Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6341
Location: The land down under.
http://tasvideos.org/SiteLicense.htmlhttp://tasvideos.org/Nach/FairUse.html
You can contact them and state that you already uploaded your own videos to your own YouTube account and you don't want to miss out on the views or whatever.
Some listen, others don't. Oh well not the end of the world.
Mainly just care if they're a partnered YouTube account and monetizing off of your work and act like they're in the right.
(IT'S GREAT WHEN YOU BLEED OVER AN ENCODE FOR A PUBLICATION AND SOME SNOOZLE JUST COMES IN AND RAKES IN THE CASH.)
As a note: TASVideosChannel (us) Publishes your movies for a global community and we get absolutely nothing in return. Account's not even partnered or anything.
(someone else can explain this better)
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Hi, thanks for the reply. I want to make it clear that I I was just wondering because I was curious, not because I someone stole my TAS. I also have not posted any of my TAS' on TASVideos as there are already much more impressive TAS' for the same categories as I am still learning.
Also I read the link about fair use, and I believe that it is inaccurate in saying that commercial use has an effect on Fair Use. As far as I know this is not the case.
In other words, if someone reuploads my TAS, can I take it down for copyright infringement, or is it technically Nintendo's property still?
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer!
That being said:
Copyright is a rather complex and difficult subject, especially when dealing with works whose copyright has never been tested on court. Needless to say, this often varies from country to country and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
(As an example of how much this can vary, if you publish a work under "public domain", meaning that it has no copyright, it depends a lot on the jurisdiction whether that's enforceable or not, and whether the work actually does have copyright or not. In many, perhaps most, jurisdictions all published works are automatically copyrighted, even if the author claims otherwise. However, if tested in court, the court might decide that publishing under "public domain", while not legally valid, can still be interpreted as a very liberal usage license, and thus the author cannot retroactively sue somebody for copyright infringement. The court might interpret the "this is under public domain" as an implicit permission to use the work for free. But AFAIK this has never been tested in court anywhere, probably.)
As far as I know, whether a data file containing information about timed key-presses used in an emulator software falls under copyright has never been determined.
Arguments could be made in both directions. For example, if you design a sudoku puzzle, it falls under copyright. If you play a game of chess, the transcript of the moves does not. If you write a short story about a fictional cook making food, it falls under copyright. If you publish a food recipe, it does not. The difference is fuzzy and often complicated. Which one of those two categories does a timed key-press file fall under? Who knows.
As Spikestuff commented above, if you publish a TAS at tasvideos.org, you will be publishing it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. If TASes do indeed fall under copyright, that license becomes enforceable, and gives freedom to anybody to do pretty much anything they want with your TAS, as long as they attribute the original work to you. (In this case, the only situation where you can do anything about it is if somebody re-publishes the TAS without mentioning the original was made by you.)
As for whether the copyright owner of the game that's being TASed has any say in any of this, the answer is probably no. The key-press file contains zero material from the game itself (with the possible exception if said file contains some kind of savestate, which usually means a memory dump of the console, in which case it will probably contain material from the original game. As long as the file contains no savestates, you are probably in the clear.)
Of course this has the caveat that many companies are unscrupulous and eager to shut down anything related to their property, even if that thing contains absolutely nothing of it. These corporations have an army of lawyers, and they will often bully individual people by threatening them with lawsuits, even if they have no case.
As for a video recording of the game being played in the emulator, the owners of the game will have much more rights to it. They own the soundtrack, the sounds, and the graphics. They also own the rights to any derived works. They usually also have a lot of trademarks related to the game. Fair use laws vary enormously between jurisdictions, but in general an entire playthrough of a game, with no significant amount of other original content, may well not fall under them. A corporation can shut down a "let's play" of a video game if they so choose, and they probably have the law behind them.
As a note: TASVideosChannel (us) Publishes your movies for a global community and we get absolutely nothing in return. Account's not even partnered or anything.
