My counter-argument basically boils down to two broad points. When we're talking about games like CP, I can understand your point. I personally find it distasteful, I concede it grudgingly, but I get it. As a side note, I've said many times that I would gladly support CP if things were different, because I think that game is more than deserving of having all the work that's been put into it compensated for.

The thing that actually bothers me is that every dev would have to be questioned in order to make things fair. In some cases, there are devs whose games are in the database but can't be reached. Either they've disappeared, they've passed away, etc. What would you do in those cases? I'm thinking specifically of Kitchens Inc games at this moment. Everyone knows that there were many sounds he used which were Simpsons quotes and things like that. The right thing in that case would be to blacklist those games, but since he's no longer here to correct the problem, even if he wanted to, are you comfortable doing that? There are many older games which could potentially fall into this category, and we just don't know how the sounds used were obtained. In an all or nothing approach, we'd have to get rid of all of them to err on the side of caution, whether the sounds were obtained legally or not.

My second point is that, even if we were to give games that are older than a certain date a pass, or exclude devs who cannot or will not respond to inquiries, we've still got the problem of proving that Game X uses sounds that were legally obtained. These days, almost everyone encrypts their sounds, and for good reason. Would you feel comfortable prying into every single game and examining each and every sound to try and figure out where they all came from? The key word there is try, because even then, I think the lines can get blurry. To use an example, let's take STW. I'm not picking on Sam specifically, it's just one of the largest games this community still plays, thus why I'm calling it out. How do we know where he got those sounds? Even if you questioned him, he could say he received a paid sound library as a gift. How would we know whether that was true or not? Again, I don't play that game, I have no clue what sounds it uses or if it even does use paid libraries, I'm just going on what my impression of the game's quality is.

To get back to the sound libraries example, if someone did purchase sounds which could be used as long as they were credited, would they then have to send each game they make to a board of judges, for lack of a better term, to be poured over and scrutinized before it could be posted to the New Releases room? Would one of the requirements be that they had to attach the receipt for their purchase of said libraries in order to be believed? What if, as I said, the sound library was purchased by someone else, so they wouldn't have the receipt? Does that disqualify them, because anyone could lie about that so easily? Look, I get it. I want all the stolen code and bickering to die in a fire as much as the rest of you, and a vetting process would be one way to kill two birds with one stone, but I don't think this is the way.

So, what I mean by driving the community away has very little to do with games whose sounds are obviously ripped from other sources. We can agree to disagree about how much harm such things actually cause. What I'm getting at here is the vetting process. It's Apple all over again, minus the exorbitant fees, of course, and I don't think a lot of people are going to take that lying down. Besides, and this is most important of all, whether your intent is to start a witch hunt or not, you, the moderators, won't have to facilitate that process. There's a certain subset of the community who will do that for you with great gusto and pleasure, and we all know it. There's no need to sugarcoat it, because once the kids get their toys taken away, so to speak, they're going to pounce on something else. Only this time, it won't be "clone clone clone", it will be, "Little Jimmy used a bad sound, I'm gonna tell on him!" Do we really need more of that? I think not. Most of us are growing extremely tired of the clone drama already, I think this just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Finally, I could be wrong about this, but making the Movie Vault a paid service won't make it legal. Have you ever heard of Megaupload? It had a paid tier of members, just as many file sharing services do. But, because it was hosting illegal material, it was taken down, and everyone who paid for it lost their money. At its core, the Movie Vault is a file sharing service, the same as Sendspace or Dropbox or what have you. Just because it specializes in a certain type of content doesn't mean that charging money for it will magically make it all better.

Actually, Ironcross, we absolutely -do have a right to do it at this point, until or unless Richard/Sander come in and ask us not to. At that point, they're taking the choice out of our hands. The rest of your power-of-attorney example misses the mark.
It is actually not me leading this crusade, by the way. I am the one left defending it, because once it got rolling I got vocal. I didn't start it, but after it was brought up on list I realized some of the issues I really should've thought about awhile ago.

