If you're interested in video game musics, there's a good chance you've heard of Video Games Live. It's a world tour concert produced by Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, presenting official soundtracks from renowned video games like Donkey Kong Country, Castlevania and Civilization. Anyway, would you look at this video:
Link to video
Earthworm Jim is one of their common picks in the performance since 2012. It's a nonstop remix composed of the musics from first two games. The point is, however, if you look closely at the screen behind the orchestra, you'll see whoever played EWJ1 is very skilled player. This is because the footage was directly ripped off from [1682] SegaCD Earthworm Jim by ElectroSpecter in 28:47.40:
Link to video
I'm no expert at this kind of thing, so I can't tell if this is legal or not (though I remember the site claims all contents are under CC BY 2.0). Regardless, they don't seem to give a proper credit to ElectroSpecter; I digged the internet but I couldn't find who made that video, either. Is this a known issue, and are there any more examples like this? I'm aware numerous glitch explanation videos cite this site's content, but I'm talking about something that isn't necessarily related to speedrun.
On one level, you can't blame people for using TASes for game footage, when TASVideos consistently has extremely high quality footage of games being played at a solid pace, whereas your average youtube playthrough might suffer from low quality, embarrassing mistakes, idle times, non-game content, etc. Of course, it would be nice to get credit! :)
The EWJ2 footage seems to be not from the TAS, at least from comparing scenes quickly.
I'm no expert at this kind of thing, so I can't tell if this is legal or not (though I remember the site claims all contents are under CC BY 2.0). Regardless, they don't seem to give a proper credit to ElectroSpecter
Firstly, as you note, TASes are published under a Creative Commons license, so other than crediting, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it, "for any purpose, even commercially".
Crediting itself doesn't necessarily have to be an on-your-face plastered on screen. It can be a small text in the end credits, or somewhere where it can be found if needed. But even if no credits can be found anywhere at all, I'm dubious if this would be something worth fighting for.
Secondly, and this is quite important, you have to be very, very careful about claiming ownership of anything done using somebody else's intellectual property without permission (which is what encoding a TAS and publishing it online is.) You can claim "fair use" and "derivative work" all day long, but courts do not care what you say. They care about the actual law, and which party makes a better case.
The TAS itself, in other words the file containing timed keypresses and nothing else, is probably completely legal. Publishing the video footage of essentially the entire game may well be a breach of copyright. Sure, most IP owners do not care, but that doesn't make it any less of a copyright breach. You have to be very careful about these things (and not, for example, start making money out of these encodes).
If anybody, the people in that concert using that video footage require permission from the IP owners (which is probably the publisher of the game, or possibly the developers, but most probably the publisher), unless they are 100% sure that it falls completely under fair use (which in this case it might).
It's a very fuzzy topic. Better not get involved, unless you are a lawyer specialized in copyright law. (I'm not, so don't take any of this as legal advice.)
Crediting itself doesn't necessarily have to be an on-your-face plastered on screen. It can be a small text in the end credits, or somewhere where it can be found if needed. But even if no credits can be found anywhere at all, I'm dubious if this would be something worth fighting for.
Nah, I don't think we should start a fight or do anything about this. I'm not upset at all, really. Did my words feel aggressive? I'd better edit the post.
I just thought it's a bummer they used ElectroSpecter's movie about 3 minutes (which is much longer than what Spikestuff linked) without any acknowledgement. The video games themself ultimately belong to their IP owners as you remarked, but including small sentences like "Video courtesy of (name here)" at the end would've been great.
Again, I don't really intend to make this serious court case as you mentioned. I just wish if more people're gonna use contents from here, they'd properly give credits. Making speedruns takes a lot of efforts, you know.
