Credit where credit is due

[MrDo]

This is an odd stance to take… that’s just part of how things go when you post things publicly online. Since I started with MAME Artwork in 2006:

• arcadeartwork.org scraped my entire site at one point, so a large majority of the “high quality” artwork you can download from there came from my site. The other part came from the artwork that was originally purchased from a group of people at BYOAC.

• That same artwork is now used all over the internet by dozens of people today, to “make” their own “new” artwork files. Including the majority of the game files in this specific thread.

• Artwork that originated from my site was used in at least two commercial video game releases.

• I’ve spent thousands of dollars myself over the years on purchasing arcade artwork, and thousands of hours scanning, cleaning, and releasing said artwork, not to mention all of the other people that contributed to my site over that time, with their own money and time. In 20 years, I’ve received zero compensation for anything, other than a few years into it, when my flatbed scanner broke down, some people pooled together so that I could purchase a new one.

Why am I saying all this now?

• MAMEWorld is gone… so I have purchased my own domains and webhosting, and my site will be back online soon. (Besides MW being gone, the artwork download page wasn’t working correctly for at least the last 18 months).

• And I came back over here to make sure I am crediting people properly for various things… I’m right now in the middle of adding a new page to my site, so that people know there are other sites out there besides mine, that have excellent artwork to use in MAME. Including OA.

I just find it ironic that someone that takes artwork from somewhere else, then makes their own files with it, now has a problem with someone using their new files. In the beginning of his YT channel, OA never credited anything for the longest time… best I could get was for him to give a generic credit to “The Community at MAMEWorld”… because it was too much trouble to read the LAY file in each game file used, and credit the actual people that worked on the artwork each time.

Which is also crazy, because:

• Anything created/cleaned by Ars Invictus… OA will take the time to give him a credit, both on this page and on the YT channel.

• You can read through this entire thread here… no notes for credit for anything from my site, or from NightVoice’s Google Drive page. I guess that’s because I’m not a big enough member of the “Libretro” community?

For OA… not necessary to credit MW people anymore… the site is gone now… if anything, it’s going to mess up your algorithm having a dead link in the video description.

And put your links back up… what’s going to happen is what’s going to happen… it’s not fair to the people that actually enjoy the work that you do, to have to be punished for something that someone else is doing wrong, and that you literally don’t have any control over.

I didn’t stop releasing artwork or take down my page when I first saw your YT channel… same thing. (The whole almost six-year hiatus thing… that’s a whole different story )

[hunterk]

Clarification: Orionsangel asked that I move this post out of their thread as being off-topic, though they made clear that it wasn’t because they wanted to suppress the sentiment, which they affirmed @MrDo has every right to make.

I had been reluctant to act on their original report of being off-topic for the same reason, but OrionsAngel suggested moving it to its own thread, which seemed like a good compromise, as it is indeed an important topic.

---

Proper attribution on the internet is a tough nut to crack, even when we try to enforce it with watermarks and signatures, etc. It gets even harder when we want people to take our work and build on it / remix it, and the reality can often differ from what we envisioned when we first shared the work.

I want someone to take my work, freely given, and make something else cool with it, also freely given. But often someone takes my work, freely given, and charges for it, either unchanged or with a slight twist. And that’s a bummer. It makes me not want to share things in the future, or to only share them with additional restrictions. (I usually liken this to offering free sundaes and someone shows up to sell spoons; they’re within their rights to do it, but it doesn’t feel good)

Even when someone does the “right” thing, if they don’t credit everyone involved in the creation, that doesn’t feel good either

Even when the proper credits are included, end-users often don’t pay attention to them, and then will start comparing your original work unfavorably with something that only exists because of your work, and that doesn’t feel good, either.

This sort of thing is especially common with work like @MrDo’s extensive, foundational work in the arcade artwork scene, since, as they mentioned above, once something has been copied/rehosted so many times (usually losing any credits somewhere in the process), people often don’t think of where it came from at all, since it’s just from “the community.”

However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in two decades of contributing to open source, it’s that there is no such thing as “the community.” Anything done by “the community” was actually done by one or a few people who cared enough about something to make/fix it.