I just want to state my agreement with Eradrain's and The Amethyst Dragon's comments here. I think that content creators have a right to determine the use and distribution of their work, and that requests like AD's should simply be respected as a matter of community ethics.
I did, however, want to comment on one point that came up in the discussion:
Mad.Hatter wrote...
I love AD and I love his publicly released work... However, something bugs me about his post at the beginning of the thread. He states that he uses the NWN Vault BECAUSE he doesn't want to pay for bandwidth. Fine. That means that the IGN Vault pays for his bandwidth usage...
Unless the Vault has clear usage terms (which I haven't looked at because I've simply respected AD's requests) preventing paying patrons from using hosted content then I'm not sure I should feel terrible about using AD's stuff.
Now, if AD hosted his haks on Filestube, 4shared, or as a Torrent I doubt anyone would blink twice about using the content...
To be safe, I would tell AD to host his own haks and ask his players to donate for the added bandwidth. Otherwise I think we can see another sort of entitlement: "I can make you pay for my hak hosting but you can't use my stuff." which, IMO, is just as bad as "You say I can't use your stuff, but I'm going to anyway."
The Vault does in fact have guidelines regarding these issues. Maximus and I wrote them together in an attempt to address the custom content controversy that arose a few years ago. Those guidelines can be found here:
Custom Content Authorship GuidelinesThe important issues are outlined in points 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8, and can be summarized as follows:
- Users of the NWVault are expected to respect the reasonable wishes expressed by authors regarding the use, distribution, and crediting of content that is linked to and/or hosted on it.
- The Vault does not restrict the kind of usage restrictions an author can place on their work. This recognizes the legitimacy of authors like Amethyst Dragon placing the kind of usage restrictions that he has on his submissions. It also recognizes that the presence of a submission on the Vault's servers is not necessarily a grant of permission for others to re-use that work against the author's stated wishes.
- When it comes to content that you've uploaded to the Vault, it may or may not decide to
enforce your request to have that content removed if someone else re-uploads it to the Vault. That is, essentially, a risk that you take when you use the Vault's servers and bandwidth to store and distribute your work.
- If you want to be able to
expect your usage restrictions to be
enforced by the Vault, then while you can
link to it from the Vault, you are expected to have
hosted the content in question on your own site.
Interestingly, it seems that IGN has adapted those guidelines to other communities than NWN's. The same guidelines can be found, for example, on IGN's WOW Vault
here.
As co-author of the guidelines, I think I can probably address questions about the policy if anyone has them.
Eradrain wrote...
Naturally that's very difficult/impossible to enforce, but decent human beings won't flaunt the artist's wishes.
Agreed, but just for the record, that should be "flout" rather than "flaunt."
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Modifié par AndarianTD, 05 octobre 2011 - 11:34 .
