I am not sure what you are planning on uploading, but the API reference that is included with that particular WoW tool is not re-distributable. It is copyright the authors and publisher, and is included in that tool with a specific license and agreement.
The web API is available through http://wowprogramming.com for free as it always has. Any compilation of that material is not re-distributable without my explicit permission.
Since the threat is only shown in tooltip/BlizzFCT, a threatmeter with bars can be viable I think :)
Of course, but why do they matter for most players anymore? All player X needs to know that he is 70% of the tank's threat, not how much threat he has compared to anyone else (tanks excluded of course)
At a cursory glance you can tell what your threat is (as a percentage) on a given mod by quering the API when UNIT_THREAT_SITUATION_UPDATE fires. As expected this means that there doesn't need to be any more addon communication, but there also won't be a pure threat number exposed. It seems you will be able to tell how far you are away from pulling aggro which is enough.
Why does this need to spread like wildfire? All this means is no one will need to download threat meters anymore, since this will handle 95% of the gamers.
Right, the data was taken from 3rd party API, translated and sized, then stored. Those operations on that data also can not be copyrighted.
It doesn't matter if that data was changed 'by hand' or by a computer program, the data origins are from an outside source and are freely available. The author(s) of the addon do not own the data in question.
Example. I go through the telephone book and add international dialing codes to each phone number in my city. I then publish this information on my city's website home page, at the bottom of each page there is an explicit copyright notice covering all information throughout the site. I find that a local phone store is printing out this information and distributing it to each customer that buys a phone. Can I sue for copyright infringement? I can try but because the information is in the public domain to start with and I am only adding, or translating the information, I have little case to present.
This would be something to take up in court, but in my personal opinion (which I use to formulate my own responses) there is a hell of a difference between adding information that is already implicit in a given context (your example), and what happened in this case. Sure, you set the model file on the model object and you get a baseline for where the model starts. Then, you have to physically go through and resize and shift the parameters until the model appears as you'd like it to.
There are two things to consider here, one is the way the data was obtained and the other is the fact that the data was simply copied in text VERBATIM without attribution. That is no longer the case, but I don't see your example as applying to this situation. But neither of us is a judge, thankfully.
EDIT: Forgive my presumption. Of course, you could be a judge and I wouldn't know it.
Actually, aside from your own "I can play that way too" posts, this has been a quite civil debate on the matter.
If we want to talk about the good of the community, it is good to have these sorts of conversations (same as we had when the license for Ace2 was being decided) about how things affect us as authors and users. I've already had two people PM me offline for clarification on a few things and I've learned more from then, and they're learned more from me in the process.
One of the things that I've learned is that this complain originally stemmed from the constants table that Benumbed took from Mazzle (along with the rest of the code that drives it). It looks like that data was removed over four months ago from DaPortrait and he worked to rebuild the model constant table on his own (look, the data is now quite different). That means this complaint has moved from a completely valid one that wasn't acted on (due to Kaelten's inability to respond during that time), to a squabble about what constitutes a derivative work in this case.
For the record, when this addon was removed from wowinterface.com, it was a blatant copy in violation of Mazzle's copyright. I'm not a laywer, so I won't speculate on exactly where things stand at the moment. This may help to explain part of Kaelten's stance, information that conveniently didn't make it into the article.
Thanks, I'll be taking it to Cairenn, Mazzlefizz and docevl.
Clad: Why you come here mudslinging and railing I don't understand, but really it seems that Kaelten and you guys need to have a personal chat, and a valium. It really isn't my business... and maybe not even yours.
Cog: Thanks, appreciated.
Mods: Lock per drama policy?
The only drama here is the random shit that's being flung around. I'm well within my right to post my opinions of the situation just as much as anyone else, and that's all that I've done. I didn't attack anyone, I simply stated that I disagreed with Kaelten's opinions, and posted a few minor responses to stuff that had come before me. It really is my business, because I want to ensure that people know where I stand on this issue considering my book is attributed to Kaelten in the article. As I've already stated I've asked for clarification on that point from the author (who paints nothing but an absurdly biased picture of the entire situation). I don't know why the article came out as nasty as it did, but I don't see why me posting my opinions is any different than you posting yours.
I've not attacked you or anyone here, so explain to me how I'm in the wrong.
