Fwd: Parallel Realities Games have non-free content

[Matthew Johnson]

On Tue Aug 26 10:06, Guus Sliepen wrote:
> 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.

This is not correct. Without a grant of some sort of copyright licence,
the work is not in the public domain, it is all rights reserved, so we
have no permission to distribute (my previous email might have been
badly phrased, sorry).

> It is perfectly OK to use music and sounds from the Public Domain in
> another programp and to distribute it.

This is certainly true, but see above. There needs to be some
grant/statement from the author that this is the case, it cannot be
assumed. (In fact, it is unclear whether is many jurisdictions you _can_
place works in the public domain or even that such a concept exists.
This is why we prefer authors to make an explicit equivelant grant such
as the expat licence).

> 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.

Ah, this is, in that case, fine for non-free. 

> 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 unsure as to the copyrightable status of names. Trademarkable,
possibly. IANAL either.

> > 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.

Fair enough, although they usually spot things like that which aren't
mentioned at all.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Johnson
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