That’s true, but it’s not obvious what we could do about that.
If we added a clause saying “anybody can download these files and also distribute them”, that would be forcibly grabbing control of distribution rights from authors. That is also bad. People would say we had betrayed their trust by doing stuff with their files they didn’t intend. And then we would have less control over monetization, because what if someone downloaded the files and then started selling them for money?
We could say “anybody can download these files and then redistribute them under this same license (e.g, for free).” At that point we’re reinventing the Creative Common license – and forcing all authors to use it. That’s definitely not happening.
I realize that all this clashes with the idea that freely downloading files is a safety measure. That is hard to solve!
What we can say is that the Archive contents cannot be lost. Someone will have copies. (After this discussion, I bet more people will have copies.) Worst case, the community would have time to figure out how to deal with the legal situation.
(PS: If you want to make copies of all of the IF Archive files, please throttle your downloads over a period of time rather than trying to slam them all at once.)
than browsing every author’s github or worst, itch_io pages, for updates (sometimes too enthutiast fellows inadvertitely loose spoiler in commenting a new IF, so I avoid even the project announcement forum… so having a centralised specialised repo is very convenient,
(as historian, even taking into account the beholder effect, I’m pretty sure that the IF archive has strongly contribuited to 1990s and 2000s renaissance of IF…)
on copyright, the issue lies elsewhere: code sharing help development, but in IF programming, the content is hopelessly intermingled with the code, so the OS-specific licenses like the GPL can’t be applied. OTOH, I personally felt that the informal (and honor-based) “zarf license” (basically: use the code as you want, but not the content" is the best one, so instead of bickering why not do a fundraising and hire a lowlife for turning the informal Zarf license into a legally solid, let’s call it “IFPL” (Interactive Fiction Public License) ? seems to me a valid idea…
Personally, I have also a minor issue that I like to encourage fanfiction/dojinshi on my work, even interactive ones so what I need is a CC-BY-NC-SA with some minor elements from the otherwise questionable OGL. (aside the vanity element “please send me a complimentary copy of your derivative”)
I think… there’s a tendency for persons with technical knowhow to overestimate how “easy” a thing is. If we want to ask what is possible, or easy, or accessible, we might do well to ask what a nontechnical person’s experiences with uploading files is. I don’t think “I know how to do this” is a meaningful benchmark. People may not used to reading instructions for uploading or linking things in the course of their day because, so far as their experiences go, it is an everyday thing that is mostly consistent across many platforms and websites.
Setting aside the licensing and distribution thing–I may be too stupid to understand the problems–I see there being two questions. Bulk uploading for event coordinators seems like an answer to something that comes up often. The other question is: how can this activity align with experiences of a “typical” user? I put “typical” in scare quotes for a reason, since there may be no such thing.
This isn’t really about whether there is lag time between request and availability. Just… can this process be aligned with common internet tasks?
e: @jnelson 's suggestion would accomplish this, so long as the form is straightforward and based on familiar inputs. & yes, a big job. too big to be feasible, perhaps
While there are plenty of US lawyers that certainly live up to that and more, I must admit I’ve met some that do not. Not to mention the whole slew of attorneys we have fighting the good fight for human and civil rights, often at substantial financial disincentive and sometimes notable personal danger to themselves and their families.
I’ve always found navigating and finding things in the IF-archive quite daunting… If I ever did submit my work I think I’d find bundling all the games up into suitable archives and categorising them equally challenging… It’s probably a lot easier when you just write for one target platform with one particular authoring system. I guess just submitting everything as a personal archive would be an option.
Yes, yes! If anything it qualifies as community-based cloud storage and backup.
Also it’s an archive. It’s a place to put stuff for posterity. If you’re not done selling your work somewhere, don’t archive it, and don’t enter annual comps which by nature need to distribute your work for free to voters. It’s not a storefront. I don’t browse for anything in there. I’d bet you could archive something and not link to it on IFDB and the general public wouldn’t run across it.
IFTF, in my experience with them, are a support structure and specifically for the purpose of making resources available to us like having a place to archive your creative work without paying for it - plus a lot of other things. I mean, I guess Zarf might at some point decide to tear off his mask to reveal Thanos and cackle at all the GIGABYTES OF MATERIAL WE GAVE OVER FOR RUTHLESS CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION…or he won’t.
Okay, does it make sense to schedule a ‘community archiving day’ where we beat the drums, go on social media, and tell each other that we’ll archive our work? Since it’ll be only one zip file per participant, I don’t think it will overload the IF Archive in terms of how much work it is to process.
Based on my own experience, I don’t think it’ll work. I started to upload my own games today after waiting for space to become available in the upload directory (Mathbrush uploaded the Spring Thing games earlier this week) After three uploads I’ve already filled the available space (the audio version of Renegade Brainwave is 53.7mb - sorry about that!) It’s probably better if we stagger our uploads rather than do them all on one day.
You don’t need to know exactly where the right place is to submit a file. When you fill in the form you just put as much info as you can, and someone from the Archive team will check that the file goes to the right place.
That may be true, but when you’ve got games where different versions of that game are written for different 8-bit and 16-bit machines using different adventure writing systems… and the archive currently groups things by both machine and adventure writing systems… it would probably be helpful to at least have some idea how best to zip and group anything I was considering uploading.
If it was held on the same day every year, I’m guessing this could be alotted for, with a temporary bump in volunteers to process the surge? It’s not like it’d be a surprise.
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