable reading because I agree that it sounded like it was looking for justification for this patriarchal, colonizing attitude towards art. I think for me it started with the language of the middle paragraph, the ‘I’m ok with being a douchebag’ stuff. My reaction to reading that was “What? Why are you OK with it? Stop being OK with it! Being human means figuring out when you are a jerk, and then figuring out what you can do to stop!” And I guess I don’t think developing as an artist should be different than developing as a human. I was also uncomfortable reading the last paragraph, with its assumption about unreasonable fears, but I guess it’s better to air that assumption and have people interrogate it than to just keep it bottled up and never question it. I also think iax was right to respond with the point about “reputation” in response. After all, a forum like this is a pretty public venue, and people will read it and be affected by the language.

 

After reading through the thread and thinking about it some more, I think my issues are more with the language of that post than with the ethical dilemma implied by it. I agree with clyde that a lot of people don’t really deal with this question at all. We just carry around assumptions about what is “public” or “free” once something is uploaded to the internet; and we have all these unspoken assumptions about what an “art object” is and what that means and what constitutes “ownership,” and a lot of it in games spaces is wrapped up in BS corporate anxieties about mass media IPs. Some have been pretty glib about dismissing the question as a simple one with an obvious answer.

 

I think part of the problem is all of these abstractions. People interpret the question as “How do you feel about stealing?” and the response is “You should never steal!” Or “if you steal you shouldn’t sell it!” Well ok, but the whole point of the thread is to interrogate what we mean when we say “steal.” Saying you’re against stealing is like saying you are in favor of freedom. Some politicians who adopt this truism mean that they want corporations to be free to trample on workers.

 

There was a story on NPR where they interviewed a woman whose picture was made into a meme and uploaded by a friend onto Facebook, and the image went viral within 24 hours and spawned thousands of spin-off memes. The woman interviewed seemed pretty OK with it, even made a sort of internet career out of it with a comedy channel on Youtube. So in this specific case it turned out fine, maybe in another case it could have been horrifying, totally demoralizing. The answer is always it depends, right? I think I would have been terrified.

 

I am always anxious about uploading pictures to the internet and am really picky about what goes up when other people want to tag me in something. I like to have a lot of control over my own image, and I think a lot of other people are like that too! I think this is why people seem to be reacting most strongly to the hypothetical of taking someone’s personal image or likeness and using it without their permission. I also think a lot of the concerns are with this idea of appropriating the image of non-public figures because that feels like more of an invasion than using the image of a politician or celebrity, who has already to an extent come to terms with their image being part of a public ecosystem. Images are really powerful in modern culture, and the culture has a lot of anxiety over them, and if you’re going to make art in order to interrogate or remix the image, I think it’s important to weigh the concerns of the subject heavily against the desire to make art.

 

I guess conventional wisdom is that if you don’t want something seen, then don’t upload it to the internet, but the response to that is always yes and no, right? Most of us have all of these different microcommunities where we exist online, not to mention the residue of past versions of ourselves, the dregs of some forum or livejournal or xanga or whatever where we don’t want people snooping around. You might say, “well get rid of that shit! Clean that shit up!” but I dunno, can you ever really be sure that you got everything, that there’s not still some ghost floating around somewhere in some archive?

 

Anyway, if you’re making games in a small space and uploading on glorious trainwrecks or something, you can usually safely assume that anywhere from a handful to a hundred people will experience the work, but you never know how or when something could get linked at the right place and seep out into a larger audience. I think a personal artistic ethos should always be able to imagine this scenario, of the audience of the work moving beyond the artist’s control, and act accordingly.

 

As for blanket policies, I really don’t think there can be one that always applies? The whole point is to develop a personal ethics that is aware of social mores, what the stakes are, who benefits, and who doesn’t, which means case by case, right? I think the only useful response to this question is specific cases. I like thecatamites’ point about how anything that makes you consider “legal issues” naturally affects your relationship with the work and how you might choose to (re)distribute it. So in that sense, it's sort of impossible to completely separate "legal issues" from "ethical issues" when it comes to the practice of making art. Btw everyone should go read this piece thecatamites wrote in Arcade Review #3 about an RPGMaker community, where there was this sort of (sorry if I paraphrase wrong) unspoken practice of never actually interacting with the work as part of a passive “audience,” but always poking around in the RPGM file in order to recycle other people’s art and ideas. I think it's a good illustration of how ethics will always depend on your community, your space, your place in time, and what you are making.

