Found some of the orignal music tracks

[major_upset]

Found these while surfing the interweb. Their free so go get em  ;D

             Warzone 2100 tracks
                   **URL CENSORED**

[DevUrandom]

That looks very much like a rip of the original files. Do I need to say that sharing non free tracks is illegal?

[major_upset]

didn't know

Sorry

[kage]

That looks very much like a rip of the original files. Do I need to say that sharing non free tracks is illegal?

only in countries that abide by international copyright law : (

[Crawdaddy79]

I have the original WZ 2100 sitting on my shelf somewhere...  Does anyone know if the original music is in an easy to use format, or is it some database file that needs some sort of extraction tool that hasn't been created yet?

[kage]

generally speaking, yes, it is in an easy to use format, since both the warzone discs are in mixed session format (contain "cd audio" as well as data), which means you can use any standard cd-ripping tools to grab the music. if warzone still supports mp3, you can rip to mp3, which is what the majority of cd-rippers do. otherwise, you will have to rip to ogg, which, is probably nicer, since bit for bit it sounds better in the mid to high range freqencies, and matches mp3 in the low range frequencies (bass is really the only thing mp3 does well, even at 320 kbps).

[ioamnesia]

so if someone were to rip the music and dist it, that would be illegal?

question 2: If I encoded the cutscenes with another compression technology would that be kosher to add to the build?

[DevUrandom]

1: Yes
2: No

Reasons:
1: Obvious.
2: The content is still under copyright.

[kage]

my suggestion is that we all move out and form some sort of floating-boat-colony in international waters, at which point we wouldn't be subject to copyright restrictions.

at any rate, there's nothing wrong with creating tools and instructions to allow users to exercise fair-use rights (in countries where applicable), so they can rip and use the music, and potentially (eventually) the cutscenes via one way or another, as long as it's absolutely clear that we do not condone the distribution of these materials and only provide such tools solely in the interest of "fair usage"

[lav_coyote25]

or we could make the music and cutscenes our own selves.... just need to find some time and some willing individuals... ::)

[DevUrandom]

kage: I wont do this for 2 reasons:
1. Copyright is there for a reason. I wont break it without the permission or against the will of the owner. (At which point it wouldn't be "breaking" anymore...)
2. I just read about Fair Use and the "Schranken des Urheberrechts" (-> wikipedia). According to those sources something like Fair Use is generally not permitted in german law. You can create a reasonable number of copies for private usage, but you are not allowed to modify it in any way. As reencoding would be such a modification, it would mean a violation of german law. I don't know what laws are applying for supporting people in doing it, but I generally don't feel that it is "right"...

Instead I agree with Coyote: We allready got some great music tracks which will show up in 2.1 and cutscenes will probably follow when we managed to provide tools to create them and got the engine to play scripted sequences.

[Giel]

kage: I wont do this for 2 reasons:
1. Copyright is there for a reason. I wont break it without the permission or against the will of the owner. (At which point it wouldn't be "breaking" anymore...)
2. I just read about Fair Use and the "Schranken des Urheberrechts" (-> wikipedia). According to those sources something like Fair Use is generally not permitted in german law. You can create a reasonable number of copies for private usage, but you are not allowed to modify it in any way. As reencoding would be such a modification, it would mean a violation of german law. I don't know what laws are applying for supporting people in doing it, but I generally don't feel that it is "right"...

Instead I agree with Coyote: We allready got some great music tracks which will show up in 2.1 and cutscenes will probably follow when we managed to provide tools to create them and got the engine to play scripted sequences.

I think what kage was trying to say is to give out instructions how to rip and use music/cutscenes from the original WZ discs. This would not be copyright violation as copyright only restricts distribution of content, not usage (e.g. taking content you legally posess and use it for another purpose than was meant by its creator, in this case music from the original WZ with our version of it).

I do however agree with Coyote as well, it is probably (i.e. most certainly) best to have our own content published under a free license.

[Crawdaddy79]

Okay so I get the CDs and proceed to rip the music..

Out of the two discs there are only 4 tracks??!!!  If I'd known that I wouldn't have bothered in the first place.

The first song in the first mission is the only one I really cared about because it was really mood-setting.

Oh well - here's to looking forward to whatever you guys produce. 

