There’s Still Time To Join The Public Domain Game Jam!
from the gaming-like-it's-1927 dept
At the beginning of the year, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We’re calling on game designers of all stripes to build analog or digital games based on the works that have entered the public domain this year, including:
- Novels, short stories, and poems by Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf plus the first three The Hardy Boys books
- Art by Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Tamara de Lempicka
- Films including The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Napoléon, and Trolley Troubles
- Music by Béla Bartók, Ira and George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Ruth Etting, and Sophie Tucker
Check out Duke’s Public Domain Day article or Copyright Lately’s round-up for more works entering the public domain.
Today marks the halfway point of the jam, which runs until the end of January. That means there’s still plenty of time to get involved. Check out the game jam page on Itch.io to sign up and view the full rules, then start working on your game. For inspiration, you can check out the winners of the jams for 1923, 1924, 1925 and 1926.
Whether you’re an experienced game designer or someone who has never attempted to make a game before, we hope you’ll join the jam and help demonstrate the value of a robust and growing public domain!
Filed Under: copyright, game jam, games, gaming like it's 1927, public domain
Comments on “There’s Still Time To Join The Public Domain Game Jam!”
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Now it’s https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/pdf/00201/1-1-stable-diffusion-complaint.pdf artists that are angry. No need to bring in RIAA/MPAA to the party.
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Just more content to be AI slurped.
ChapGPT Input: write code for a game from developer donations that were meant for human consumption in the 1st world and not meant to be sold to the donators kids
What a joke
An early word of congratulations to the idiot contingent this year! Usually when this annual event comes close to the end of its run, there’s comment about it being pointless, nobody’s interested, attacking the idea for lacking original content, etc., often followed by disgusting attacks on the results because nobody’s made a AAA million dollar game so the games are worthless.
This year… well, at least the whining has started on an actual issue that people should be concerned about, and can have some valid discourse surrounding it. A shame it’s the the copyright fanboys who fail to get any momentum behind their own products, rather than a genuine attempt to have the conversation where it belongs.
Sorry, guys, copyright abuse and the theft from the public domain are still very important issues, and the level of human input required for some of the award make concerns here meaningless (no, ChatGPT isn’t going to come up with inventive analog games or ways of combining multiple sources in an original way on its own). Let’s enjoy this event, and worry about AI influence where it actually has some meaning other than to attack the people trying to raise awareness about issues you are on the wrong side of.
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It really has been a long while since out_of_the_blue showed his face around, hasn’t it? My guess is he either got COVID-19 or he actually showed up on January 6th 2021.
Considering one of those fanboys is Tero Pulkinnen, that’s not a surprise. What’s more surprising is that he hasn’t shown up sooner, considering that anything to do with the public domain is squarely everything he’s against. I suppose the Brownian motion inside his skull means that his single pair of brain cells have to have some synaptic response once in a blue moon.
ChatGPT at best could come up with results that could be used in such games, but by itself would not be a substitute for actual design principles, or be able to decide on itself what constitutes engaging or fun in the context of a game. But then a game jam was never going to, or be intended to, supersede the resources and time needed for a full game development cycle. But of course, copyright fanatics aren’t going to acknowledge this either.
I will, however, laud Paul for his efforts to call out the trolls, as is the moral duty of every rational human being.
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“ChatGPT at best could come up with results that could be used in such games, but by itself would not be a substitute for actual design principles, or be able to decide on itself what constitutes engaging or fun in the context of a game”
This is why the subject could be an interesting debate, with hones players. My experience so far is that while it’s great for proving a first draft, overview, template, etc. of something, it still requires a human being for the majority of the actual creativity. StackOverflow has banned ChatGPT for this very reason – it’s a cool starting point, but no replacement for expertise.
Unfortunately, the guys above have either decided to declare that copyright no longer matters or that merely creating new works is wrong in the face of potential AI.
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There’s actually 2nd lawsuit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit
Looks like the AI image generators are not very nice to artist’s copyrights…
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But, AI generators are here to stay. As much as you wish they weren’t, public domain and open source images are there, so even if the artists win their lawsuits, all it does is reduce the training pool for the AI.