If I understand the code in question, it's solely comprised of co-ordinates for the placing of 3D models - models and artwork not included just co-ordinate data. This information, which is freely openly obtained data through a 3rd party API, would then not be qualified for copyright protection, no?
Also, looking at your arguments about enforcement, it's not the responsibility of WoWAce, WoWUI or Curse to enforce copyright law. The owner of the code would be required to act on infringement and after such infringement were confirmed the sites would then be legally obligated to remove such copyrighted material from their sites AFTER official notice.
Well the data isn't available via the API. The API provides a baseline of coordinates that are then hand-tweaked to show the model in the right size/proportion/etc. This data was not created through some data transformation or download, but rather by hand.
Cog, didn't you say you were going to defend my rights?
Clad, my request has been made in public. Law does not mandate that I have to go through your processes. All relevant information has been stated. I have stated the facts as I see it and asked you to act. You can decide to not act. That's yours.
You cannot make up rules as you go either guys.
First off, I am a moderator on wowinterface.com We typically moderate comments and forum posts. I asked you NICELY to report this to the people that will actually be looking into it. I will not rise to your bait, sorry.
EDIT: Read my post. I said Administrator of wowinterface.com. You can't post whatever you want on your own personal blog and expect it to be taken as a legal notification. No one here is making up rules, I'm being consistent with the policies that are already in place.
You know full well that you need to take up that case with an administrator of wowinterface through the appropriate channels. Don't try to goad me, because it won't work. Present your case with the literature to back it up and it will be looked into, the same as ANY other claim.
Was something deleted from this thread? The post above seems disjoint.
Yep, I removed it before it was just a nasty post "calling" Benumbed out for the Mazzle/Benumbed drama. I just posted mine as a warning, considering how volatile I expect that discussion to become overall :P
OK so reading this article, every party tries to mediate and Mazz is being a dick. It may be time for the community to manually reconstruct the database and recover DaPortrait that way. Because essentially that's what Mazz demands. Redo my work, because I'm not willing to share.
How did Kaelten try to mediate? He basically told Benumbed that Mazzle was being a dick and asked Mazzle to reconsider. Then he fell off the face of the planet and didn't respond any further. When Curse tried to take decisive action, Kaelten defied the instructions of the owner of Curse, and chose to instead police things on his own.
And Clad, why you are targeting Kaelten, when many parties have tried to take a mediating position is beyond me.
Read the article. I don't consider what he did mediation, in the least. He is the one quoted in the article, and furthermore he is the one attributed as the "author" of a book that he has only written a small portion of the content for. That makes it appear as if cogwheel and myself agree with his position, which could not have been further from the truth.
But Mazz doesn't mediate so there are really two things one can do in an adversarial situation like this:
1) Ask Mazzle to remove your addon from MazzleUI if he hasn't asked permission and was granted it. If he has modified your addon ask that any version of MazzleUI be removed from the addon site that contains your modified addon because of CR IP infringement.
I don't want to, because I don't object to it being distributed as a small part of a compilation. I already HAVE taken action when my work is posted somewhere I don't want it to be. Licenses and copyright means nothing without some form of enforcement. I enforce mine when necessary.
Quote from Ackis »
Reading the article I can see why it wasn't removed.
The original work was the same but by the time the complaint got to the proper ears, the add-on was distinguished enough to be considered a separate entity in itself.
For people who are new to these boards and are coming here looking to spam or cause trouble.. please save you time. If you want to have an actual discussion, feel free to contribute. Nonsense will of course be deleted.
I like Kaelten, but I'm honestly shocked to hear his response to this issue. I agree the article seems biased, but with good reason. You may not like Mazzlefizz and you may not like the current state of copyright law and policy, but that doesn't give you or anyone the right to trample on the rights of an author that wishes to protect their work. At any point in time I could have asked Mazzlefizz to remove LightHeaded and some of my other addons from his compilation, because he does not under any circumstances have the right to redistribute it. My addons have been copied, my addons have been posted to other addon sites, and other people have tried to take credit for work that was mine.
It is not up to Kaelten to "invent" an original work out of a clear derivative work. The amount of work and time that Mazzlefizz spent with his testers gathering information for the portraits took quite a bit of time and effort. To have a data table such as that just blatantly stolen is a huge slap in the face if the author isn't asked.. regardless of how much credit the person who lifted it tries to give.