 

It might be worth saying that I generally think people’s feelings are more important than intellectual, abstract ethical positions. Or I guess I’m saying that we shouldn’t always need a sound rhetorical argument to convince us that we shouldn’t do something. If we can’t always ask someone directly, then we should practice imagining how people will respond to things. Like, if someone doesn’t want their image used in something, I think that emotion should be enough to command any artist’s respect. They shouldn’t need some ethical justification for their emotional response, grounded in greek philosophy or something. I think empathy is just as useful of an artistic tool as the will to go out and find things in the world, remix them and make them new. I think that if an artist underestimates empathy, then the artist risks making shitty art.

 

I think the Appropriation game clyde made is good for exploring these issues because it brings up a lot of different layers of ownership that we don’t tend to take seriously (for whatever reason), taking it case by case. The examples in this game are pretty banal/impersonal (picture of building, picture of hotel rug). One thing I would like to see Appropriation deal with is the issue of asking for permission. The first time I wanted to say “It’s not OK” is when I got to the image of the cartoon with the goatee, but I thought, “If I knew who drew this I would just ask.” I think the game has a lot of potential, and it could be a lot more interesting if it considered the different categories of “usage, reference, and commentary” that SBM mentioned and maybe deal with plagiarism, satire, and others as well. I kind of like the matter-of-fact non-subtlety of the Q&A format, but it would also be interesting to consider all the different ways the question might be phrased, right? How much control the player has over interpreting the question. When you see the word “OK,” yeah, maybe it’s ethically ok, but maybe it makes for lazy art.

 

I'm definately going to put an instance of a well-know character in the Appropriation game and then include a piece of fan-art of that character. It's so weird to me that someone would think that the person who made the fan-art is harmed more than the commercial entity that paid for the character to be developed and disseminated.

 

I don’t think it’s about who's harmed more; it’s about who has more to lose. Human vs. monolithic entity. I’m making my own assumptions here, but.......it’s true that a human originally drew sonic, but that person has more cultural cache and capital than the fan artist. And then more humans designed, rendered, and animated sonic for other iterations, then more humans later drew different versions of sonic with the understanding that many different versions had already been drawn and would continue to be drawn for other media. I think its easier to identify the source of the fan art than it is the source of whatever image I tend to associate with the word sonic. 

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I am always anxious about uploading pictures to the internet and am really picky about what goes up when other people want to tag me in something. I like to have a lot of control over my own image, and I think a lot of other people are like that too! I think this is why people seem to be reacting most strongly to the hypothetical of taking someone’s personal image or likeness and using it without their permission. I also think a lot of the concerns are with this idea of appropriating the image of non-public figures because that feels like more of an invasion than using the image of a politician or celebrity, who has already to an extent come to terms with their image being part of a public ecosystem. Images are really powerful in modern culture, and the culture has a lot of anxiety over them, and if you’re going to make art in order to interrogate or remix the image, I think it’s important to weigh the concerns of the subject heavily against the desire to make art.

 

I'm glad you heard that NPR story. When I heard that story there was what seemed to be intended as a second half. 

 

Here is the original story.

 

I like thecatamites’ point about how anything that makes you consider “legal issues” naturally affects your relationship with the work and how you might choose to (re)distribute it. So in that sense, it's sort of impossible to completely separate "legal issues" from "ethical issues" when it comes to the practice of making art.

 

I don't understand the connection you are making in the above statement.

 

Btw everyone should go read this piece thecatamites wrote in Arcade Review #3 about an RPGMaker community, where there was this sort of (sorry if I paraphrase wrong) unspoken practice of never actually interacting with the work as part of a passive “audience,” but always poking around in the RPGM file in order to recycle other people’s art and ideas. I think it's a good illustration of how ethics will always depend on your community, your space, your place in time, and what you are making.

 

That piece talks also mentions how there were common practices that were not discussed because individuals in the community felt their rights were being violated; assumably permission was difficult to gain, so people just ripped stuff off without asking (and I don't think it's hard to imagine that the community was better because of this stealing).  

A thing of value mentioned in that article is dependent on the willing ignorance of artist's rights to images of their own creation and disingenious silence that the author seems to rationalize by thinking of their own perspective on the issue as the cultural norm. It's a great example of what we are talking about here. 