(someone else can explain this better)
What happens if TVC becomes partner?
I believe that the income that it would have would be useful to improve the host and its connection, since sometimes the site and forum are inaccessible for a period of time during the day and sometimes it's annoying, and maybe giving gratifications to the publishers / judges / admins / emulator devs / authors or people who do big contributions to this community to keep it operate, but it's just an opinion as a normal user.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Evil_3D wrote:
What happens if TVC becomes partner?
With Google turning evil, this often comes with more hassles than it's worth for what we're doing. We'd do better having advertising on our site directly.
Evil_3D wrote:
I believe that the income that it would have would be useful to improve the host and its connection, since sometimes the site and forum are inaccessible for a period of time during the day and sometimes it's annoying, and maybe giving gratifications to the publishers / judges / admins / emulator devs / authors or people who do big contributions to this community to keep it operate, but it's just an opinion as a normal user.
We'd all love to raise some money to cover certain costs and maybe give certain people who put in time a little extra. It's hard to do though without possibly not rewarding certain contributors to the extent they should be.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Not wanting to disrespect the site, but I am not sure if that license means anything legally.
The point is, a lawyer could argue that it was impossible for us to generate the keypress files unless we had access to the ROM which contains their game. So, even if you could prove that the ROM was dumped completely legally, they could still argue the keypress file is a derivative work and you are not allowed to relicense it. Until a court decides on the matter, no legal conclusion can be reached.
And I am not sure about that Fair Use defense for the videos either. An encode of a run normally includes the whole story of the game, which can be copyrightable, and there can also be a song played during the run which is their property.
The reason we have not seen a lawsuit is just because nobody is making lots of money on this and we are doing free marketing for the game makers. If we were asking money to make the TASes available, you can be sure that Nintendo & co. would send their lawyers trying to get a bit of the cash.
The point is, a lawyer could argue that it was impossible for us to generate the keypress files unless we had access to the ROM which contains their game. So, even if you could prove that the ROM was dumped completely legally, they could still argue the keypress file is a derivative work and you are not allowed to relicense it.
I don't think that's how it works.
Microsoft Word is proprietary software, and Microsoft owns the copyrights to it. However, Microsoft has zero rights to any work that you create using that program. Just because you use a program to create some data of your own doesn't mean that the IP owner of the program has any rights to your data.
It's only when the data of the program itself is being copied that it becomes a copyright issue.
Sure, that's one possible defense. Things in law are hardly clearcut as you seem to think, though. The judicial system has many ways to punish people that try to be creative to circumvent the law.
Say that the law requires you to pay an engineer a given amount per year. Then you hire someone as an "analyst" and tells him/her to do everything an engineer will do and pay less. If after he/she leaves you get sued, it does not matter that they agreed to work as an analyst, if it is proven that the work done was that required of an engineer you have to pay what you had to pay an engineer anyway.
In a similar way, if what you are doing with their copyrighted program is generating files to instruct an emulator how to play it, it is still possible to argue that you are profiting from their intellectual property getting publicity to the site, it does not matter if you actually included parts of their program.
Like I said, it is not clear who is going to win, but that lawsuit would definitely not be frivolous.
Somehow I think the community is getting things wrong with respect to the law. There is no problem in disagreeing with the law or losing a lawsuit (at least as long you don't do something obviously wrong like killing someone). If people started arguing that what we are doing is digital archeology and the government is making our job illegal, that would be much more convincing.
One example that I think is similar is what's happening to academic publishing. Some years ago, the only way to publish a paper was to give copyright to the entire thing to the publisher. Even in the Internet age, you needed to publish in these prestigious journals to be promoted, so it did not stop.
The effect was that the government paid to transfer rights to the publisher, paid the salary of the researchers who made it and reviewed it, and paid the subscription fees that allowed other researchers to access it. And after it was published, you could not even take a copy of the paper you wrote yourself and give it to your students because it violates the publisher's copyright.