[kage]

i'll personally never feel that there's anything wrong with "fair use" of any kind, but i understand what you mean, dev, when it comes to german and various other countries' fair use laws, hence the "(in countries where applicable)" note, and i see that as a good enough reason not to provide any official, semi official, or publically-provided-by-us tools, so that we're legally viable in a universal sense.

in the united states, the dmca specifically supports reverse engineering, but on the other hand, has been used in court to supress the act of reverse engineering (or perhaps the public distribution of tools that are designed for the reverse engineering of a specific product) -- u.s. law, ever since the politicians got involved, has never been self affirming, has very often been abused so that actual legal enforcement and connotations are contradictory to the spirit of the law, and as long as i can remember, have always been fuzzy.

however, until such a time that "content providers" of works such as music stop advertising their product as "portable music" and instead advertise it as "music which you can only play on the machine on which you bought it, and on that specific install of your operating system", then i believe the moral implications of providing consumers with a product under the guise of "improved freedom and convenience" where it does not exist validates me to personally assist anyone in exercising what are commonly thought of as "fair use" rights (almost anything that does not violate the one-customer-per-license contract) in countries where there are not laws very specifically forbidding it.

although the previous argument does not in any way directly apply to warzone, the developers have, released the game to the world though with added restriction (music and movies are copyrighted, and actual game data may be as well); it would seem that, by right mind, one would think that a person who actually bought a license for warzone should be entitled to the best overall gaming experience when using warzone (this would include the wzr code, since it's signifigantly improved, as well as the audio and video). while i fully support the eventual creation and use of new music and movies, the originals are the best available now, and will still have sentimental/nostalgic value in the future.

that said, i will avoid tainting the wzr project by providing any instruction for ripping content and exercising any available fair use rights, but i will continue to do so externally: if the laws of your nation do not clearly forbid this kind of fair usage, then you will email me with a request for help under the assumption that you own a legal copy of warzone 2100 discs and are licensed to use them, and that any possible legal culpability is yours alone, since i am making a best effort to insure that i am helping only those with valid fair use rights.

i semi-disagree with giel though -- while copyright law is normally interpereted to apply only to the distribution of works, it actually specifically applies only to the act of copying a given work (whatever the case now, distributing an illegally copied work for free was not a crime, since the offense had already been committed). the concept of copyright prevented someone from obtaining "undue value" at the expense of "potential income" to the original author. as an example, if there's an extraordinarily famous painter, jimmy johnson, who sells his works for no less than 50 million euros each, then if you were to make a replica, and hang it on your wall, then you've obtained "undue value" since, arguably, anyone who sees that painting on your wall with think you're either extremely rich or have great connections, and often enough this will cause other people to have a more favorable impression of you. if you give this replica to someone else, then you lose all benefit, and the receipient begins to benefit, but the author suffers no more or less from the distribution than they had from your initial replication of the work. of course, there are ways to make the author suffer more, such as suggesting that the author gave you this appearantly legitimate work in exchange for illegal contraband, thereby damaging the author's reputation, however law tends to not consider all the possibilities that may happen until they actually do happen.

now we look at copyright law as it applies to computers: copyright law as it exists cannot actually apply to digital media no matter how it tries: even if the internet did not exist, and there was no other way to transfer data data between computers without the use of physical media (such as a cd), selling a legitimate copyrighted work to someone in digital form is an act that is almost certainly going to violate copyright law many, many times -- if you move the work from one location on the computer to another, in the vast majority of operating systems, a move is actually a copy (as in copyright violation) followed by removal of the original, and again, in the vast majority of filesystems, the deleted original is present until overwritten (making a copy of a painting and hiding the original under a rug doesn't mean you only have one copy). this doesn't even take into account things such as ram-cached copies of the work: giving someone a copyrighted work in digital form is the same thing as selling a painting to someone who already has a blank conviently sized canvas and a pallett of paints already sitting in plain sight.

beyond that, there are many connotations of copyright law as it applies to computers: copyright law states that you cannot create a likeness of the work without the permission of the author, however, if you copy a digital file of an image which is copyrighted, and do so without authorization, then you're not actually creating a likeness of that image, but only creating a pile of ones and zeros: only when you actually display that image are you actually creating something that offends the copyrights of the author. as an example, if you took a legitamate copy of a copyrighted comic book and ground it up into a heap of multi-colored goo, and then i created another heap of multi-colored goo that looked identical in every way, no matter how much the author might try, i could never be found to have violated the author's copyright. it's fairly obvious that digital content producers and providers aren't trying to enforce or otherwise uphold copyright law, since the drm they lace their products with in no way prevents or discourages you from copying their work 100,000 times on your machine (which in theory, would've been an inexcusably serious offense): what they do try to restrict is your ability to distribute copies to third parties, and even your ability to "transfer" a work (giving someone else a copy or moving it to another location and then deleting your original immediately afterwards), which falls into the realm of licensing, not copyright. licensing also can cover the manipulation or alteration of a work, but copyright cannot (such as re-encoding a movie, or altering an audio file so that it sounds different) -- there's no law that i'm familiar with that prevents you from utterly defacing a legally obtained painting, for example, as long as you don't attempt to present it as the original work.