As for “not nice to copyrights”, you’ve already been informed of many infringements by supposedly better people, including yourself. No artist in history has even created something without influence, human or otherwise.
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Yes, but if this is not a big deal, why did the AI companies need to go to the piracy area? If they could just use the expensive practice of obtaining the licenses to the material that they use to train their AI, and that’s somehow working approach, why are these companies now at the receiving end of artist’s lawsuit fury? They should just stop illegal practices and all is ok.
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Or, here’s a simpler explanation: AI was never covered by copyright law to start with, which is why copyright holders are absolutely falling over themselves to figure out what cut of flesh they can grab from people performing fair use.
Being on the receiving end of a lawsuit doesn’t mean you’re guilty of anything. To be precise, that’s what the lawsuit is for: to prove if you are guilty of anything.
Techdirt was on the end of a single man’s fury based on a shaky claim of defamation, and Techdirt was found innocent.
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Happily I’m not on the wrong side of the argument. Instead I have explicitly rejected developing AI technology because of its impossible-to-solve copyright issues. Some years ago, there was a decision point where it was possible to start developing AI technology. I decided to reject the tech because of its unresolved copyright issues. Had I went that direction, I could be one of the targets for the recent lawsuits that are comparing AI tech startups to illegal napster (as opposed to spotify which obtained the license deals for the content)… Smaller entities like myself simply have impossible task of obtaining the necessary funds to purchase copyright licenses of millions of images. Thus the AI tech is better left for larger entities to handle. Now it seems that only criminals were interested.
But of course your public domain compo is involved, because both sides of the copyright equation need to be considered at the same time. When tech developers do not care about other people’s copyrights, then copyright duration needs to be increased. So when AI folks are running wildly with getty’s images copyrights, then it could be that mickey mouse never sees its expiration date.
My tech development has been timed correctly. When mickey mouse disappears from copyright, I need to have better animation technology available to replace it. You have seen meshpage’s technology, it has been designed to replace mickey mouse from the marketplace once the market explodes due to mickey copyright expiration.
Your competition on public domain works remind me that there’s a deadline available that should not be missed. After 10 years of development, missing the mickey mouse deadline could be death blow to the tech I’ve been developing.
Australian Copyright
I’m a little bit upset. I’ve done some research.
In Australia, the law says an author has to be deceased for 70 years before their work enters the public domain. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter what the law is in their home country, you must act as if the work was first published in Australia and, therefore, Australian law applies. This is a 2006 or 2007 amendment (I forget which, as there were numerous amendments made in both 2006 and 2007) to the Copyright Act 1968 that was made to comply with the US-Au Free Trade Agreement that was negotiated from 2005 to 2007.
A.A. Milne died in 1956 so, as an Australian in Australia, I have to wait until 1st January 2027 for his works to become public domain in my country. I can’t say “James James Morrison Morrison Whetherby George Dupree” in Australia, even though I could if I was in America but almost every website I can access, even many run in Australia or the UK or almost anywhere, seems to only abide by American laws. OK, so I could actually say it, just not in public or to the public.
I did something stupid in December 2019: I read the Australian Copyright Act (1968, with amendments). Oh man did that give me a headache! Not to mention it was incredibly depressing!
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Yes, this is very big mistake. This is because the law as written can only specify the edge where the activity becomes illegal. It does not specify the location where your activity must be to remain legal. Only the edge is specified. Proper implementation of the copyright act stands firmly at the center of that copyright area, and not at the edge. But after reading the act, you only have information about the edge, i.e. what practices criminals are using when they cross that legal-illegal dividing line. You don’t have the proper practices that should be followed to stay legal longer time. While those practices all depend on specific technology and situation, none of them are very near at the edge that the act specified.
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So if the edge is illegal, why mention the edge? Why not just specify what’s legal, then?
Because you’re not interested in people following the law, you’re only interested in suing people for petty cash.
Thank You for sharing the great information. This is very useful.