As soon as people started to lobby to require all publicly funded research to be permissively licensed, every major published started to give the option to publish with Creative Commons.
That's one of the reasons I think people should have sued when Nintendo started cracking down on TASes. Even if the lawsuit was lost, it would be one way to argue that the law is broken. As long as people keep with strange excuses, all that really matters is who has more money to pay lawyers.
Nintendo does have the right to take down a video of their game being played because they have the legal right to public performances of said games, as well as all the assets that are being used in the video (graphics and music). The video itself could be considered a derivative work, which they have rights to.
However, the idea that they have the right to take down the video because a pirated copy of their game was used to create it doesn't sound like it would hold any water. Public performance, using their assets? Yes. A pirated copy was used to create the video? No. If they can prove that the person pirated their game, they can sue that person, but I don't think that can be used as the reason to take down the video (at least not without winning such a lawsuit). It's like saying that Microsoft can take down a published paper that was written in a pirated copy of Microsoft Word. Sure, they can sue the person for pirating their software, but I highly doubt they could take down the document written in it because it was created with a pirated copy. I doubt copyright works like that. The ownership of the work does not somehow transfer to Microsoft just because Microsoft's software was used illegally to create the work. That would be just weird logic.
Nintendo don't will take down all of the videos of his games, because it will be ridiculous, they released a game to the people buy it, after that the person can do everything he want to the game, streaming, gameplay, speedrun, tasing or even pirate it (wich is illegal the last fact), there are a lot of twichers and youtubers earning money recording gameplays of his games too (Idk if they will have to pay a percentage to nintendo)
If nintendo put letters in the matter they will take down the typical sites where you can download their pirated games, but trying to fight against piracy is like trying to patch a hack in an online game, no matter how you try, there will always be a more powerful cheat and improved than the previous.
in short, nintendo wouldn't erase videos from his games because it would extinguish thousands of gameplays channels
Can somebody explain me in short what exactly you think you own in TAS?
Image and music of the game own by their respective owners. Like in let's play or something you can say that AT LEAST you own audio commentaries or something. In tas there is nothing that could be considered yours LUL
Can somebody explain me in short what exactly you think you own in TAS?
Image and music of the game own by their respective owners. Like in let's play or something you can say that AT LEAST you own audio commentaries or something. In tas there is nothing that could be considered yours LUL
What exactly do you think a TAS is? You seem to think it's the video recording of the game being run.
OMG, you catch me! I'm so stupid! Good job! I can't understand the difference between tas studio project file, emu movie file and encoded video uploaded on youtube etc ;C
It's obvious that everyone only cares about TAS encodes uploaded on youtube, because that's like the only way to get some profit from your TAS.
It seems so to me. Your comment said: "what exactly you think you own in TAS?" and then you proceeded to list things that you consider being parts of a TAS, which the TASer does not own, ie. images and music. "In tas there is nothing that could be considered yours LUL"
I cannot interpret your comment as anything else than you thinking that a TAS consists of the video recording and its audio, because that's quite literally what you are saying. You didn't even mention the keypress data file at all.
Said file is a work produced by the TAS author. It contains original material. It does not contain any data from the game (except if the file also contains a savestate). It's non-trivial, and it has a substantial amount of original unique data created by the author. You would have to give a quite good argument about how this data does not fall under copyright, owned by the author of the file. Or why said data would belong to somebody else.
That being said, and as I commented in my first post in this thread, this has probably never been determined in court. It could also be argued that this data file does not fall under copyright. But a good argument would have to be presented why.
The fact still remains that by publishing said data file on tasvideos.org, the author is granting a very liberal usage license for its use, and cannot legally retroactively take it back.
Also, the IP owner of the original game can bully the author, or the site, into removing said file, claiming ownership, but this is another issue altogether. It might or might not hold in court, but that's the power of corporations: They have an army of lawyers and an endless supply of money, neither of which is available to individual people. Large corporations get away with bullying people in this manner all the time, and claiming ownership of things they don't legally have the right to.
