EvilDragon said:
If somebody writes "You can use the sourcecode and do what you want with it, simply send me an eMail if you do. Thanks
" what license do you need?
The dev told you what he wants, and that's it
So is it a licence or not. If you don't put a licence on your games. how can you avoid that companies licence your work and make money on your sweat.
Simple: Put in your readme what's allowed to do with your work or not. It's as legal as any license.
And it's up to the devs if they put it in there.
According to most laws worldwide, if there's NOTHING in the readme, you can't use it for your own stuff. If you want, you need to contact the dev. Which is also fine.
From my understanding I think there are some cases where you are not completely in your right, or at least borderline, EvilDragon.
If you follow the
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.
Berne Convention stipulates 3 core principles on copyrights. the
2nd principle of Bern convention is the "automatic protection"/of the Author by a copyright, called
'automatic copyright'. That means theoretically that when you only write your name in the game, you are copyrighted and the game is proprietary game. So all games created with that are the automatic property of the author who is also automatically protected by the International Bern convention. So Your games with only the name are theoretically protected and restrict some rights/liberties for the others: basically the 4 core liberties edited by the FSF For software. I have to send you an email to know what to do with the game. On that point you're right and you know that better than I know. Now all of that is basic international and international law, but Bern convention allows some flexibility from nation to nation, or even between states of one nation. that flexibility allow some very unfair but legal things. And In practice you can also licence the work of the others.
First point - Automatic copyright is Not Fool-Proof in all countries.
Check the web for 'Automatic Copyright'. That's very explicit, especially in US. Even more if you add, "do what you want with the game" (as you told me the last time), theoretically you allow everybody to do "what [they] want with [your] game, including licencing your original work. Isn't it? i was really surprised about what you told me and I decided to provoke you a little bit by asking you if we have to be careful or not of what we write on a licence text. It was my question the last time. apparently in a reply you told me that's enough. can you please confirm or infirm that first point as you publish software and thus experience those things more than us.
Second point - a work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright,
and different countries impose different level of standard. Bern convention comes from the French law rights 100 years ago, where the level is restrictive. But the levels of originality imposed between the original work and another one to obtain a copyright protection are not the same in USA, japan, korea ... and especially china. not all US programers know that US only joined recently the Bern convention and modify their system. But they still have traditionally a really flexible copyright law with quite high levels of originality to justify a copyright. That's the reason why in this country all things are clearly TM, ®, CC everywhere with really long texts, approvals, restrictions in the text ....and that's the reason why they have lawyers in there companies. In China that's worst, no respect at all. in korea (country of Game Park Holding) the levels can be very low too. I don't know. Now for the games of that site, the main problem can simply come from that.
A simple example is the game
Animatch v1.2 that is a transpose of commercial games but especially
seems to be just a small improvement of the gp2x game
tilematch.
If it is based on the same code, Is the difference enough to say that's a different game? probably not everywhere in the world if both are based on an Automatic Copyright. If not for some national rules, The automatic copyright of Animatch is probably not possible, valid, full proof or protective enough in several countries. With reference to Tilematch, somebody could thus use Animatch and pass the threshold of improvement of a less restrictive country and put a clear copyright stipulating that people must buy the game to play. The new owner of the game would be protected by Bern convention and Animatch and the poor first dev could be out of law in this archive or in particular countries. I don't know about Korean law, but maybe its possible for GP holding to do that. Or others. Anyway, i am pretty sure that at least in China that's possible. Animatch is maybe not the best example, but everybody can easily understand the spirit. Tell us EvilDragon your experience on that second point as you are more involved in international software projects (Canada, UK, Turkey, Korea, Germany).
But anyway that's always good to know that, because you always have some limits on laws that can be broken, and having an indicator of the licence when you select a game is not only a way to improve selection of a game by licence type. It is I think also a way to give the possibility to anybody to think a minimum about the licence issue, without forcing him. licences seem to be an epidermic Taboo for some people here. But most gamers are not aware of the difficulties, diversity and implications of that issue (me the first as I know only some points), and I think that's a problem here. That is for this cited problem I started my OP with "I think there is a big problem in the GP2X archive, and this problem can have consequences for the community"). Why companies and institutions have highly well payed lawyers specialised in copyrights. In the artistic domain, the cousin of my wife is very well payed not only to protect the artistic companies and authors with which he works for, but also to find new opportunities on the back or sweat of the others, playing with evolution of local, national laws and even from other countries... you can easily understand what I mean if I transpose that to games that are made of codes, music, pictures, videos. I don't want to scare people. Most dev knows perfectly that I think as they as they learned that in dev schools. But some were maybe lazy or not interested by the topic at school. Maybe. Personally I was interested at Uni. but we were not a lot and it was not my topic so only during few hours. So not scaring them, but just a matter of being some aware of the licencing issues in this gaming community, for young like me with only a small University experience, But also for youngest that don't know anything on the topic. Education of the mass is always a good solution.
Adding a criteria of licence to select a game is the minimum. Education starts with that. But I repeat in any case I wanted to educate, convert or force somebody to use one licence in particular or promote any software church foundations. I used GPL as an example (apparently GPL is an epidermic example) because I can explain more easily something based on examples that I know (i.e. why I thought a new selection criteria would be good). But you would do exactly the same thing with your experience and your knowledge when you will give me a reply.
best regards EvilDragon
