Fwd: Parallel Realities Games have non-free content

[Guus Sliepen]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:27:45AM +0100, Matthew Johnson wrote:

> > blobandconquer's copyright file says:
> > All music and sound effects contained within this game are taken from various
> > freely accessible internet websites. In all cases this music and sound is
> > assumed to be placed within the public domain and therefore free to distribute.
> > [Parallel Realities] accepts no responsibility for audio contain herein that
> > was made freely available without the consent of the owner.  All character
> > names used within the game are copyright and/or trademarks of the respective
> > owners. They are not in any way associated with either Blob Wars: Blob and
> > Conquer or Parallel Realities.
> 
> I agree that this is not sufficient to assume a grant of copyright from
> the author and hence noone has the right to distribute.

You don't need a grant of copyright to distribute something, otherwise Debian
would not exist at all. It is perfectly OK to use music and sounds from the
Public Domain in another programp and to distribute it. However, it appears
that, for example, the music used in blobwars is not from the public domain,
but taken from modarchive.com, which states that all music they distribute is
free to use and to redistribute. That is not DFSG complaint, but OK for
non-free (so this is where I'll move the music to). The sounds are taken from
different sites which have similar licenses.

As for the character names, IANAL. I'll ask on debian-legal if it is OK to just
use some names from popular culture. 

> I'm very surprised it made it past the FTP masters.

When I adopted blobwars there was no mention of sound and music in the
copyright file IIRC, just that the game was GPLv2.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
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