 

It might be worth saying that I generally think people’s feelings are more important than intellectual, abstract ethical positions. Or I guess I’m saying that we shouldn’t always need a sound rhetorical argument to convince us that we shouldn’t do something.

 

At the same time, I imagine that you don't think we shouldn't always default to a person's feelings. 

 

Something that I don't feel is being acknowledged enough in this thread is that this isn't just a matter of artists using information in ways that make other people unhappy; it's also a matter of people claiming that they have rights to stop artists from using that material. I'm not claiming that it should always go one way or the other, I just want to get people to start acknowledging that requiring permission and consensus before a move can slow things down so drastically that the art might not happen. I'm not saying that the value of creating the art, the resulting work, and the reception is of greater importance than someone's feelings or the rights they believe they have. But I will say that these two sides are often mutually exclusive and we should look at what we are losing before defaulting to putting more importance on someone's feelings. My concern with your evaluation of people's feelings over intellectual, abstract ethical positions and sound rhetorical arguments is this: Often, what two parties want to happen is mutually exclusive.  If we aren't using intellectual, abstract ethical positions and sound rhetorical arguments, then we are using something else to figure out who gets their way and it might not be as ethical of a method.

 

If we can’t always ask someone directly, then we should practice imagining how people will respond to things. Like, if someone doesn’t want their image used in something, I think that emotion should be enough to command any artist’s respect. They shouldn’t need some ethical justification for their emotional response, grounded in greek philosophy or something. I think empathy is just as useful of an artistic tool as the will to go out and find things in the world, remix them and make them new. I think that if an artist underestimates empathy, then the artist risks making shitty art.

 

Again, often we are choosing between two parties. I think your premise is that people own their own image. I don't agree with that, but for the sake of argument I'll choose a more mild example. Someone might not want an image of their graffiti used in something, should that emotion be enough to command any artist's respect? If we require them to provide a convincing argument on why we shouldn't be able to use an image of their grafitti, are we underestimating empathy and risking making *shitty aggressive art? 

*I don't like the idea of using "shitty" here because it is way too ambigious of a concept for this argument. There is a lot of shitty art I like. There is also a lot of aggressive art that I like. Here is an example of something I like that is both aggressive and shitty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=320&v=m1wkfJY3AZM

 

I think the Appropriation game clyde made is good for exploring these issues because it brings up a lot of different layers of ownership that we don’t tend to take seriously (for whatever reason), taking it case by case. The examples in this game are pretty banal/impersonal (picture of building, picture of hotel rug). One thing I would like to see Appropriation deal with is the issue of asking for permission. The first time I wanted to say “It’s not OK” is when I got to the image of the cartoon with the goatee, but I thought, “If I knew who drew this I would just ask.” I think the game has a lot of potential, and it could be a lot more interesting if it considered the different categories of “usage, reference, and commentary” that SBM mentioned and maybe deal with plagiarism, satire, and others as well. I kind of like the matter-of-fact non-subtlety of the Q&A format, but it would also be interesting to consider all the different ways the question might be phrased, right? How much control the player has over interpreting the question. When you see the word “OK,” yeah, maybe it’s ethically ok, but maybe it makes for lazy art.

 

I'm happy to hear that you are interested and I'm excited to consider your suggestions. Ideally what the game would be able to do would be to survey the player on why something is OK or not OK. But not only does this get technically complex, but it also would change the motivation of answering. In the current format, the player are asking themselves why it is OK or not Ok and what it is Ok or not OK for. Prompting these questions for someone so that they can consider their own views for the first time on things they assumed were already obvious is worthwhile in itself. Maybe Pippin Barr will make a better version*

*It's a loose conection, but I say it because I really like Leaderboarder which I think has a similar feel).

 

 

I don’t think it’s about who's harmed more; it’s about who has more to lose. Human vs. monolithic entity. I’m making my own assumptions here, but.......it’s true that a human originally drew sonic, but that person has more cultural cache and capital than the fan artist. And then more humans designed, rendered, and animated sonic for other iterations, then more humans later drew different versions of sonic with the understanding that many different versions had already been drawn and would continue to be drawn for other media. I think its easier to identify the source of the fan art than it is the source of whatever image I tend to associate with the word sonic. 

