Copyright Issue with PhantasyRPG.com

Post by **freim** » December 31st, 2005, 11:04 am

Graphics are Ã‚Â© their respective owners, or are licensed under the GNU GPL 
All rights reserved. A Division of GamersBrand Entertainment, LLC

I still find this innacurate and unsufficient. The material under GPL is also copyrighted. And how can they claim "All rights reserved" on everything?

I guess this just shows one of the loop holes of the GPL, and that it's not very suited for media.

Artis · Post by **Artis** » December 31st, 2005, 5:53 pm

frame wrote:
Code: Select all
Graphics are Ã‚Â© their respective owners, or are licensed under the GNU GPL 
All rights reserved. A Division of GamersBrand Entertainment, LLC
I still find this innacurate and unsufficient. The material under GPL is also copyrighted. And how can they claim "All rights reserved" on everything?

I guess this just shows one of the loop holes of the GPL, and that it's not very suited for media.

Not really, it shows that no one has bothered to do anything about it. IANAL, but seeing that the images are distributed as individualy, intermixed with non-GPLed images at least a list clarifying which are GPLed would be needed to comply with paragraph one of the GPL.

Post by **Jetrel** » December 31st, 2005, 9:14 pm

Darth Fool wrote:Hmm... I don't think it is particularly sad to make a portrait sized picture inspired by an icon. It is not like they just took the icon, rescaled it and then added detail. The direct copy of neo's shaman, however, is quite sad.

"Detail" is a poor choice of words, since that's precisely what they _didn't_ do.

They added no articulations (or new objects) to the costumes that were not already present in the sprites.

The point is that coming up with the costume is actually one of the more intimidating, but easiest, parts of drawing. It's easy to do a perfectly decent job, although it's hard to do an excellent job. It's a curve with a rather gentle entry to it.

What you've really got here, is an example of a bunch of teenagers who are on a power trip because they know a little bit of server-side scripting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't write a good part of the insides of their "game engine", and just stole it as well from somewhere else.

Post by **freim** » January 1st, 2006, 12:10 am

Artis wrote:Not really, it shows that no one has bothered to do anything about it. IANAL, but seeing that the images are distributed as individualy, intermixed with non-GPLed images at least a list clarifying which are GPLed would be needed to comply with paragraph one of the GPL.

Yes, they should do that.

What I refered to as a loop hole is how GPL media can be used in closed source web based programs.

Post by **irrevenant** » January 1st, 2006, 2:46 am

Jetryl wrote:"Detail" is a poor choice of words, since that's precisely what they _didn't_ do.
They added no articulations (or new objects) to the costumes that were not already present in the sprites.

The point though, is that they at least drew the pictures themselves (except for the shaman).

I agree the art is amateurish and lacks detail, but ultimately they've done nothing wrong (again, except for the shaman) in drawing inspiration from the Wesnoth sprites.

P.S. The Saurian's outfit is quite sophisticated - much more detailed than the sprite.

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » January 1st, 2006, 3:10 pm

Their Shaman is a disgrace, I am not pleased

Artis · Post by **Artis** » January 1st, 2006, 11:24 pm

frame wrote:What I refered to as a loop hole is how GPL media can be used in closed source web based programs.

I don't view that as a loophole, aggregation (the images aren't part of the game as such) has many usefull effects. I don't see how you could forbid it short of forbiding non-commercial use (that is if said game is commercial) and that would limit inclusion in distros.