Bug#501508: openarena-data: openarena contains materials from non-free sources

[Mike Swanson]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Steve Cotton
<steve0001 at s.cotton.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Wikipedia page for the non-Doom character:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsien-Ko
>
> Kyonshi (OpenArena) and Hsien-Ko (Darkstalkers) are Jiang Shi or
> Chinese vampires.  There's an entire genre of horror monsters that
> look like that.

The Wikipedia article you linked to says that it's a very specific
character of a very specific copyrighted series.  Whether it is its
own genre or not is not at debate, but the copyright violation should
be clear.  It'd be fine for a completely original character to appear
in OA, but not a blatent ripoff of a copyrighted one.

> I don't see a closer similarity in the characters to Darkstalkers
> and Doom than a generic vampire and space marine.

What exactly is a "generic space marine"?  They don't exist in real
life (yet), so the only way to display one is in fantasy (including
games).  It's not exactly hard to take a look at the Doom title screen
and the OpenArena character and see that the OA character is obviously
based on the former: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Doom-1-.gif
Or even the Quake III Arena character "Doom":
http://www.freewebs.com/fatmanq3/doom.jpg

> PS - Given this is a copyright violation report, I'd assumed that
> the clip on YouTube would be an official trailer, but it doesn't
> look to be so.

Yes, I considered that when submitting the initial report.  You might
argue "fair use" as it's a short clip plus the uploader (leilei, same
as the OpenArena maintainer in fact) giving his comments about it
("kicks hiney").  Besides this, it would be a youtube.com issue and
not a Debian issue... (I know it's a lame excuse, but really it was
the video that made me notice the identical character as in OA)