Is Your Script a Part of a Compilation Without Your Permission?

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

@Tchos Dang I was never aware of that post. It never appeared my list/time-line/whatever and I have been subscribed to the scripting section for as long as we've been on this site. The annoying thing is it happens too often. Suffice to say I would have done my war dance back then had I known.

 

@Shadooow Looks like we'll have to agree to disagree. To me there is a world of difference between a single file and the whole of the scripting section of the vault. Yes they may contain the same content, but the big file removes all feedback from the process. As I haven't got the bandwidth to download it at present, I'll have to ask. Does it contain links to the pages where individual packages are hosted? If not I can't see anyone going to the trouble of telling me or anyone else what sucks about it. Conversely, it is going to take a really dedicated individual to seek out the relevant page to say what they like about any package. Add to this the low rate of feedback anyway...

 

As I seem to be the only person unhappy about this I have removed my request to have my stuff excised from the archive.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               

To my knowledge - note this comes from my recollection of a conversation with Rolo from a long time back (when he first started backing up the IGN Vault - the file you are referring to is an archive file that was created to safely backup all of the files that were on the original Vault. The compressed archives are stored in a location separately from the other data on the original Vault listing. As listings are ported over to the new vault, the listing is recreated - however, at some point it was decided to scrap the old Vault ranking system.

 

The archive was never, to my recollection, intended to be available for general download. It was solely intended to preserve files for latter upload and  later connection to the new listings. I'm not sure where or when that changed.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

Echoing some of the other sentiment here, my personal feeling is that if I make available a project where I have used someone else's code, I will try to credit any other authors as best I can. Usually, that's as simple as leaving in their comments and readme information. Sometimes that involves a link to some other site (like to a thread in this forum where someone posted something I used). To my way of thinking, that's a courtesy I would appreciate and I would do my best to reciprocate. That said, when I post something that someone else uses in his project, I understand that any acknowledgement is just a courtesy and not something I could require, even if I wanted to.

 

However, my understanding is that, from a legal standpoint, the material posted on IGN's NWN Vault can be republished without permission or acknowledgement of the earlier authors. It's not that any authors have given up their rights, it's that they have given others the same rights to publish the work when they made it available on the vault.

 

[...]You hereby grant, transfer and assign to Ziff Davis and its successors, assigns and licensees (collectively, “Licensee”) a fully-paid, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right and license to publish, distribute, reproduce, transmit, use, translate, display, perform, modify, revise, create derivative works of and archive the Material, in any form or media now known or hereafter developed (including without limitation in print, magnetic or electronic form), on any number of occasions in any form, and to sublicense third parties (including other users of the Service) to do any of the foregoing with further right of sublicense[...]

Which, with the slightly more relevant parts highlighted, reads something like

 

[...]You hereby grant, transfer and assign to Ziff Davis and its successors, assigns and licensees (collectively, “Licensee”) a fully-paid, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right and license to publish, distribute, reproduce, transmit, use, translate, display, perform, modify, revise, create derivative works of and archive the Material, in any form or media now known or hereafter developed (including without limitation in print, magnetic or electronic form), on any number of occasions in any form, and to sublicense third parties (including other users of the Service) to do any of the foregoing with further right of sublicense[...]

In other words, ZD and other users of the service (which is basically everyone who used IGN's Vault) can archive, modify, build on, etc. and republish the stuff that was posted on the Vault. That's partly why a different part of the agreement requires that the poster actually have permission to publish what he is posting; he can't just post any material because it will be republished.

 

BTW, I once asked Rolo about this (for a related matter) and his response was that, in essence, that provision (or one like) it is what allowed the creation of the new vault. That is, if the individuals who posted their stuff to the old Vault hadn't agreed to the old Vault's agreement, there would have been no way to create the new Vault.

 

Obviously, this isn't an arrangement with which everyone would be comfortable. People who want to allow more restricted access to their work would have to find a different way to make the material available. And, of course, deal with the difficulty of enforcement of any restrictions, which, IMO, as a practical matter, is a far more onerous task.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tchos]

               

However, my understanding is that, from a legal standpoint, the material posted on IGN's NWN Vault can be republished without permission or acknowledgement of the earlier authors. It's not that any authors have given up their rights, it's that they have given others the same rights to publish the work when they made it available on the vault.