 

I don't understand what you are saying. Who is losing what? 

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I think that if you're making something you're not charging for, or getting paid for, the lines are a little blurrier, also there's a lot more content to use that is designated free for non commercial use.

However I do find it interesting that It seems like you feel almost opposite from the way I do about this topic. I read this whole thread so far, and I'm still confused on what your actual stance is. So I'll just say what my opinions on the subject are and see if I can better understand you.

 

I see that the examples that you seem to be using are good examples of over reaches of copyright law. I think it's pretty easy to find examples of copyright law that are really ridiculous, and copyright law probably needs a makeover for our current digital age. However I seem to remember that you were more interested in focusing on the ethical aspects of using other artist's work and personal images as opposed to legal.

 

I have also seen you post examples where you say things like, I'm not going to contact the developer that made this program, or the camera manufacturer to get permission. You don't need permission for things like that. For many tools and resources like that, you've already paid for permission to use the computer, or the camera, or the software. This is definitely the case for a program like Photoshop. A program like Gimp though, has been made free. It's kind of an open source tool, and when you use it, you inherently have permission to make things that are your sole property without cost. A bunch of people who know how to make a program like Gimp and would like to use a program like Gimp have worked together to make a tool they need. One person by themselves would spend a lifetime making a Photoshop alternative. However a group of people working together spend less time, get more product, and experience. They have decided it is worth their time. In my mind that's what this whole argument boils down to. The worth of time.

 

Let's say I need something for a project I'm working on, like a font. Sure I suppose it's possible that I could look up some tutorials and make my own font. It doesn't seem worth the time I've put aside to work on this project to make my own font. Someone else decided used their time to make fonts, so now I don't have to. When that artist made their font they may have decided that the distribution, page hit, or experience is enough for the time they spent creating the font. It's also possible that the artist evaluated the time they spent working on that font to be worth money in all uses, or maybe some uses.

 

Let's say you see a font you'd like to use to say, embedd in a website, and the artist that made the font has specifically written that they do not allow that for free. What you are doing is either seeing, what this person has said their time is worth, and decided that you know better what their time is worth than they do, and their time is worth nothing. Or you have decided that you want the font and even spending a couple minutes figuring out what they think their time is worth, is not even worth your time. Ethically, I'd say that means your actions in this hypothetical situation prove that the product that resulted from that time spent is worth using, but the product is worth nothing to you. That, doesn't even make sense. Those two things are contradictory.

 

One other scenario is that someone clearly uses something like a Creative Commons Attribution licence. They'll let you use their product for free, but they just want credit. The result is the same.

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Thanks for posting illuminatedspace. I don't really have anything to say about most of your post, but there is one place I can make a clarification:

 

Let's say you see a font you'd like to use to say, embedd in a website, and the artist that made the font has specifically written that they do not allow that for free. What you are doing is either seeing, what this person has said their time is worth, and decided that you know better what their time is worth than they do, and their time is worth nothing. Or you have decided that you want the font and even spending a couple minutes figuring out what they think their time is worth, is not even worth your time. Ethically, I'd say that means your actions in this hypothetical situation prove that the product that resulted from that time spent is worth using, but the product is worth nothing to you. That, doesn't even make sense. Those two things are contradictory.

 

In this case, I would feel that the product would be worth using, but that it would be not worth what they are asking for in exchange (or even worth caring what they are asking for in exchange). I don't see any contradiction there. If I'm putting a jig-saw puzzle together and the piece that fits is in my hand, I'd like to just put the piece in without paying $50 in compensation or even looking at its licensing restrictions to see that they want $50 for it (or finding out that they claim I can't sell the puzzle because I used the piece).

 

----------------------------------------------------------

 

 

I thought this was rather relevant to the discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson

 

375px-Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg

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I haven't had much time to dive back into this much, but I think you're doing a disservice to the legitimate desire to charge for licences. Programs take a ton of time to make and refine to the point that they could be sold for a person to use indefinitely. Fonts are significant undertakings to make the individual characters look right and then align them nicely on a screen. The point of charging for them is largely for real commercial use, for studios or productions that have a budget to allocate to these things. There is a practical murkiness when this comes to non commercial people who just want to make a thing for themselves, but ethically it's a simple situation that the owner of a thing has decided what they want the conditions for use to be.

