Scratch

Good point about the Galleries, HoboPrimate.  The Galleries are still pretty new territory to me.  I scanned pages and pages of them the other night and they do ask people with similar interests or projects to submit their own projects.  But when you look at pages and pages of them they seem pretty random.  More than a few invite NEW users to submit their first efforts...  More than a few invite GAMERS to submit games, or improvements to games...  So there's lots of repetition and overlap.

If the Scratch Team set up several Groups systematically maybe it would be easier for people to find each other.  Then they could move on out to whatever Galleries interest them. 

But other Members have expressed interesting ideas about improving the Galleries elsewhere in the Forums, so I'll leave it to everybody to pursue this topic with those folks. 

I guess I'm still back at the beginning of the Plagiarism topic: wondering exactly how I would suffer if someone copied my work.  If you're not in SCHOOL your grade can't suffer.  If you're not submitting Scratch projects for advancement at WORK, then your position can't suffer.  If you're not hoping to SELL your Scratch project for thousands of dollars then your bank account can't suffer.  It would be unpleasant to see someone else's name on a project I had uploaded, but how much time and effort should I devote to feeling bad or chasing the plagiarist??

The worst thing that could happen to the Scratch community wouldn't be rampant copying.  It would be discovering that Scratch isn't really fun enough or creative enough to hold peoples' interest over a long period of time.   That's why I hope the Scratch Team and the Members will concentrate on *enhancing* the whole Scratch environment rather than policing it.

BTW, if someone *did* copy my work I guess I might write a polite comment to them asking them to credit me in the future and urging them to trust their own creativity. There's not much point in my doing anything more than that....   :-)

DrJim wrote:

It's not hard to just copy - it can be difficult to figure out exactly what to copy.

Wow! That takes me back to when I was a teacher. It's almost exactly what I used to say to my classes, usually after identifying and highlighting an example of copying. ("How do you know what to copy if you don't know what's right?")

I always had a reputation for being a bit sneaky at times and I recall one exercise in which I had pupils sitting opposite each other in a maths test. I knew 3 or 4 of them would try to copy, so I designed the task sheet in such a way that a high proportion of answers consisted of the digits 0 1 6 8 or 9 which, of course, when viewed upside down look like 0 1 9 8 or 6.  The 'switching' 6 and 9 pinpointed the copiers in an instant as they blithely thanked their stars when they saw an upside down answer that didn't need any effort to interpret. I salted the test with so many questions where answers included a 6 or 9 that the copiers identified themselves!

w

Actually, Richard Stallman has said that his purpose for creating the GPL was to lawfully subvert copyright (the original reason for naming it a "copyleft license"), which he saw starting to be applied to software in the early 80's (one of the main pushers of that was Bill Gates. It did well to him).

I think restrictive copyright laws and licenses for published works made sense when publishing them was a costly thing, but now it makes sense to diminish those restrictions in areas where that isn't the case anymore (like digital publishing and copying).

Anyway, regarding plagiarism, I think that what scratch has right now is enough: It is possible to shift-click on Extras, and get a summary of all previous versions of a scratch program. It is also possible to view the date of when was a project submitted to this site. With these two, it's pretty easy for someone to assert original credit.

Llamalover wrote:

What can I do when someone copies my project outright and doesn't even vaguely credit it to me?
Lucarirox4 copied my project 'racing car game' (http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Llamalover/14520) at
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Lucariox4/16434, someone please look!

Thanks

i believe we can only post games if we alter them

This new feature is related to this topic. http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1235

jamie wrote:

Is it allowed if someone takes your game, changes the theme, then calls it "their creation"? Because I created a game called "Pong 2.1" and a week later, a user called "mina" redid the background, and called "her creation" and I am really annoyed with her for taking credit for MY game, I just want to know if it is a Scratch rule if you can slightly alter a game and call it yours.

Jamie

MY GAME: Pong 2.1
MINA'S GAME: Wack-Pong

well jamie it is ok to do that as long as you give the real owner credit.

There are several different notions of the "right thing" floating around, and it is worth thinking about what you mean by it.

1) is it legal?
2) will you get in trouble for it?
3) does it follow the rules of the license agreement?
4) is it ethical?
5) does it follow the conventions of the community?
6) does it benefit others?

These are overlapping, but not identical questions.

Currently, copying someone else's scratch program and not giving them credit is possibly legal, will not get you in much trouble, does not follow the rules of the license  agreement, is unethical, does not follow the conventions of the community, and is of no benefit to others.

Modifying someone else's program and giving them credit is ok in all the interpretations of the "right thing" above, except maybe the "benefit to others", depending on whether your changes made a better or a worse program.

Creating new works that others may modify is arguably a bigger benefit to the community, so may be a better thing than editing others' work.

Someone forwarded me this article in the New York Times about some controversial artist that takes pictures of other people's work: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/arts/design/06prin.html?ex=1197608400&en=d1c6ec7c53a9d76a&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Since Scratch is in some ways an art, I thought it is relevant to the plagiarism discussion.

I'm also disturbed by this, looks like the 'art' part of his work lies in provoking discussions like these...

On the other hand, Mahler was called a shameless plagiarist in his time (for remixing other composers' musical themes) Bartok travelled around Hungary recording gypsy music and transcribing these recordings into his own compositions, Dvorak's 'stole' his most famous musical theme from Native Americans, and almost every classical music composer 'cited' other people's music in their own oevre.

In German law we try to determine the 'creative' part of a remix based on the assumption, that actually cloning something else 1:1 can - by definition - never be 'original'. While my legal opinion clearly backs this view, I am personally rather in doubt about the concept of intellectual property.

'Intellect' is Latin and literally means 'reading in between' in the sense of deducing something that's not apparently obvious. 'Property' is also Latin and means a lot of things, but mostly describes the idea that you 'own' something in the sense that you can exclusively decide if and how you allow others to benefit from it. It seems the only way you can exploit your intellectual property is by sharing it with others (the word 'patent' - also Latin - literally means 'opened' in the sense of 'disclosed' or 'shared') while at the same time prohibiting others to 'use' it. The idea behind this is that if you don't grant an inventor a monopoly, he will keep his invention secret. That's a very sensible and pragmatic approach to me, but IMO disregards some fundamental ethical, philosophical and even religious questions like: "Which part of myself is originally my 'own'. Do I 'own' my body, my mind, my voice, my language, even my life? How about my children, do I 'own' them?"

I tend to believe that 'giving birth' to an idea is not so much different to 'procreating' a child, and that ideas 'live' only within a social context. What use, after all, is a song that's never sung, an untold story, or an unseen picture? And once an intellectual creation has been shared, does it really have to be progressively modified in order to stay 'original'? Why can't a copy be another original? If you're out with friends sitting besides a campfire singing a song, shouldn't everybody use the same lyrics, the same harmony, even the same melody? Isn't the whole point of 'tradition' to pass something on while staying true to the original?

Giving credit to the 'creator' or 'inventor' is of course a different, moral question.

Just my 2 cents...