pouët.net

imo completely irrelevant for the choice of an open source license for your work. Those are a means to give a specific amount of freedom to random people downloading your code. It's important that your license is worded correctly and precisely, or people might end up getting away with using your work for something you didn't want them to.

there is actually a comprehensive comparison for this type of decision on wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses (that is if you're not into reading more than 140 characters with the attention span and all that)

Also nice gargaj front you collected there :)

I remember Amiga Demo and Doc disks having a screen at the beginning saying that the production could not be sold for profit in PD libraries and was not PD?!

I don't follow... how is slapping a Creative Commons licence on a demo supposed to stop it from plagiarising, or being plagiarised? (Especially bearing in mind that this whole discussion was about demos plagiarising sources outside the scene.)

I'm not saying that this solution stops everyone ever from plagiarizing your work (there is no 100% cure to this), but it is definitely a good one when it comes to a big company or any other legal third party from stealing your work and presenting it as theirs (making shitloads of money you don't have any right to along the way). Remember that cc isn't only protecting your code like GPL, MIT and BSD but visuals and music, as well.

yeah, all those big companies stealing demos by the dozen

yeahno, that's not how software licences work. You don't need to put a licence on your work to protect it from being stolen - copyright law does that automatically. If there's no licence attached to your work, then the default position is that you maintain all rights over it and nobody can do anything with it without your permission (including the things that you're probably fine with, like passing on copies of your demo to their friends... yes, historically the scene has worked on a gentleman's agreement that you're not going to sue people over that, even if technically you could). Licences are for formally giving people permission to copy your stuff under certain conditions - not for taking permission away (because, as mentioned, by default they don't have any to begin with).

That's not to say that open-source licences aren't useful... just that this isn't the problem they're solving.

An issue with unlicensed work is that it also allows transformative usage. AFAIK, from my limited research from before, transformative usage is definitely not well defined and varies country by country. I think it might have to be settled in court.

My answer for this is quite simple:

Andy Warhol had a model for his "Blue Marylin".
Leonardo da Vinci had a Model for his "Mona Lisa".
And so on. I don't care.

When people hunt for the originals in demos or demoscene graphics and seem to have a strange satisfaction in publicly pointing out they found it, I just feel pity for these guys that seems to have more joy in publicly trying to blame/shame fellow demosceners rather than enjoying the overall achievement that a demo on a limited platform created.

When all the "nocopy" crap started I told someone at a party "I just don't care! When looking at a picture I love to see demoscene artists work with limited colors and resolutions and achieve something what even the original artists weren't partly able to do! Often I find the interpretations better than the originals!". And this is still my opinion.

And finally:
Ocean machine would still be awesome if you replaced that first scene with a stick figure painting, but I prefer to see something beautiful, so also no need to complain for me here.

I think about this with a "lameness" metric. If it's lame stealing, ppl cry about it, and that's that. People don't always have a lame-meter which aligns with yours, but being honest about this can generally help creators be aware of it.

In Ocean Machine, the image is displayed fullscreen for quite a while. It becomes a central piece of the demo for that moment, rather than transforming the original work into something else.

I think it also helps if you don't just leave 1 sentence in your nfo if you steal an idea/image/shader, without fundamentally changing it. Everyone watching should be aware of the source.