Re: Proposed Guidelines Regarding Unauthorized Use of Copyrighted Assets
I have a couple questions about the guidelines that I didn't think about yesterday. The guidelines are great, but it seems they only account for clear cut violations. Here's where I'm confused.
A lot of older games, such as the GMA and Draconis titles, were created during a time where it was really hard to get your own assets, so they use stolen ones. A lot of these companies either aren't working on their games anymore or have gone completely out of business. It wouldn’t be feasible to expect them to strip their stolen assets and replace them with new ones, and considering those games have been around for almost 20 years it wouldn't make sense to remove them from the database either.
There are also games that have stolen assets strictly speaking, but they've been modified so heavily that it's hard to tell where they might have originally come from. This isn't an audio game, but Undertale is a perfect example and the only example I can come up with right now. There's a clip where a character says, "Hmm, that's a wonderful idea." This clip came from a 1960s McDonalds commercial, but it's been pitched up and another pitch layer was added to it to make it sound more demonic. Another example from the same game is the voice clip for Sans. This split second vocal sound was ripped strait out of a scene from Spongebob Square Pants. There's probably more sounds that are ripped from places as well, and I don't think the companies in charge of these commercials/shows would have just told Toby Fox that he could use those clips. In these cases though, I'm not sure if there's a law that allows this sort of thing within limits.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, how will you guys determine where the thin line between too far and not far enough is located? I guess the rule where you won't take action unless someone reports a game could cover most of this, but at the end of the day, if the content creators come knocking on our door with threats because a game we haven't accounted for has stolen assets, we're not in a position where we could claim ignorance, because sadly that's not how the law works. I'd say go all the way with this, but examples above considered it's not that simple. Maybe I'm thinking about this a bit too hard, but these are just issues that naturally come to mind for me.
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