I am very liberal with my addons and my licenses, and I take a similar stance to Mazzlefizz on some things. If someone wants to use something of mine, I expect to be asked if the license doesn't explicitly allow it. I honestly don't know how I would react if someone did the stealing first, and then decided to ask me. While we could have a discussion for hours about the merits of this specific data table and this specific addon, I think the addon should have been removed from the Ace SVN when NeT asked for it to be removed.
Rabbit as for the following:
For what it's worth I agree with Kaeltens comments from the article - sometimes it's hard to see what is a copy of your code and what is just a sane way of doing things.
If you look at the original code for Funkydudes spam blocker addon (the name escapes me right now) and my code in SimpleChatMods/antispam.lua, you'd think Funkydude copied it. However, he says he didn't, and I have no reason to not believe him. After all, there's only so many ways you can write that piece of code.
Posted on: Today at 02:01:48 am Posted by: dragonis
In this case we're talking about an extremely large data file that contained both heuristic and tweaked data on a number of different mob models. The comparison of DaPortrait's data and Mazzlefizz's shows pretty clearly that the data was not two paths converging at the same point, but that they in fact originated from the same place. I agree, sometimes it's difficult to see the line between two things, but the decisions that were made weren't hasty and ill-informed. An algorithm sure, there are only so many ways to do the exact same thing.. but something like this is not the same.
Also, I've submitted corrections to the original article. Kaelten is NOT the "author" of World of Warcraft Programming, he was a co-author that is responsible for the smallest amount of original content in the book. That's not a knock on his contribution to the title, but simply the truth. The fact that he's associated as the singular author of the book makes it appears as if we support some of the outlandish statements and stances he chooses to make in this issue. Hopefully the author of the article can fix that, because I have no desire to be associated with views such as this.
0
0
The web API is available through http://wowprogramming.com for free as it always has. Any compilation of that material is not re-distributable without my explicit permission.
0
Of course, but why do they matter for most players anymore? All player X needs to know that he is 70% of the tank's threat, not how much threat he has compared to anyone else (tanks excluded of course)
0
New CVars:
+ "threatMinimap", -- default: "1"
+ "threatWarning", -- default: "1"
+ "threatWorldText", -- default: "1"
New APIs:
+ "GetThreatStatusColor",
+ "IsThreatWarningEnabled",
+ "UnitDetailedThreatSituation",
+ "UnitThreatSituation",
New Events:
+ "UNIT_THREAT_LIST_UPDATE",
+ "UNIT_THREAT_SITUATION_UPDATE",
At a cursory glance you can tell what your threat is (as a percentage) on a given mod by quering the API when UNIT_THREAT_SITUATION_UPDATE fires. As expected this means that there doesn't need to be any more addon communication, but there also won't be a pure threat number exposed. It seems you will be able to tell how far you are away from pulling aggro which is enough.
Why does this need to spread like wildfire? All this means is no one will need to download threat meters anymore, since this will handle 95% of the gamers.
0
This would be something to take up in court, but in my personal opinion (which I use to formulate my own responses) there is a hell of a difference between adding information that is already implicit in a given context (your example), and what happened in this case. Sure, you set the model file on the model object and you get a baseline for where the model starts. Then, you have to physically go through and resize and shift the parameters until the model appears as you'd like it to.
There are two things to consider here, one is the way the data was obtained and the other is the fact that the data was simply copied in text VERBATIM without attribution. That is no longer the case, but I don't see your example as applying to this situation. But neither of us is a judge, thankfully.
EDIT: Forgive my presumption. Of course, you could be a judge and I wouldn't know it.
0
If we want to talk about the good of the community, it is good to have these sorts of conversations (same as we had when the license for Ace2 was being decided) about how things affect us as authors and users. I've already had two people PM me offline for clarification on a few things and I've learned more from then, and they're learned more from me in the process.
One of the things that I've learned is that this complain originally stemmed from the constants table that Benumbed took from Mazzle (along with the rest of the code that drives it). It looks like that data was removed over four months ago from DaPortrait and he worked to rebuild the model constant table on his own (look, the data is now quite different). That means this complaint has moved from a completely valid one that wasn't acted on (due to Kaelten's inability to respond during that time), to a squabble about what constitutes a derivative work in this case.
