Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

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Fnord
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Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Fnord »

Hi

I was casually browsing steam, and its recommended queue when a game called Grand Strategy popped up. And something really felt a bit "off" when I noticed the screenshots. It's possible that my mind is playing tricks on me, but does the castles here not look terribly similar to those in Wesnoth?

Image

Down to the placement of the small windows under the top of the towers (seen on some towers). I'm not certain enough about this to want to go in and accuse someone, but could someone more familiar with Wesnoth take a closer look at this, and if it turns out that something shady is going on, get in touch with the devs of Wesnoth, so that they might take appropriate actions?

*edit*
Also, take a closer look at the first screenshot on the store page (the one with castles with two different looks to them). There's a tree in the central northern part of the northern island. Does it not look similar to the larger brighter trees on the right side of this screenshot?
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

The terrain on Grand Strategy looks like a clear copy-paste from Wesnoth 1.4.6
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Fnord
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Fnord »

Then I know I'm not crazy and just imagining things. I've not played Wesnoth for a few years now, but it looked so similar that I just could not help but notice it.

So this should probably be forwarded to someone on the devs, so they can send a take-down notice. As far as I know, Valve's system is pretty simple when it comes to this.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Tad_Carlucci »

License allows the use of the artwork. The violation would be if *they* tried to prevent you from using it in your games, as well.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Fnord »

Ah okay. Then I guess no harm was done, and this thread can be allowed to die.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Pentarctagon »

To add to that - all of Wesnoth art is licensed under either the GNU GPL or the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. So they are free to use Wesnoth's art, as long as they don't try to say that said art is under a different license.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by GunChleoc »

I can't find any licensing info on their site at all.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Elvish_Hunter »

I actually downloaded the Linux client from www.denizenseven.com and unpacked it. Without running it, I found a file called GrandStrategyClient-0.9.35-Release.jar inside of it; unpacking that one as well, I found a readme.txt with the following content:

Code: Select all

The SGX libgdx theme in the game is the work of Raymond Buckley (https://ray3k.wordpress.com/).

The screen layout is modified from JPlatformer by Stefan Hösemann.

A number of the icons are from the KDE Oxygen Icon set. (http://www.kde.org).

A few of the maps use images from the Battle for Wesnoth project. (https://www.wesnoth.org/).

The Wesnoth images use the following license:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Music is from:

{Song Title/Titles} by Twin Musicom (twinmusicom.org)
Notice that the developer states that our artwork is under the CC-BY 2.0 license... There are no mentions of GPL v2 or CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Andrettin »

Elvish_Hunter wrote: November 22nd, 2018, 9:21 pm I actually downloaded the Linux client from www.denizenseven.com and unpacked it. Without running it, I found a file called GrandStrategyClient-0.9.35-Release.jar inside of it; unpacking that one as well, I found a readme.txt with the following content:

Code: Select all

The SGX libgdx theme in the game is the work of Raymond Buckley (https://ray3k.wordpress.com/).

The screen layout is modified from JPlatformer by Stefan Hösemann.

A number of the icons are from the KDE Oxygen Icon set. (http://www.kde.org).

A few of the maps use images from the Battle for Wesnoth project. (https://www.wesnoth.org/).

The Wesnoth images use the following license:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Music is from:

{Song Title/Titles} by Twin Musicom (twinmusicom.org)
Notice that the developer states that our artwork is under the CC-BY 2.0 license... There are no mentions of GPL v2 or CC-BY-SA 4.0.
I guess they confused the two licenses? It seems like an honest mistake to me.
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josteph
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by josteph »

Creative Commons' version 4.0 licenses didn't exist when wesnoth 1.4.6 was released. I haven't looked but it's possible that back when 1.4.6 was released wesnoth did use a version 2.0 CC license. But it could have been either CC-BY 2.0 or CC-BY-SA 2.0, those two are not the same thing.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by doofus-01 »

josteph wrote: November 24th, 2018, 10:48 am I haven't looked but it's possible that back when 1.4.6 was released wesnoth did use a version 2.0 CC license. But it could have been either CC-BY 2.0 or CC-BY-SA 2.0, those two are not the same thing.
No, it was GPL, not CC of any sort. If it were CC, it would be CC BY-SA, not CC BY.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by Iris »

To clarify, Wesnoth has used the GNU GPL v2 exclusively (with the option to use a later version instead) for the entirety of its history until 1.13.x, and even now there’s only a few bits in mainline that are actually CC BY-SA.
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by shevegen »

I actually think it is pretty cool if others re-use artwork from wesnoth (while adhering to the licence format of course). It is a testimony to those who invested time into wesnoth prior to the release (in this case) at steam.

> So this should probably be forwarded to someone on the devs, so they can send a take-down notice.

I think this is a pretty rough advice as a first-try. First one ought to check whether they adhere to the licence; and then afterwards they should be contacted IF it were not to adhere; and only afterwards, say some days that are a reasonable time, follow up and inform steam.

It's not as if this has to happen like in the next 24 hours or something.

Anyway, as Elvish_Hunter pointed out, they attribute the source and give due credit. Perhaps it could be made more prominent but I think this is a detail rather than the big picture. I actually think it's pretty cool by that dude to use parts of wesnoth and give credit - that's great, isn't it?

After having played some add-ons, I sort of want to create a campaign too, one day (when I get to it ... although I will use ruby to autogenerate a LOT of things; and re-use old storylines from my old pen and paper RPG group possibly). I am pondering what to do since I am pretty sure I don't want to create a campaign that is like the main campaigns, but instead want to include aspects from other campaigns - unique abilities to pick from for heroes at the least (not sure about units, but heroes definitely); possibly an inventory system (hopefully at the least one inventory system will be officially supported in main wesnoth too, simply because so many add-ons make use of inventory system); a world-map travel variant like in oldschool computer RPG games too (one add-on had this... I forgot the name as I am terrible with names but it was where you could train some units, then travel with them, get ambushed on the way, or also chased by orc units and so forth, before you continue to the next scenario - it's a bit like a novel), and of course include things from my two favourite add-ons ... those arabian night variants ... anyway, I am getting off-topic here, but for cases like that it would be nice to create some sort of game that is based on wesnoth, but is still quite different. So being able to re-use artwork is good in such a case too.
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josteph
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Re: Potentially stolen artwork from Battle for Wesnoth in steam game

Post by josteph »

So someone should send the developers of that game an email and ask them to correct "CC-BY 2.0" to "GPL 2.0".
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