Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by lvcabral »

I thought about releasing the code without the assets to make it fully open, but the idea of this work was an exercise of programming, I don't want to have someone using it for profit and I would be co-responsible on a litigation.

If someone learn from it and build something else I don't care, but dealing with Intelectual Property is complicated.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by oitofelix »

lvcabral wrote:Well that's just to protect me, I do not own the brand neither the assets, they belong to Ubisoft, so I can't make it free for commercial use.
That would be justifiable (not quite really, see below) for the assets, but not for the source code or documentation if you've written them from scratch or otherwise own their copyright. In this case you have full rights to release your code as free software and I strongly encourage you to do so.

Regarding the assets, since you aren't the copyright holder, you have no right to allow nor deny their redistribution, let alone modification or commercialization. Furthermore, brand is a trademark law issue, not a copyright-related one.

Disclaimer: this is not legal advice; I'm not a lawyer.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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oitofelix wrote:
lvcabral wrote:Well that's just to protect me, I do not own the brand neither the assets, they belong to Ubisoft, so I can't make it free for commercial use.
That would be justifiable (not quite really, see below) for the assets, but not for the source code or documentation if you've written them from scratch or otherwise own their copyright. In this case you have full rights to release your code as free software and I strongly encourage you to do so.

Regarding the assets, since you aren't the copyright holder, you have no right to allow nor deny their redistribution, let alone modification or commercialization. Furthermore, brand is a trademark law issue, not a copyright-related one.

Disclaimer: this is not legal advice; I'm not a lawyer.
Thank's for the explanation, as you could see I know nothing (just like John Snow)

I will study more about the open source licenses available and make one official for my code and documention.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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lvcabral wrote:I thought about releasing the code without the assets to make it fully open, but the idea of this work was an exercise of programming, I don't want to have someone using it for profit and I would be co-responsible on a litigation.
You don't need and really can't license the assets, so license just the work you hold the copyright upon, namely the engine's source code.
lvcabral wrote:If someone learn from it and build something else I don't care, but dealing with Intelectual Property is complicated.
The term "Intelectual Property" has no legal meaning. Please see the article Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage.
Last edited by oitofelix on June 2nd, 2016, 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by oitofelix »

lvcabral wrote:Thank's for the explanation
You're welcome. :)
lvcabral wrote:as you could see I know nothing (just like John Snow)
:lol: That's not true, you are a skilled programmer. I know what it takes to write a Prince of Persia engine. ;)
lvcabral wrote:I will study more about the open source licenses available and make one official for my code and documention.
I'm very glad to hear that! :D I suggest you use a strong copyleft license like GPLv3+ for code and FDLv1.3+ for documentation. Copyleft licenses have provisions to prevent a middleman from making a proprietary version of your program, so it remains free for all users. Of course, ultimately this choice is up to you. For guidance see the GNU project's license recomendations.

While you are at it, consider reading the article Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software for the reason we in the free software movement don't use the term "open source".
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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Coco wrote:Says I, who does nothing [...]
Well, you did make two good mods. :)
oitofelix wrote:
lvcabral wrote:I will study more about the open source licenses available and make one official for my code and documention.
I suggest you use a strong copyleft license like GPLv3+ for code [...] For guidance see the GNU project's license recomendations.
Note though that without in-depth knowledge of licenses, it may be difficult for you (lvcabral) to assess the objectivity of that page; a page published by GNU, who themselves wrote several of the licenses mentioned in this thread and who, when it comes to licenses, have very strong opinions in very specific directions. See the last section of my post here, and make sure you study in particular the difference between permissive and copyleft licences. Also, don't forget to take into account that you based your work on code developed by ultrabolido, who may have certain opinions on the matter himself. ;)
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by oitofelix »

Norbert wrote:Also, don't forget to take into account that you based your work on code developed by ultrabolido, who may have certain opinions on the matter himself. ;)
This is important. It seems the work you (lvcabral) based your game upon has no license. If it had, you'd only need to pay attention to its license. However, in the current case, if your game uses some of its code you have to ask its author for permission (in fact you'd have to ask even before you began modifying the code). On the other hand, if you only looked at it and wrote your game from scratch, without copying significant parts of the program (15 lines or more), you don't have to.