Turtlepower, I think the key would be reasonable effort. With KitchensInc games, unfortunately Jim is no longer around, but he used sounds that he didn't have a right to. Now, none of his games cost money, and the man is passed on, so no company in their right mind is going to try and sue him or harass him. Anyone who did would probably get a whole pile of negative publicity for their trouble. No good.
Regarding CP, I'm glad you see my point, and I totally understand why your acceptance is grudging. These are more clear-cut cases where we know the sounds aren't strictly legal, but I'm well aware that in many instances we'd run up against situations where certainty couldn't be managed. At that point, we do our due diligence, and if it turns out we were wrong, we did everything we could. We would also publish someplace on the forum that if any active devs were using copyrighted material illegally in any of their work, we'd appreciate them coming forward to work with us in order to keep their games available.

This is where I circle back to you, Ironcross. You're quite right to say that the forum members make the community; if you go, the community as a whole sort of goes as well. But my point stands as well; in fact, they support one another. If something bad happened to the community we'd all have to react, so while person A might be fine with downloading illegal material sometimes, or might be okay with CP having music from the pokemon franchise, or whatnot, they'd still be negatively affected if the site got hit with something, if for no other reason than that a source of socialization and info would be shut down or negatively implicated by law. But please believe me when I say that I recognize, all the way down, that if everybody left, there would really be no community to support. I do realize that. I just want you to recognize that at the end of the day, you want to be allowed to go on supporting illegal practices, when you personally have less to lose from the action than the community at large. It's the equivalent of going to a family member's house, using their internet to download illegal material and get caught. I'll tell you something. I didn't mean to, but I did that; forgot I had MuTorrent open at my mom's place a couple of years back, and her ISP got hit with a cease-and-desist. Now, it didn't matter; nobody got hurt, and nobody got further harassed when I shut the program and apologized to her. But that's not the point. It could have. And that wouldn't have been her fault; it would've been mine. The law, however, would at least at first have been hounding her, not me, because it was on her Internet connection that this was happening. It's similar to how on most games, you're told that if someone has your password and does things on your account, you're still responsible. But on a much larger forum, it's harder to track the individuals doing wrong, so if bad things happened, they'd be more apt to happen to the forum at large. And that doesn't just hurt you; it hurts everyone. Every time you blithely turn away from this issue and dismiss our so-called moralizing as a failure, you're deciding that your rights trump those of the group you belong to.

Hi,
Well, this is a new angle I wasn't expecting.
I didn't even consider the fact of examinig each and every game that's headed our way. Do mainstream and fansites even do this? I've seen sites say not to link to illegal material such as movies, but I haven't seen sites that take it further to projects as well.

Correct. Charging anything for the audio vault would be a massive massive problem for the service. right now the fact that they are asking for donations could  potentially be an issue, but nothing like if there was a subscription.

why don't we just do nothing until law enforcement actually tells us to do something about it. They usually don't immediately take a site down. We're worrying about a  problem, yes its a problem I won't deny that, but it probably won't come to much of anything.
Yes, you can argue that you feel that is' morally wrong to support noncopyrighted materials of any kind because it's against the law. The weird thing about the law is that the law doesn't matter if it's not enforced, and I haven't seen any enforcement happening against this site. You can argue that it's morally wrong to support these sorts of things, and it might be, and I guess that if tyou and the mod team decide to implement this new rule, we really can't convince you to change your mind or stop you no matter how much we argue against it, as evidenced by what has been going on here. But I am telling you now that many people, me included, are going to leave if you make what is akin to an ultimatum against Crazy Party that says something to the effect that discussion of the game will be disallowed here until all copyrighted material is removed. Someone will make a forum that doesn't do this, and people will join it to talk about the game because the game is good. And people will just flow out of here like a river, as the positive feedback loop will make you lose more and more people. Then you will be moderator of a dead zone pretty much. People will tell their friends that the audiogames.net forum is dead and that only a limited selection of games can be discussed there, and to check out whatever the new forum is since that one is unrestricted, drastically cutting the number of new registrations. I'm not threatening you, or attacking you, just telling you what is going to happen.
Show the moderators how you feel! If you would migrate to a new forum if discussion of games with copyrighted material such as Crazy Party is disallowed, thumb this post up!

nope, I'm not threatening you, I'm just encouraging people to weigh in on the issue even in a small way. I know you may  feel threatened, but I think that's mostly because you're alone here. You're trying to fix something that, to most people on here, isn't broken, and making a bunch of ripples doing it. Just stop please.

