Spectrum Computing

[mention]Ralf[/mention] , I believe it's the consequence of the social network takeover of the last few years. It seems they are able to bring the worst out of people, encouraging precisely what you wrote. That's one of the reasons why I am not on them - except for my You Tube channel and Whatsapp -, and do not want to. Like Goethe said, life is too short to drink bad wine - and, I would add, to lose time behind other people's frustrations, egotism, anger and fixations.

When discussions had to pass through some sort of moderation, be them newsgroups or forums, there were the occasional trolls and flame wars, it's true. But social media seem to me like the public loo's wall - everyone (well, almost) thinks to be authorized to write the worst kind of abuse on them.

Anyway: I met Andrews in London in July 2015 when I attended the presentation of the ZX Vega in Highgate. I contributed the initial game pack with Cousin Horace, which at the time was my most recent title. To this day, I did not receive any royalty for it, despite a RCL representative repeatedly asking me through email for my bank account number - which I promptly gave each time. With RCL's demise, I think I will hardly receive any.

I confirm that he his fine with free-of-charge distribution of games for which his company Subvert Ltd claims intellectual property (listed here) but will ask for a copyright notice and a donation to a charity organization if they are commercially distributed.

What I do not yet understand, though, is how easy it is to acquire intellectual property rights over such a wide range of contents in a relatively short span of time. What if I buy the rights to some old series of 8-bit games and then declare them free for all?

Am tempted to try to get the IP for this brick, it's in about 80% of early Speccy games...



Being a clever sort, I'd of course also make sure I got the upside down version...

Ahem... anyway, on the subject of Horace, I'm afraid I'm still a rat-tail denier...

What does the f*ck IP stand for?

I've read it several times about this affair...

What does the f*ck IP stand for?

I guess in this case it's not Internet Protocol but Intellectual Property

Alessandro wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2019 8:28 am What if I buy the rights to some old series of 8-bit games and then declare them free for all?

Why not ? Actually that would be a great crowdfunding project....

I was just joking In fact, I wouldn't even know where to start from because I have no connection with that kind of business whatsoever, haven't the faintest idea of how much such intellectual property rights would cost, and I am unable to determine how many people would be willing to part with their money to fund not a real project, but just my promise...

You may or may not know that we are releasing a physical copy of this game, not soon after announcing it we was emailed to tell us that the copyright was owned by Subvert, this email was from Paul the owner of that company, what followed was a few emails that eventually lead us to an agreement in how we can still publish, this was to add a copyright to the game and make a donation per tape sold for the MS Charity in the UK.

I must admit that I thought we would have to cancel the release but as he was the one that came up with the solution, and to be fair its a solution we was happy with.

Anyway the events after did leave a bitter taste but there is always two sides to a story, this is ours, if I am honest, we are doing this for Alessandro now.

Actually, further questions about Paul Andrews's ownership of the Horace character have been raised in a new video from American YouTuber Tipster - his second on the subject...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNzCAoHZrq8

I've watched his video in full, it's quite an eye opener. A few things Paul Andrews has described in his communication has been denied by the recipient - Octav1us Kitten.

Also, Octav1us Kitten is slowly restoring her YouTube channel today. Her two videos covering the ZX Spectrum Horace games (including homebrew) are here and here. At time of writing this, she is not obeying the stipulations that Paul Andrews publicly announced this morning.

I've seen things in the past with people hoovering up retrogames IP, acting very heavy-handed, getting way out of their boundaries - like Edge's Tim Langdell and more recently, Elite's Steve Wilcox. Both got called out on that, their fibbing was exposed.

Can't come to a full conclusion on Paul Andrews. Things are just murky and questions do need answering.

Never heard of Octav1us before but from what I've seen of her content since she started re-enabling it I have to say I'm a new fan. Good light hearted fun (with the exception of the videos where she looks like a nervous wreck, obv.)

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2019 10:42 pmI've seen things in the past with people hoovering up retrogames IP, acting very heavy-handed, getting way out of their boundaries - like Edge's Tim Langdell and more recently, Elite's Steve Wilcox. Both got called out on that, their fibbing was exposed.

The other obvious stunt is to pick on people with few resources to counter the claims, get them to publicly capitulate, then cite that as an example to others, as if somehow it lends credence to their subsequent claims (it doesn't).

This discussion is mainly about the looks of Horace, right?

In this case I would propose a technical solution - one I'm inept to implement myself, I'm quick to admit - but well, here goes. Horace is just
1. a name and
2. a bundled of bitmaps

IP laws differ from country to country, but there seem to be ways around 1. by either parody (Huray! and the Ski Shores) or reference (Tribute to ...).

Maybe you know about the Mii Channel on Nintendo's Wii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mii or ktuberling https://games.kde.org/game.php?game=ktuberling or similar character generators. So a workaround to 2. would be to deliver the game without preset sprites, but generate them according to user settings. A Horace look-alike would be only a set of parameter values within the myriads of possibilities, say
Number of rattail = 1
Number of feet = 2
Number of eyes = 2
Size of Eyes = 7
Number of arms = 0
etc.
Now your generator needs some default values to start with, so the user can fiddle with them.This just might be 1,2,2,7,0, ... I would of course prefer three feet and three eyes, i.e. 1,3,3,7,0, .. 'cus he 'd look soooooo leet'o!

This is basically taking the "You can't copyright a pure idea" to the game character level i.e. if it is legal in your jurisdiction to program a clone of say Pac-Man from scratch and distribute it, it should be legal to do the above.

Now it's time to make wise decisions...

https://www.instagram.com/p/B37LIY4JKcZ ... clhwq2ebip

"Evil midweek cutie"