In other words, ZD and other users of the service (which is basically everyone who used IGN's Vault) can archive, modify, build on, etc. and republish the stuff that was posted on the Vault. That's partly why a different part of the agreement requires that the poster actually have permission to publish what he is posting; he can't just post any material because it will be republished.

 

That's not what it says.  It says they can grant those rights to users, but they don't in fact do it.  They grant a much more limited subset of rights to the common users, which as I quoted earlier are explicitly enumerated as only that which is normally allowed for any other copyrighted work -- that is, users can make personal copies for themselves.  Not redistribute it without permission.

 

The reason you need to state that you have the right to post it is so that you are actually able to grant those rights to them.

 

The reason the new Vault is okay is because it was designated by Maximus as the "successor" to the old Vault.  Not because users have any right to redistribute the uploaded works.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

@Proleric As to removing my stuff from RoloVault (as opposed to NeverWinterVault) goes, I think it's an excellent idea. As I moved my (and some other people's) stuff across from the ign vault before the scraping had even started, it is only wasting space in RoloVault. Removing all my entries from RoloVault should save (IIRC) over 100 meg of space in there.

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

If people want to talk about the EULA or best practice on attribution, I suggest a separate thread, as neither of those issues are raised by the OP, and tend to muddy the water. Can we focus on practical outcomes to this specific issue?

 

@Tarot Redhand - Thanks for reconsidering. I do hope you'll also review your vote on the new vault.

 

As I see it, there's a major comment and a footnote here. The major comment is to say "thank you" loud and clear to everyone who worked so hard to port thousands of projects from IGN to the new vault. The footnote is that there's no practical way of doing that without error, so we need to be open to putting things right. I'm not sure that voting 1/10 reflects that balance (I don't mean that unkindly).

 

Obviously, when it's your work, it's important to you, but I'm sure you can understand that the migration wouldn't have happened at all if the team thought they had to ask permission case by case. The time and effort would simply be prohibitive.

 

Similarly, there are issues of scale when editing a 980Mb file, which I why I mentioned the possibility of taking it down (now no longer necessary - thanks for your understanding).

 

@Pstemarie - public access to Rolovault allowed many volunteers to work on migration without anyone spending too much time on admin. Sometimes it's better to be roughly right than exactly wrong. I don't know how / when the decision was made, but I'm thankful for it.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kamal_]

               As someone who actually has had his work taken from the IGN Vault and posted elsewhere without my permission, I can tell you that they most certainly do not have those rights. Actual lawyers were involved.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

As someone who actually has had his work taken from the IGN Vault and posted elsewhere without my permission, I can tell you that they most certainly do not have those rights. Actual lawyers were involved.

So your argument is that we should have allowed the vault to die, and not transfer anything to the new vault?

 

If not, how would you have done it, given the limited volunteer resource available?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tchos]

               

Kamal was a major player in helping to transfer things to the new Vault, so I strongly doubt he's making any argument against the new Vault.  I helped, too, and I'm not arguing against it either.  The new Vault is a good and valid successor, and its validity doesn't require claiming that any TOSes or EULAs are making authors grant rights that they don't make them grant.

 

If that was unclear, I'll rephrase -- The Vault is not at issue.  Migration from the old Vault to the new Vault does not require permission, because it is a successor to the old Vault.  What requires permission is any old user downloading something and deciding to upload it somewhere else, or putting it in a compilation, or other kinds of redistribution.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kamal_]

               

So your argument is that we should have allowed the vault to die, and not transfer anything to the new vault?

 

If not, how would you have done it, given the limited volunteer resource available?

As tchos pointed out, and Rolo himself will confirm, I was one of the main people involved in making the vault backup, using the scraping tool that was written and my bandwith to so we could grab everything as quickly as possible since we didnt know when it would totally disappear.


Rolo has a written  statement from Maximus that the new vault is the inheritor of the old vault. Tarot's position is entirely within his/her rights, and the vault admins do and have removed/altered things at authors request. I'd say "proper procedure" for something like this would be a thread in vault forums with the request to remove Tarot's content from the package. Vault admins would almost assuredly (I am not one and dont speak for them) oblige, as they have for other similar requests.