 

Fonts are not a puzzle piece. By calling them a puzzle piece you equate them to a larger expanse of something that you've already rightfully obtained, being withheld from you needlessly. A font you get online is someone's work that you want to take and use. That's more akin to taking the entire puzzle from the shop, because they have a whole warehouse full of them anyway where other people can pay the proper price, and then hanging it in your gallery without even considering crediting the puzzle maker as the artist.

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Thanks for posting illuminatedspace. I don't really have anything to say about most of your post, but there is one place I can make a clarification:

 

 

In this case, I would feel that the product would be worth using, but that it would be not worth what they are asking for in exchange (or even worth caring what they are asking for in exchange). I don't see any contradiction there. If I'm putting a jig-saw puzzle together and the piece that fits is in my hand, I'd like to just put the piece in without paying $50 in compensation or even looking at its licensing restrictions to see that they want $50 for it (or finding out that they claim I can't sell the puzzle because I used the piece.

 

Then you are deciding that another human being's time is not worth anything to you.

It seems like you're saying "I'm just not willing to compensate them, or even find out if they'd like to be compensated or credited."

If the product the artist has made is worth using, then it's worth something to you. If those two values don't add up then you can find a different piece to use.

 

If you're making dinner and you need salt, you can't just walk from your house and until you find any salt and say, "Well I don't know if this is a free sample or it cost something, or belongs to someone else. I want to use this now in my dinner."

It's just conditional uses, instead of absolute uses.

The ingredient is someone's time and built up skills, as opposed to tomatoes and basil.

The ethics are the same as paying for items at the grocery store, it's just easier and less risky to take the font and not bother.

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I think part of my frustration is that there are no online spaces where the expectation is that everyone can use anyone else's stuff for commercial or non-commercial derivative works. Or that even when that expectation is held by most, there is no legal backing. Think of something as fluid as conversation. There might be a tinge of annoyance when someone repeats an idea or phrase that you initially shared when it's not credited to you, but no one is calling for full citations of where all the things people are saying come from. I assume that we can all see how that would stifle the conversation. Though some folks may be having conversations for commercial purposes, their particular capitalist needs don't trump the freedom to converse and share ideas freely and without credit. That is!what's going on with all images, sounds, characters, stories, games, and now even jokes are being removed from the Commons into the land of profits and property rights.

Let's consider an example of how sharing spaces cannot exist free of the rules put in place by profit-motive in the current paradigm:

At openClipArt.org it first seems like this is a place where things can freely be ripped-off and riffed-on, but then when you examine it closely you find out that much of it is derivative (a.k.a. unlicensed) work. Turns out that tracing something in vector-graphics does not remove the property-rights from the owner. And let's suppose for a moment that it did: this well is so easily poisoned that someone like myself who just wants to grab a puzzle-piece, still can't because I would have to check to see if this work was original work by the person who uploaded it (because one person may be uploading non-original work). It gets worse. Suppose someone uploads their original work and claims that they surrender all rights to it; they can't. It's not legal to surrender intellectual property rights. So here we have a rare place where imagework is supposedly freely shared, but in reality it's just another place where the rules of capitalist intellectual property rights need to be considered constantly.

You folks have everywhere on the internet to display and charge for your creative works while I have no where that I can comfortably share images, sounds, and written works with others without having to keep it on the down-low until some profit-motive decides to sue or harass.

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I'm struggling to see the parallel between conversation and people's works. I see conversation as important but not something that I have 'created' as such, it's a something I take part in but that's different. I feel like equating conversation and created works is substantially devaluing the work, which isn't to say that conversation is not valuable just that it's something that exists in a very different realm.

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I'm struggling to see the parallel between conversation and people's works. I see conversation as important but not something that I have 'created' as such, it's a something I take part in but that's different. I feel like equating conversation and created works is substantially devaluing the work, which isn't to say that conversation is not valuable just that it's something that exists in a very different realm.

Now I'm starting to understand the problem.

I'm not sure if I need to do a better job of communicating what I find most valuable about art (things I find valuable about conversation), or if I should concentrate on finding folks who make it for the same reasons that I do. I probably need to do both.

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The Gamers With Jobs podcast (episode 451 at 55minutes) had a discussion about the ethics of publishing streams of games where one player dominates another competitively. The question is whether or not permission from other players is necessary.

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