...which is why, you'll note, one of my posts from not so very long ago mentioned that feeling of being hung out to dry?

"all because of one rule, because of something that will most likely never be an issue"

To me at least, there is an implicit subtext here. The subtext is that the only reason Pragma would be in the wrong is if he was caught breaking a forum rule. i.e., he's fine right now, and has been fine all this time because no one called him on his borrowing of hundreds of copyrighted assets.

This is patently not the case.

Pragma's use of all of these assets is theft, pure and simple. It is theft on the same level that an unauthorized code fork is theft. It is theft in the same way torrenting audiobooks is theft. If someone created something for public consumption, then asked that you pay in order to access it, not paying is essentially violating those terms of access. Someone made art, and instead of paying for it, you decided to take copies for yourself. You aren't depriving them of their art, since they still hold all the rights to it, but you're now taking copies for yourself. And in Pragma's case, he didn't stop there. He then went and spread that art around; he's not claiming the music and sounds are his, but he still doesn't have any legal rights to use these assets in his game.

By this logic - and this goes for anyone sympathetic to the plight of Crazy Party - this means that if you make a game, and you have a sound designer who writes original music, I am at liberty to get hold of that music and use it in my own applications, at least so long as I don't make money off it. I can't claim it's mine, but if I just sorta nod and smile, that's all right, I suppose?
"But no! I hear you cry. That's stealing!"
Of course it is, but somehow it's not okay if you're the target, but it's totally fine if you're reaping the benefits.

This says a lot about mindset, and a lot about privilege. Maybe it's different for you because sources like Nintendo are enormous corporations who won't miss the revenue. But you'll note how both CP and my fictional example just above are non-paid; they aren't trying to generate revenue, they're just borrowing and redistributing sounds. But then it gets into a situation where people are allowed to be stolen from if they meet (or in some cases fail to meet) certain arbitrary conditions. Is that fair?

No, I think not.

I think what we have here is people getting understandably upset that someone's finally calling out some hypocrisy.

The whole issue is really quite loaded, I'll give you that much. But there are certain aspects of it that are actually pretty clear-cut. And I think we should, in the interest of fair play, be discussing those individually, rather than just trying to hide then by lumping them into the thornier collection of all the rest of it.

In short: this isn't just a problem because of some arbitrary rule. It's a problem because we've all known stuff like CP and the vault and even MushZ's Alter Aeon sound pack are full of copyrighted stuff, and we've all gone blithely on using them anyway (yes, I'm guilty here too).

Hello. So i'm going to chime in here, as I see alot of people talking about this, to the point where they want or would like to see Pragma change his sounds. Now, i'm just going to say, Guys, what is crazy party? is it if mario party and Pokemon had A baby, If that was your ancer, You win a prise! Now I don't know about yall, but aside from gameplay, the sounds are what made crazy party, crazy party! Nintendo isn't gunna care about, that. how, meny, times, do, people, have, to, say, it? If it ain't broke, why fix it? You're just gunna go and brake it. I don't know, but if it consirns accessibility and preservation, you better believe i'll keep fighting! ka, mey, ha, mey, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

At this point, we already know that games like CP have copyrighted assets that they shouldn't have. What you're saying amounts to "I will stop stealing if someone tells me to", and that's borderline ludicrous.

agree fully with keyIsFull. We are meny, you are one. We will distroi you. Anyone got that reference?