pouët.net

This topic goes to category of "mainly non-lawyers discussing about law" but anyway..

So very few demoparties / related sites give any sort of "contractual clauses" how productions can be distributed or used. The unwritten rule, to me, seems to be that distribution for non-commercial purposes is OK. However, it's problematic that it's not actually defined like that. Hence this current convention creates unnecessary legal gray area around what people could consider fair use of demoscene productions and other related materials.

I would love to see that demoparties / related sites would start to take this potential issue into consideration by being more explicit about how/where/who can use demoscene contents. For example just adding something like this to compo rules would help the situation a lot: "By submitting entry to the compo, you agree to license the entry using a Creative Commons license. If not mentioned otherwise, the license will be CC BY-NC-SA 4.0."

Any thoughts on the matter? Is my tinfoil hat squeezing too tightly?

I agree with you waffle but isn't "fair use" an American legal term that doesn't exist in many other countries? I know it doesn't in mine and in my understanding it has to do with the use of non-freely distributable materials for quotes and in the news and such. The CC license fixes this. Sorry if I'm bitching about semantics.

A CC license will take care of the cases of "I'm now a big artist and I want to sell my demoscene stuff to a big company for their exclusive use." Then the organizers can say "No, you agreed to this license back in the day."

Yes, fair use is US term. Europe is a mixed bag of very varying copyright and "right to cite/use" laws which makes understanding how demoscene productions can be used even more difficult.

Given the "mainly non-lawyers discussing about law" condition:

You don't need a specific license if you have the copyright holders permission to do something.
If the participant knows that the compo will be livestreamed and the entries will be made available for download then they give their permission implicitly by participating and if they don't like it they can just decide to not participate.

The act of making the work publicly available is done by the artist when the production is submitted to the compo crew. That the organizers will redistribute it is already known, just like you know that youtube will make a video available if you upload it to them.

Sure, if you want your ass covered as an organizer you can require a written permission from each contributor to stream and host the production, but there is no real need to enforce a specific license.
It is (or at least should be) sufficient to just write the condition in the party rules.

Not all distribution is commercial use, and not all commercial use is distribution.

The copyright act defines five areas:
- reproduction
- derivatives
- distribution
- performance
- and display

When entering a party you only give consent to the third, which is essentially copying it to scene.org for free download. You're still not giving away your rights to control stuff like remixes or playing on radio.

I would be very sad about forced licensing.

What Gargaj wrote. Also has this ever been a real problem in the past? Have sceners actually turned around and, say, asked scene.org to remove their prods because they're rock stars now? And even if, was it bad enough to warrant new rules?

Personally I'm a huge fan of staying blissfully ignorant of legal stuff unless there's an actual problem to be solved.

Lots of music releases have been removed from scene.org due to artists signing with record labels.

What Gargaj and Dojoe said. On the other hand, we're currently entertaining the idea to include terms with productions that prohibit broadcasting especially via Youtube - would be interesting to have some model case proceedings, and to sue the heck out of Youtube for their rabble repeatedly breaching contracts. We're not sure yet if we even want that. However it sounds funny as a project. Dekadence's terms look like a good start, we're on something similar.

U.S. law (Section 230) currently treats them as a platform, not a publisher, meaning they're not responsible for the content they host - this is currently a rather hot button issue right now (not in terms of copyright but e.g. antivax content on Youtube or Facebook), so it's possible the legislation may get amended in the not-so-far future.

Definitely not "lots". I faintly remember maybe 2-3 cases, and those were netlabel stuff, not compo releases.

Obviously, you also give (implied) consent for display at the party.

Isn't displaying at the party a private setting? Depending on local laws you can put some movies on the bigscreen without getting into trouble.

I don't think anyone have to worry about the legal issue of showing the compo, streaming it and directly distributing the entries. It is implied when entering the compo that this will happen.
But that doesn't mean that others can host it on other platforms, that is where a license comes in handy.

But if a party enforces a specific license then I can't put my own license in it that requires that any video capture must be done from real hardware to prevent people from making recordings on buggy emulators.

One of those cases was the entire NOISE catalogue with hundreds of releases, thus "lots". It's a fair point that few of them were released at demo parties, and one could (and did) argue that net labels aren't part of the demo scene anyway. The lines were blurrier back then, with traces of the old "scene" that was less defined and encompassed pretty much anything you could do with a computer. Either way I don't mean this as an argument for or against implicit licensing, if such a thing even holds up in court, I just wanted to point out that there have indeed been cases where the lack of a clear licence has caused headache.

Aren't most parties public events that anyone can attend by buying a ticket?