honestly, on a 1920x1200 screen, my post doesn't seem that long. apologies to all those of you who became friendly with the mouse wheel (you should've read only the first two paragraphs anyways...)  ???

[Giel]

i'll personally never feel that there's anything wrong with "fair use" of any kind, but i understand what you mean, dev, when it comes to german and various other countries' fair use laws, hence the "(in countries where applicable)" note, and i see that as a good enough reason not to provide any official, semi official, or publically-provided-by-us tools, so that we're legally viable in a universal sense.

in the united states, the dmca specifically supports reverse engineering, but on the other hand, has been used in court to supress the act of reverse engineering (or perhaps the public distribution of tools that are designed for the reverse engineering of a specific product) -- u.s. law, ever since the politicians got involved, has never been self affirming, has very often been abused so that actual legal enforcement and connotations are contradictory to the spirit of the law, and as long as i can remember, have always been fuzzy.

however, until such a time that "content providers" of works such as music stop advertising their product as "portable music" and instead advertise it as "music which you can only play on the machine on which you bought it, and on that specific install of your operating system", then i believe the moral implications of providing consumers with a product under the guise of "improved freedom and convenience" where it does not exist validates me to personally assist anyone in exercising what are commonly thought of as "fair use" rights (almost anything that does not violate the one-customer-per-license contract) in countries where there are not laws very specifically forbidding it.

although the previous argument does not in any way directly apply to warzone, the developers have, released the game to the world though with added restriction (music and movies are copyrighted, and actual game data may be as well); it would seem that, by right mind, one would think that a person who actually bought a license for warzone should be entitled to the best overall gaming experience when using warzone (this would include the wzr code, since it's signifigantly improved, as well as the audio and video). while i fully support the eventual creation and use of new music and movies, the originals are the best available now, and will still have sentimental/nostalgic value in the future.

that said, i will avoid tainting the wzr project by providing any instruction for ripping content and exercising any available fair use rights, but i will continue to do so externally: if the laws of your nation do not clearly forbid this kind of fair usage, then you will email me with a request for help under the assumption that you own a legal copy of warzone 2100 discs and are licensed to use them, and that any possible legal culpability is yours alone, since i am making a best effort to insure that i am helping only those with valid fair use rights.

Well, this ^ does not at all fall under fair use rights. Fair use is for example quoting parts of content, or in case of audio playing 5 secs of it for the purpose of giving an example or demonstrating something.

But then on the other hand since in the case you mentioned you already have the content (i.e. the music accompanying the WZ CDs). And well, copyright has nothing whatsoever to do with how and where you use content/media, it only deals with the distribution of it. (In case of executables it does prohibit multiple usage though, as explained below, WZ's music however isn't executable.)

And as such telling people how they can use materials which they already legally acquired is not illegal at all.

i semi-disagree with giel though -- while copyright law is normally interpereted to apply only to the distribution of works, it actually specifically applies only to the act of copying a given work (whatever the case now, distributing an illegally copied work for free was not a crime, since the offense had already been committed). the concept of copyright prevented someone from obtaining "undue value" at the expense of "potential income" to the original author. as an example, if there's an extraordinarily famous painter, jimmy johnson, who sells his works for no less than 50 million euros each, then if you were to make a replica, and hang it on your wall, then you've obtained "undue value" since, arguably, anyone who sees that painting on your wall with think you're either extremely rich or have great connections, and often enough this will cause other people to have a more favorable impression of you. if you give this replica to someone else, then you lose all benefit, and the receipient begins to benefit, but the author suffers no more or less from the distribution than they had from your initial replication of the work. of course, there are ways to make the author suffer more, such as suggesting that the author gave you this appearantly legitimate work in exchange for illegal contraband, thereby damaging the author's reputation, however law tends to not consider all the possibilities that may happen until they actually do happen.

