Assuming that "Redistributables" is defined to be the downloadable software development kit (as it is in licenses for similar MicroSoft SDKs) then I think you should not be worried.
My reading would be that the GPL is indeed "Excluded" according to the clause above. (Again, the term/clause is not new in MS SDK licenses.) But this just means you can't e.g. redistribute the SDK itself under the GPL.
The object files produced by a compiler are not considered to be derivative works of the compiler. So, you can distribute binaries compiled with this SDK under any license you desire. The analogy is that you can safely use Word to edit a document without Microsoft having a copyright claim on the resulting document.
How could this "red vs blue" have swept the awards, when the second one you mention had 4 awards?
"Swept" may be stretching it a bit, but it's arguable that Red vs Blue's Blood Gulch Chronicles did the best.
Fountainhead Entertainment did indeed win four awards, but these were split between the two different films that they entered. Anna won one, and their (and Ghost Robot's) In The Waiting Line video won three. The three for Blood Gulch Chronicles, though, included Best Picture.
It believe it doesn't really matter where you are based, but rather where your market is. In both scenarios, if Eurosoft does sufficient business in the US then they will want to apply for a patent in the US just like Amerisoft would.
This could all be achieved without government intervention just by publishing in a Journal of No-Longer-Patentable Ideas. (Or web-site. Are there such sites?)
I believe this is one of the services that ip.com seeks to provide.
if you want to define "Machinima" as using Game Engines and their free (sometimes open source) editors as the "tools," then we're in the realm of reason.
I can confirm that when I coined the term, that was what it meant. People were beginning to make stuff in Unreal, Half-Life, etc. as well as pieces that didn't use the original games as the basis for their plots - but they were still describing such things as "Quake movies".
That term was inaccurate, and likely to put off creative people who wanted to make something other than recammed deathmatches. It seemed we needed a new word and I cobbled one together.
Of course semantics evolve with use, and these days the people claiming to make "machinima" do tend to include stuff made in real-time engines that are not game engines.
But the interesting stuff is not the gradual increase in the use of real-time rendering at some (e.g. previewing) stage in a traditional animation process.
The key aspect to contemporary machinima is that one takes well-established techniques (e.g. live performance recordings later edited together) from traditional real-world film-making, and applies them to work in a virtual (and digital) environment. You also skew said techniques to take advantage of things you can do better in that environment - you are less constrained by real-world physics or expenses during filming, and you have more powerful and expressive representations to work with in post-production.
The result is something substantially different than either traditional film or animation. Their illegitimate offspring is a new production technique, and the groups doing machinima claim it can be significantly cheaper and more flexible.
But then to ship the resulting movies as AVI files? That's the biggest cop out I've ever seen in any art form.
Personally I'd love to see more machinima distributed in a way that allows client-side rendering. It offers exciting quality/file-size ratios (framerate and resolution increase with the client's processing power, think 3D Flash) and also interesting story-telling techniques (e.g. allow the viewer limited control over playback without letting them escape the overall narrative.)
But in practice people have found that "native" machinima is as yet difficult to distribute in an easy-to-run manner. It's simpler for the viewer to play an AVI than to install a new playback engine.
I continue to hope we will see more native machinima, but the form of distribution doesn't need to change for film-making in a virtual digital environment to matter as a production technique.
The article is a report from the "Supernova conference" on decentralization - a currently perceived shift in the nature of the Net, back from few publishers and many readers, to something more end-to-end.
The two-page Salon report wonders what the business models for e2e are, and what the consequences of greater commercial interest in e2e technologies might be. The quoted introduction (and high-rated comments) are not very representative of the story. It doesn't say anything very surprising, but there's more there than the dubious geek/suit dichotomy.
I've published software under the GPL that can do MP3 decoding. (It's a collection of small tweaks to the GPLed Quake1 engine, and uses the GPLed Amp11lib library decode MP3s.)
The modified engine isn't really meant for anyone other than a few fellow developers to use right now, but it is on SourceForge, so I believe it's effectively published anyway.
Possibly I'm worrying too much, but I like to know what I should do now in principle, so I consider what action is pragmatic.
I believe the GPL tells me what to do: I should not distribute my program.
"7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
The fee is only an example, I believe, so perhaps just the existence of the patent has always disallowed the distribution of MP3 decoding software under the GPL. Mp3licensing.com certainly thinks it can enforce a license fee on publishers of MP3 decoding software product, and since the distinction between source and binary is fuzzy, I assume they would seek the same from those who publish source.
Now, this confuses me a bit for two reasons.