For the record, when this addon was removed from wowinterface.com, it was a blatant copy in violation of Mazzle's copyright. I'm not a laywer, so I won't speculate on exactly where things stand at the moment. This may help to explain part of Kaelten's stance, information that conveniently didn't make it into the article.
0
The only drama here is the random shit that's being flung around. I'm well within my right to post my opinions of the situation just as much as anyone else, and that's all that I've done. I didn't attack anyone, I simply stated that I disagreed with Kaelten's opinions, and posted a few minor responses to stuff that had come before me. It really is my business, because I want to ensure that people know where I stand on this issue considering my book is attributed to Kaelten in the article. As I've already stated I've asked for clarification on that point from the author (who paints nothing but an absurdly biased picture of the entire situation). I don't know why the article came out as nasty as it did, but I don't see why me posting my opinions is any different than you posting yours.
I've not attacked you or anyone here, so explain to me how I'm in the wrong.
0
Well the data isn't available via the API. The API provides a baseline of coordinates that are then hand-tweaked to show the model in the right size/proportion/etc. This data was not created through some data transformation or download, but rather by hand.
0
First off, I am a moderator on wowinterface.com We typically moderate comments and forum posts. I asked you NICELY to report this to the people that will actually be looking into it. I will not rise to your bait, sorry.
EDIT: Read my post. I said Administrator of wowinterface.com. You can't post whatever you want on your own personal blog and expect it to be taken as a legal notification. No one here is making up rules, I'm being consistent with the policies that are already in place.
0
0
Yep, I removed it before it was just a nasty post "calling" Benumbed out for the Mazzle/Benumbed drama. I just posted mine as a warning, considering how volatile I expect that discussion to become overall :P
0
How did Kaelten try to mediate? He basically told Benumbed that Mazzle was being a dick and asked Mazzle to reconsider. Then he fell off the face of the planet and didn't respond any further. When Curse tried to take decisive action, Kaelten defied the instructions of the owner of Curse, and chose to instead police things on his own.
Read the article. I don't consider what he did mediation, in the least. He is the one quoted in the article, and furthermore he is the one attributed as the "author" of a book that he has only written a small portion of the content for. That makes it appear as if cogwheel and myself agree with his position, which could not have been further from the truth.
I don't want to, because I don't object to it being distributed as a small part of a compilation. I already HAVE taken action when my work is posted somewhere I don't want it to be. Licenses and copyright means nothing without some form of enforcement. I enforce mine when necessary.
That really isn't how things work... at all.
0
0
It is not up to Kaelten to "invent" an original work out of a clear derivative work. The amount of work and time that Mazzlefizz spent with his testers gathering information for the portraits took quite a bit of time and effort. To have a data table such as that just blatantly stolen is a huge slap in the face if the author isn't asked.. regardless of how much credit the person who lifted it tries to give.
I am very liberal with my addons and my licenses, and I take a similar stance to Mazzlefizz on some things. If someone wants to use something of mine, I expect to be asked if the license doesn't explicitly allow it. I honestly don't know how I would react if someone did the stealing first, and then decided to ask me. While we could have a discussion for hours about the merits of this specific data table and this specific addon, I think the addon should have been removed from the Ace SVN when NeT asked for it to be removed.
Rabbit as for the following:
In this case we're talking about an extremely large data file that contained both heuristic and tweaked data on a number of different mob models. The comparison of DaPortrait's data and Mazzlefizz's shows pretty clearly that the data was not two paths converging at the same point, but that they in fact originated from the same place. I agree, sometimes it's difficult to see the line between two things, but the decisions that were made weren't hasty and ill-informed. An algorithm sure, there are only so many ways to do the exact same thing.. but something like this is not the same.
Also, I've submitted corrections to the original article. Kaelten is NOT the "author" of World of Warcraft Programming, he was a co-author that is responsible for the smallest amount of original content in the book. That's not a knock on his contribution to the title, but simply the truth. The fact that he's associated as the singular author of the book makes it appears as if we support some of the outlandish statements and stances he chooses to make in this issue. Hopefully the author of the article can fix that, because I have no desire to be associated with views such as this.
0
Read up two posts. Thanks.