Disclaimer: again, this is not legal advice; IANAL.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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Coco wrote:If all programmers here joined their efforts into working together, for all these years, they could have recreated the game from scratch with new graphics and all :idea:
Says I, who does nothing, just crtisizing people who actually took some effort for making better expirience :mrgreen:

This four screen view looks cool. The 'feel' of the game will change completely.

Also, can anyone import graphics from Prince of Persia classic?
i still haven't finished Level 11 of Imprisoned Again - for crying out loud! :lol: :lol: :lol:

well, it's mostly work-related, why i can't play as much as i wanted to.

still, seconding Norbert, your two mods are indeed classics which will stand the test of time.

mebbe, it's time for a third mod? Image
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by Coco »

Ungh. Legal property mumbo jumbo. Can't we just do whatever we want, and name the mods "Son of the Persian Shah"?
It's not like we make any money on this :D
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

Post by lvcabral »

oitofelix wrote:
Norbert wrote:Also, don't forget to take into account that you based your work on code developed by ultrabolido, who may have certain opinions on the matter himself. ;)
This is important. It seems the work you (lvcabral) based your game upon has no license. If it had, you'd only need to pay attention to its license. However, in the current case, if your game uses some of its code you have to ask its author for permission (in fact you'd have to ask even before you began modifying the code). On the other hand, if you only looked at it and wrote your game from scratch, without copying significant parts of the program (15 lines or more), you don't have to.

Disclaimer: again, this is not legal advice; IANAL.
First: I tried to contact "ultrabolido" several times, on twitter, at his website but no response. His last sign of life was a retweet in March/16, if someone has access to him please let me know.

Second: As you mentioned, he has no license listed on his repository, that was one of the reasons I could not decide what to do with my project in that regards, I just assumed if he made it public in GitHub would be no problem, but I can always be wrong.

So for now I will just keep looking into the references you all gave me and see what kind of license make sense for this project.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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lvcabral wrote:Second: As you mentioned, he has no license listed on his repository, that was one of the reasons I could not decide what to do with my project in that regards, I just assumed if he made it public in GitHub would be no problem, but I can always be wrong.
Quoting from GitHub's Open source licensing page:
GitHub wrote:What happens if I don't choose a license?

You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend.

Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository within the GitHub site.

If you want others to use, copy, modify, or contribute back to your project, we strongly encourage you to include an open source license.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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oitofelix wrote:
lvcabral wrote:Second: As you mentioned, he has no license listed on his repository, that was one of the reasons I could not decide what to do with my project in that regards, I just assumed if he made it public in GitHub would be no problem, but I can always be wrong.
Quoting from GitHub's Open source licensing page:
GitHub wrote:What happens if I don't choose a license?

You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend.

Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository within the GitHub site.

If you want others to use, copy, modify, or contribute back to your project, we strongly encourage you to include an open source license.
I just read that at GitHub's http://choosealicense.com/

As my work is done, for now all I can do is give him credit and keep trying to contact him.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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lvcabral wrote:I tried to contact "ultrabolido" several times, on twitter, at his website but no response.
Hm, yes, it seems "ultrabolido" (at this forum, WordPress, Gmail, Twitter, and GitHub) was created just for the one project.
Spaniard Ultra Bólido, we may never hear from him/her again...
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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lvcabral wrote:As my work is done, for now all I can do is give him credit and keep trying to contact him.
You may also consider rewriting from scratch the code you used.
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Re: Prince of Persia port for Roku streaming box

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oitofelix wrote:
lvcabral wrote:As my work is done, for now all I can do is give him credit and keep trying to contact him.
You may also consider rewriting from scratch the code you used.
Well, that would be a problem, I don't think I would have any motivation for that, besides the fact I already rewrote most of it, once JavaScript + Phaser Framework (what ultrabolido used) has very different paradigms and API's from Brightscript (that is a VisualBasic flavor and no real inheritance concepts).

So I would find myself basically renaming variables (that I mostly kept to help me during the porting process) and maybe reorganizing code around.

If I need to come to this point, I just remove it from GitHub and have fun myself only with it :)
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