Firstly, isn't there loads of relatively high profile GPLed MP3 decoding software? Some of those mention that _use_ of the software may require a patent license in some countries, but that isn't necessarily good enough, is it? Section 8. of the GPL itself seems to suggest one should include an explicit list of countries which are patent-encumbered, and that peoples of those countries should then not consider themselves to have been granted the GPL for one's program. The fact that other projects aren't doing this leads me to wonder if I've misunderstood the GPL.
Secondly, how can I "refrain entirely from distribution of the Program"? Even if I take out the offending code, it's all on a CVS server. Is it my responsibility to get it removed? Is it SourceForge's responsibility?
The article charicatures the particle physicists as insisting that every explanation must be reductionist whilst the solid-state physicists will only accept holistic explanations (i.e. it is just the emergent behaviour that matters, reductionism doesn't really tell you anything useful.)
Whilst modern scientists may earnestly and usefully debate which approach is currently most worthwhile in one or another area of science, I believe most would not argue there is a fundamental dichotomy here, especially if they've taken any interest in the 20th century philosophy of science.
Instead, I think many would suggest that neither holism or reductionism is the 'one true ism'. Science is about producing useful and testable explanations (aka theories) for observed phenomena. Both reductionist and holistic explanations can be useful and testable. Even at the level of rival explanations of the same phenomena rather than rival 'isms', different kinds of explanation need not be inconsistent or practically redundant.
One well-known essay partly along these lines would be "Prelude... Ant Fugue" from Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", which discusses holism and reductionism both in general and in the particular context of models of consciousness.
> While creating a demo of the humanly fastest
> possible game of Quake compiled from the best
> run-throughs is impressive in its own right,
> I'd be far, far more impressed by a single
> person (or even a team) that produced a
> similiar time in one sitting.
The reason for running the levels individually in the dQ runs is basically because the final result is more entertaining and interesting. You can attempt more impressive tricks, and can go a lot deeper into the strategic planning.
However, if you want to see the sort of one-sitting run (speed-runners call them "marathons") that you mention, though, you can. Speed Demos Archive carries a huge number of single level demos, and also some marathons. The current record for a Nightmare marathon run is 26:25; on Easy skill the time is 15:48.
And for a true marathon, check Marlo Galinski's run through Quake1 on Nightmare skill where he kills every monster and triggers every secret, in a single sitting lasting 86:48.
Although I'm not sure I like "MechAnime" any better, I agree the term "Machinima" is far from perfect. In my defense: I didn't know it was going to become a registered domain name some day. (And at least I didn't call it "e-cinema" or "I-Film" or "holo-fLix" or something like that.)
At the time that I started using the word, there were a lot of people using the term "Quake movie" to mean the same thing, and it was about to get confusing since some of them were getting made in things like Unreal and Half-Life. Necessity is not the best of all mothers.
Calling them "Quake movies" was also going to stop someone such as a frustrated wannabe director from taking the technologies seriously. I appreciate the jury is still out on whether they should (c: but still suspect there is real promise once the right tools come along, and do think that "Hardly Workin'" is well-made and really funny.
In the late Eighties, the technology arrived that meant artists without many resources could begin to make records in their bedrooms. I think that overall this was a good thing. I hope that the same sort of thing is beginning to happen for cinema. Digital cinema is a good start for docu-drama and fly-on-the-wall pieces but it can't cope so well with anything with a more ambitious scope. Machinima is one way in for people who want to make this sort of stuff.
As well as open access, the other thing for the short-term is that this stuff compresses fantastically well compared to conventional digital video formats, because it's at a higher level of abstraction. Given that your client-box is powerful enough, the Quake2 version lets you playback at a resolution and framerate that would cost GBs to deliver as Mpeg. It's basically 3D Flash, and I think we'll see that sort of technology playing an important part in the Net distribution of cinema whilst we wait for that long-promised, never-here bandwidth revolution.
I'm not sure I understand the emphasis on streaming formats.
There are times when I want my text served up live, and in those cases I'll go on IRC at a pre-arranged time. But normally I want to read a piece of writing that has been finished and published, and that I can access whenever I want, so I browse the web. I think the same analogy holds for video content.
Streaming makes sense for live broadcasts, since the timeliness and the possibilities for immediate interactivity compensate for the drops and stutters - but it seems to me that most video is more suitable for publication in a "download, then playback" format. I don't mind waiting for a download to complete if it means I can watch the result at my leisure and not have the experience compromised by network traffic problems.
Streaming acts as one flimsy layer of protection against copying, but especially for non-establishment publishers, the main problem is getting the content to the viewer in the first place, not trying to enforce pay-per-view economic models whose plausibility in the digital age is somewhat dubious in any case.
