Re: Copyright of console illustrations
Hi all,
Thank you all very much for you input on this! And sorry for not
replying earlier.
I think I'll go with the safe route; I'll drop these images for now, and
also ask Dimensions.com for a clarification about their license.
I'll now try to reply to some of the points Michael made in an attempt to
better understand these kinds of things.
On Sat Aug 30, 2025 at 8:43 PM CEST, Michael Lustfield wrote:
This would require a judgment call, meaning you need to make an
assumption that courts would also agree. I don't know how hard it was
to build those simple images, and that would be a factor.
Would it? There have been court cases like (the famous?) "Feist
Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co." which stated that
copyright does not reward effort, just originality.
Assuming the remainder of the application meets DFSG, then I'd say the
bar for "non-commercial" was met as well.
Why though? To me, "non-commercial" is a clear violation of point 6 of
the DFSG, "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". But see below.
Copyright: 2021 melonDS team
I'm not finding melonDS on that page, but I also see the site does not
claim authorship or copyright. Ah, melonds made the fork ... they do
not have copyright on this file.
My reasoning was "nobody has", since I was arguing the files were public
domain. So I just put a bogus string there.
Files: src/frontend/qt_sdl/InputConfig/resources/*
Copyright: ToDo
License: non-commercial
We restrict the usage of our drawings and 3D models in commercial
software, but as long as it's a free and open source community
project, that would be approved. Any reference/backlink to
Dimensions.com that could be provided in the developer notes and/or
credits for the project would be sufficient for use."
The question that I'm left with is- does the non-commercial mandate of
these images destroy DFSG-freeness of the package they're included in?
Personally, I don't think it passes the desert island test, but I also
suspect that level of scrutiny (clearly) violates their original
intent.
I have another idea instead. Assuming that by "non-commercial" they
meant to prohibit usage in non-free projects, but allow usage in
DFSG-free projects, this clause does not pose any additional restriction
on melonDS. This is because melonDS is GPL, and the GPL imposes that the
work always stays GPL - hence free. So the case where these
illustrations, included in melonDS, are used inside a larger
non-open-source project does not ever happen.
I know I'm probably stretching it a bit too much here, but I'm just
curious to hear your (and Dimensions') opinion on this.
Thank you all again! Bye :)
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