The only thing that I'd suggest parties to adopt is something among the lines of "You grant a non-revokable right to [party organizing] and [demoscene archival sites] to distribute your entry", which I think covers the most reasonable narrow case. Every other right should remain with the creator.

Personally I release my works under opensource licenses, but I don't think parties should enforce that. If you are worried about how your work is used and distributed, put a license on it.

If you are worried about being allowed or not to download and reuse demoscene prods, ask the authors, until they understand the problem and start putting a license on what they release.

But I don't see why demoparties should be involved here. Unless they are themselves in the second case?

The CC license suggestion was a conversation starter. I don't necessarily want to see any particular licensing models forced on anybody.

I'd prefer that demoparties would adopt semi-standardized boilerplate clauses that would enable a baseline for production distribution and future use in a manner that doesn't fall to gray areas. Most important point being that scene.org archival is ensured. Secondary point is then whether scene radioshows, demoshows at parties etc can use the productions without asking for permissions.

Some questions where I'd like to have a more definite answer via clauses/licensing:
* Can the prod be archived to scene.org or other sites?
* Can the prod be added to YouTube or other sites?
* Can the prod be used/played at other demoparties or events?
* Can the prod be adapted/remixed?

Asking permission is nice and very much preferred but it's another deal trying to reach some pseudonym that has been inactive for a while now. :)

I think having CC-BY-NC-ND as a default demoparty license if not specified otherwise might work better than CC-BY-NC-SA, as it essentially allows people to still spread the demo but not modify them or make a profit. The CC licenses have the advantage that they have easy-to-understand descriptions compared to typical open-source licenses. Of course people should still be able to choose a different license, but I think BY-NC-ND is probably as restrictive as it can get while still giving demoparties/scene.org an obvious permission to spread the entries afterwards. Of course people can still choose a different license that is less restrictive.

Not sure about the -NC- part though. I mean, we pay to attend demoparties, and one of the main reasons for people to attend demoparties (among many other things of course) is enjoying demos on the bigscreen. With enough ill will that might be construed as commercial use.

The problem is while NC sounds great at first blush (ain't no megacorp makin' money from my blood, sweat and tears!), the definition of what constitutes commercial use is anything but clear, and you may end up excluding uses you actually support. Courts have already been found to choose a very dim interpretation of "commercial use", plus it's inherently incompatible with most open-source licenses.

* Aside: It gets even worse in the open hardware territory. Your PCB manufacturer is making money by fabbing the CC-BY-NC-SA design you found on GitHub for you, so good luck etching those by yourself.

I mostly see it as a "legally safe" backup option in case people don't want to spend any thoughts on it, and it should by no means be what people actually end up choosing consciously. :)
It should of course also be kept in mind that even though you grant a license, it doesn't mean that you cannot grant an exception to some users*, one of which could be the demoparty itself - if you upload something to the demoparty intranet, you obviously want it to be seen on the bigscreen, no matter if it's considered to be commercial or not. I'm rather sure that if someone was so crazy to release something under a CC-NC license at a demoparty and then tried to sue the demoparty for being a commercial event would be dismissed by the courts.

(*e.g. all by music is CC-BY-NC-SA and I regularly hand out exceptions for people to use the music in their games, which means that this specific use of my music is not under the CC license)

... with monetization?

I have successfully gotten one of my intros removed from Youtube using their copyright claim form. In general I try not to care/worry too much, but this was such a bad rip it simply couldn't pass, and trying to reason with the uploader proved pointless.

Note that even without any explicit license by submitting an entry you implicitly grant the competition organizers the following rights (standard demoparty setting assumed):

*present the entry to the local audience on the big screen

*present the entry to the public in case of video stream / recordings (as announced / known in advance)

*upload to scene.org and local website for public distribution, thus allowing everyone to download and replay freely as long as no modification or monetarization is applied

*it is likely to appear on csdb, pouet, demozoo etc.

The most critical part is any kind of video footage apart from big screen live audience recordings: Is it just unmodified distribution (it basically still looks exactly the same) or is it a potentially undesirable modification (not a binary/realtime prod anymore, image compression or timing artefacts, messed up reproduction due to drive for hardware issues, other issues depending on the platform or format used for redistribution).
Same applies for running via emulator, or spreading as part of a package primarily promoting replaying in emulated form.

Adaption/remixing/etc. is a totally different thing, basically one could assume that it is generally not allowed unless explicitly stated otherwise, but then there is this citation/artwork thing which turns it upside down, ending up in a huge gray area.

In general, copyright notices that no one reads/expects are mostly useless, thus the current descriptions major parties give about using your submissions combined with common sense while presenting, distributing, performing or reusing other peoples work should apply.