So to me, "broadcast" and "streaming" don't seem as important as "publication" and "download". Many of the arguments from the article still apply, but it is a slightly different game with a wider range of possible formats... so, is there something especially important about streaming video that I am missing?
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Assuming that "Redistributables" is defined to be the downloadable software development kit (as it is in licenses for similar MicroSoft SDKs) then I think you should not be worried.
My reading would be that the GPL is indeed "Excluded" according to the clause above. (Again, the term/clause is not new in MS SDK licenses.) But this just means you can't e.g. redistribute the SDK itself under the GPL.
The object files produced by a compiler are not considered to be derivative works of the compiler. So, you can distribute binaries compiled with this SDK under any license you desire. The analogy is that you can safely use Word to edit a document without Microsoft having a copyright claim on the resulting document.
"Swept" may be stretching it a bit, but it's arguable that Red vs Blue's Blood Gulch Chronicles did the best.
Fountainhead Entertainment did indeed win four awards, but these were split between the two different films that they entered. Anna won one, and their (and Ghost Robot's) In The Waiting Line video won three. The three for Blood Gulch Chronicles, though, included Best Picture.
if you want to define "Machinima" as using Game Engines and their free (sometimes open source) editors as the "tools," then we're in the realm of reason.
I can confirm that when I coined the term, that was what it meant. People were beginning to make stuff in Unreal, Half-Life, etc. as well as pieces that didn't use the original games as the basis for their plots - but they were still describing such things as "Quake movies".
That term was inaccurate, and likely to put off creative people who wanted to make something other than recammed deathmatches. It seemed we needed a new word and I cobbled one together.
Of course semantics evolve with use, and these days the people claiming to make "machinima" do tend to include stuff made in real-time engines that are not game engines.
But the interesting stuff is not the gradual increase in the use of real-time rendering at some (e.g. previewing) stage in a traditional animation process.
The key aspect to contemporary machinima is that one takes well-established techniques (e.g. live performance recordings later edited together) from traditional real-world film-making, and applies them to work in a virtual (and digital) environment. You also skew said techniques to take advantage of things you can do better in that environment - you are less constrained by real-world physics or expenses during filming, and you have more powerful and expressive representations to work with in post-production.
The result is something substantially different than either traditional film or animation. Their illegitimate offspring is a new production technique, and the groups doing machinima claim it can be significantly cheaper and more flexible.
But then to ship the resulting movies as AVI files? That's the biggest cop out I've ever seen in any art form.
Personally I'd love to see more machinima distributed in a way that allows client-side rendering. It offers exciting quality/file-size ratios (framerate and resolution increase with the client's processing power, think 3D Flash) and also interesting story-telling techniques (e.g. allow the viewer limited control over playback without letting them escape the overall narrative.)
But in practice people have found that "native" machinima is as yet difficult to distribute in an easy-to-run manner. It's simpler for the viewer to play an AVI than to install a new playback engine.
I continue to hope we will see more native machinima, but the form of distribution doesn't need to change for film-making in a virtual digital environment to matter as a production technique.
--Anthony.
The article is a report from the "Supernova conference" on decentralization - a currently perceived shift in the nature of the Net, back from few publishers and many readers, to something more end-to-end.
The two-page Salon report wonders what the business models for e2e are, and what the consequences of greater commercial interest in e2e technologies might be. The quoted introduction (and high-rated comments) are not very representative of the story. It doesn't say anything very surprising, but there's more there than the dubious geek/suit dichotomy.
--Anthony.
I've published software under the GPL that can do MP3 decoding. (It's a collection of small tweaks to the GPLed Quake1 engine, and uses the GPLed Amp11lib library decode MP3s.)
The modified engine isn't really meant for anyone other than a few fellow developers to use right now, but it is on SourceForge, so I believe it's effectively published anyway.
Possibly I'm worrying too much, but I like to know what I should do now in principle, so I consider what action is pragmatic.
I believe the GPL tells me what to do: I should not distribute my program.
"7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
The fee is only an example, I believe, so perhaps just the existence of the patent has always disallowed the distribution of MP3 decoding software under the GPL. Mp3licensing.com certainly thinks it can enforce a license fee on publishers of MP3 decoding software product, and since the distinction between source and binary is fuzzy, I assume they would seek the same from those who publish source.
Now, this confuses me a bit for two reasons.
Firstly, isn't there loads of relatively high profile GPLed MP3 decoding software? Some of those mention that _use_ of the software may require a patent license in some countries, but that isn't necessarily good enough, is it? Section 8. of the GPL itself seems to suggest one should include an explicit list of countries which are patent-encumbered, and that peoples of those countries should then not consider themselves to have been granted the GPL for one's program. The fact that other projects aren't doing this leads me to wonder if I've misunderstood the GPL.