Nope, it does not apply to the copying of the work. It applies to distributing a copy of a work. I.e. you are allowed to distribute your own original without retaining the original. You're not allowed however to copy a work and distribute that copy (or the original for that matter, while keeping the copy).

This means you can rip as many CDs as you whish, copy as much content as you can, etc. As long as you do not provide others with your copy/rip of it, or the original of it while retaining the copy yourself.

now we look at copyright law as it applies to computers: copyright law as it exists cannot actually apply to digital media no matter how it tries: even if the internet did not exist, and there was no other way to transfer data data between computers without the use of physical media (such as a cd), selling a legitimate copyrighted work to someone in digital form is an act that is almost certainly going to violate copyright law many, many times -- if you move the work from one location on the computer to another, in the vast majority of operating systems, a move is actually a copy (as in copyright violation) followed by removal of the original, and again, in the vast majority of filesystems, the deleted original is present until overwritten (making a copy of a painting and hiding the original under a rug doesn't mean you only have one copy). this doesn't even take into account things such as ram-cached copies of the work: giving someone a copyrighted work in digital form is the same thing as selling a painting to someone who already has a blank conviently sized canvas and a pallett of paints already sitting in plain sight.

Erm, well at first, you don't really think people implementing file systems are really that primitive? Because most if not all modern filesystem implementations (since 1990 or so) will upon a file/directory move do nothing more than creating a new hardlink on the target location and destroy the old one (that's the simple explanation without terms such as inodes, indices, etc.).

Then secondly, normal copyright law permits everyone to make as much copies for personal use as they'd wish. They're only disallowed to distribute these to other people.

In some countries copyright law however makes exceptions on this specifically for software (not its accompanying media/data though). The US and most of Europe among those. These mean that every entity (e.g. a person, company, etc.) is only allowed one copy (for backup purposes only) per bought unit. This part of the law is very fuzzy as to how it applies in regards to multiple installs on the same PC (e.g. for having multiple configurations), or an installed version vs the installer disc. So that part of law will also be very difficult to apply. Keep in mind though that, that only applies to the executables, be it binary or script.

beyond that, there are many connotations of copyright law as it applies to computers: copyright law states that you cannot create a likeness of the work without the permission of the author, however, if you copy a digital file of an image which is copyrighted, and do so without authorization, then you're not actually creating a likeness of that image, but only creating a pile of ones and zeros: only when you actually display that image are you actually creating something that offends the copyrights of the author. as an example, if you took a legitamate copy of a copyrighted comic book and ground it up into a heap of multi-colored goo, and then i created another heap of multi-colored goo that looked identical in every way, no matter how much the author might try, i could never be found to have violated the author's copyright. it's fairly obvious that digital content producers and providers aren't trying to enforce or otherwise uphold copyright law, since the drm they lace their products with in no way prevents or discourages you from copying their work 100,000 times on your machine (which in theory, would've been an inexcusably serious offense): what they do try to restrict is your ability to distribute copies to third parties, and even your ability to "transfer" a work (giving someone else a copy or moving it to another location and then deleting your original immediately afterwards), which falls into the realm of licensing, not copyright. licensing also can cover the manipulation or alteration of a work, but copyright cannot (such as re-encoding a movie, or altering an audio file so that it sounds different) -- there's no law that i'm familiar with that prevents you from utterly defacing a legally obtained painting, for example, as long as you don't attempt to present it as the original work.

honestly, on a 1920x1200 screen, my post doesn't seem that long. apologies to all those of you who became friendly with the mouse wheel (you should've read only the first two paragraphs anyways...)  ???

Derivation from a copyrighted work isn't legal either. However interpreting the bits from a text-document as being the bits of a picture is indeed legal, this because the content (not the encoding, which is a sequence of bits in this case) is entirely different due to differen decoding techniques used. Then as for licensing. All you can do with licensing (based on copyright law such as the GPL) is provide people with certain rights, sometimes only if certain conditions are met (such as in case of GPL distribute to the source code as well). You can however NOT restrict people's rights on how (not) to use media/content with a license. This because all a license can do is grant rights, not restrict them (yes it is possible to put restrictions on when certain rights that wouldn't otherwise be granted are granted). Only a contract can actually restrict rights (and EULA is concidered a contract, for you have to agree with it), and only if you agree with it.

PS My mouse-wheel had fun