People can't just take stuff from the vault and post it willy nilly around the internet on other sites. That is the purpose of my statement you quoted. Rolo's letter from Maximus does pretty much give Vault 2.0 the same rights to content that was originally posted to IGN Vault that the IGN Vault had. I suppose someone really stubborn could actually try to test that in court, but that would be a pretty dumb and community damaging thing to do, particulalrly when vault admins have shown the willingness to work with authors on the matter. There are a number of long threads on the vault forums where anyone can see the vault admins working with authors who have concerns about the distribution of their work.


My apologies for any typos, I am on my mobile phone.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               

If that was unclear, I'll rephrase -- The Vault is not at issue.  Migration from the old Vault to the new Vault does not require permission, because it is a successor to the old Vault.  What requires permission is any old user downloading something and deciding to upload it somewhere else, or putting it in a compilation, or other kinds of redistribution.

 

One thing that seems to have been avoided in the discussion was the rights of the vault.  The vault has the right to grant public access to its submissions according to its policies.  The vault has the right to completely remove submissions if it does not wish to accommodate the terms of use the submitter put in place.  The submitter does not have the right for their submissions to be displayed on the vault.  Even the old vault would remove certain submissions based on its policy.  This is why beginning a discussion on rights maybe counterproductive if the offender is the party that grants public access.  The new vault has inherited the submissions of the old vault and has announced their new policy.

 

However, the new vault (following from the old) desires to be a place where the community is free to upload and distribute submissions.  In TR's case, the vault could legally take his request to not include his submission in a vault compilation as a request to completely remove all of these entries even from their own individual pages, as the terms of use TR wishes may be more restrictive than the vault wishes to accommodate. The vault certainly will not do things this way, but for the point of legality, no entry on the vault has an inherent right to be there.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

BTW I was serious about removing my stuff from RoloVault (as opposed to NeverwinterVault) if you need to save space sometime. Also I was in error when I said you'd save 100 MB of space- I did a rough quick tally and it's actually over 250 MB (no I am not bragging - it's just some of them use really big textures).

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

It says they can grant those rights to users, but they don't in fact do it.

On more careful reading, I think you are right. The paragraph I quoted says ZD and its successors (which sounds like it includes the neverwintervault) can do all of those things, and can sublicense others to do them, but nothing I have read says that they have done so.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               

Really, all of this legal talk is uncertain, unhelpful and unnecessary.

 

Everyone connected with the new vault has been more than ready to correct any oversights. Tarot Redhand is now content to let the project stand. So actually there is no dispute between the parties, and therefore no call whatsoever for any intimidating talk of lawyers.

 

The project in question is in no way presented as an original or derivative work. It just bundles the entire content of Rolovault in a different format. Regardless of any legal questions, it seems to me that this is within the spirit of migration, and it is open to change if anyone is unhappy. So where's the problem?

 

Surely, the paramount consideration is to attract, encourage and retain people who want to build with custom content. So, I'd like them to feel confident that they won't run into trouble if they download and use material from the new vault in line with the author's terms. That should be our big message, with a footnote that the handful of authors with special requirements will be catered for, too.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tchos]

               

Really, all of this legal talk is uncertain, unhelpful and unnecessary.

 

Everyone connected with the new vault has been more than ready to correct any oversights. Tarot Redhand is now content to let the project stand. So actually there is no dispute between the parties, and therefore no call whatsoever for any intimidating talk of lawyers.

 

I'm pretty sure Kamal only mentioned that lawyers had been involved in one of these cases to provide evidence in response to Ehye_khandee's challenge that only the word of a lawyer would convince him that authors have these rights.  I don't believe it was to threaten anyone.

 

I agree that for the most part, in the context of the Vault, discussion of rights is not necessary, but it's necessary when misinformation is allowed to spread unchecked.  In the larger world, this contributes to the exploitation of artists, musicians, and writers by industry and unethical businessmen thanks to people not understanding what rights they have, or misunderstanding the wording of contracts.