Secondly, how can I "refrain entirely from distribution of the Program"? Even if I take out the offending code, it's all on a CVS server. Is it my responsibility to get it removed? Is it SourceForge's responsibility?
--Anthony.
The article charicatures the particle physicists as insisting that every explanation must be reductionist whilst the solid-state physicists will only accept holistic explanations (i.e. it is just the emergent behaviour that matters, reductionism doesn't really tell you anything useful.)
Whilst modern scientists may earnestly and usefully debate which approach is currently most worthwhile in one or another area of science, I believe most would not argue there is a fundamental dichotomy here, especially if they've taken any interest in the 20th century philosophy of science.
Instead, I think many would suggest that neither holism or reductionism is the 'one true ism'. Science is about producing useful and testable explanations (aka theories) for observed phenomena. Both reductionist and holistic explanations can be useful and testable. Even at the level of rival explanations of the same phenomena rather than rival 'isms', different kinds of explanation need not be inconsistent or practically redundant.
One well-known essay partly along these lines would be "Prelude... Ant Fugue" from Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", which discusses holism and reductionism both in general and in the particular context of models of consciousness.
--Anthony.
> While creating a demo of the humanly fastest
> possible game of Quake compiled from the best
> run-throughs is impressive in its own right,
> I'd be far, far more impressed by a single
> person (or even a team) that produced a
> similiar time in one sitting.
The reason for running the levels individually in the dQ runs is basically because the final result is more entertaining and interesting. You can attempt more impressive tricks, and can go a lot deeper into the strategic planning.
However, if you want to see the sort of one-sitting run (speed-runners call them "marathons") that you mention, though, you can. Speed Demos Archive carries a huge number of single level demos, and also some marathons. The current record for a Nightmare marathon run is 26:25; on Easy skill the time is 15:48.
And for a true marathon, check Marlo Galinski's run through Quake1 on Nightmare skill where he kills every monster and triggers every secret, in a single sitting lasting 86:48.
--Anthony.
I confess to being the originator of the term.
Although I'm not sure I like "MechAnime" any better, I agree the term "Machinima" is far from perfect. In my defense: I didn't know it was going to become a registered domain name some day. (And at least I didn't call it "e-cinema" or "I-Film" or "holo-fLix" or something like that.)
At the time that I started using the word, there were a lot of people using the term "Quake movie" to mean the same thing, and it was about to get confusing since some of them were getting made in things like Unreal and Half-Life. Necessity is not the best of all mothers.
Calling them "Quake movies" was also going to stop someone such as a frustrated wannabe director from taking the technologies seriously. I appreciate the jury is still out on whether they should (c: but still suspect there is real promise once the right tools come along, and do think that "Hardly Workin'" is well-made and really funny.
In the late Eighties, the technology arrived that meant artists without many resources could begin to make records in their bedrooms. I think that overall this was a good thing. I hope that the same sort of thing is beginning to happen for cinema. Digital cinema is a good start for docu-drama and fly-on-the-wall pieces but it can't cope so well with anything with a more ambitious scope. Machinima is one way in for people who want to make this sort of stuff.
As well as open access, the other thing for the short-term is that this stuff compresses fantastically well compared to conventional digital video formats, because it's at a higher level of abstraction. Given that your client-box is powerful enough, the Quake2 version lets you playback at a resolution and framerate that would cost GBs to deliver as Mpeg. It's basically 3D Flash, and I think we'll see that sort of technology playing an important part in the Net distribution of cinema whilst we wait for that long-promised, never-here bandwidth revolution.
--Anthony.
I'm not sure I understand the emphasis on streaming formats.
There are times when I want my text served up live, and in those cases I'll go on IRC at a pre-arranged time. But normally I want to read a piece of writing that has been finished and published, and that I can access whenever I want, so I browse the web. I think the same analogy holds for video content.
Streaming makes sense for live broadcasts, since the timeliness and the possibilities for immediate interactivity compensate for the drops and stutters - but it seems to me that most video is more suitable for publication in a "download, then playback" format. I don't mind waiting for a download to complete if it means I can watch the result at my leisure and not have the experience compromised by network traffic problems.
Streaming acts as one flimsy layer of protection against copying, but especially for non-establishment publishers, the main problem is getting the content to the viewer in the first place, not trying to enforce pay-per-view economic models whose plausibility in the digital age is somewhat dubious in any case.
So to me, "broadcast" and "streaming" don't seem as important as "publication" and "download". Many of the arguments from the article still apply, but it is a slightly different game with a wider range of possible formats... so, is there something especially important about streaming video that I am missing?
- Anthony.