Katawa Shoujo Forums

Katawa Shoujo (and the demos/pre-releases that lead up to it) are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.
You can find the full version of the licence in the manual, or you can follow this link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/au/

BY-NC-ND means "Attributed, Non-commecial and No Derivate works".

Basically, you're free to give anything you download to anyone else, so long as you say that we made it, you don't charge money for it and you don't change it.

Reverse engineering the game to extract our music, art and scripts is in breach of this licence.

Compared to the licences you get for pretty much anything else, we think that this is a pretty fair one. And yes, we know we can't stop people hacking open our hard work so that they can see/hear/read things independant of the full build of the game.

But, for crying out loud, don't do it here.

We have worked long and hard to create this game, and are giving it to you free of charge. We're also providing a place for you to come and talk about the game.
By posting "Here's how you crack the game" or "Click here to download the soundtrack I extracted!" you're basically taking the one condition that we have and breaking it right under our noses.

So, whilst we encourage fan works, don't be surprised to find your posts deleted and topics locked if you continue to post stuff that you have extracted from the original Act 1.

It's just bad manners.

Not sure if I'm allowed to comment on this, but you probably don't know that this exact licence does not exist in the Netherlands. We do have "Authors law", but this only says that your not allowed to scrap of someones name and put on your own (this law goes onto everything thats created).

Not sure how it entirely works, since I'm no lawyer, but thought I should let you know either way.

Edit: According to a friend of mine you can't even use a CC license in court here, kinda lame..

Edit 2:

mallory wrote:It has been fully ported to the netherlands, as far as I'm aware.
A licence isn't anything like a law, it's just shorthand for creators to specify which rights they waive/reserve.

Yeah, but deciding/demanding which rights you have for a object is for specification to use in a court, when it comes down to it. So basically it does have to do with the law.

Not sure if I'm allowed to comment on this, but you probably don't know that this exact licence does not exist in the Netherlands. We do have "Authors law", but this only says that your not allowed to scrap of someones name and put on your own (this law goes onto everything thats created).

Not sure how it entirely works, since I'm no lawyer, but thought I should let you know either way.

It has been fully ported to the netherlands, as far as I'm aware.
A licence isn't anything like a law, it's just shorthand for creators to specify which rights they waive/reserve.

Who cares about laws, this is a matter of respect towards the developers!

The issue isn't what laws apply where the issue is don't be a douchebag. Like crud said you he can't stop you from wrecking the game just don't provide people with how to's in the forum. I use this forum for game discussion and if you guys keep getting threads that I write in locked I will be slightly angry at you and then you'd be sorry cause you know you hurt my feelings or something. Just don't do it or do it on 4chan or something if you must.

Xevo wrote:Not sure if I'm allowed to comment on this, but you probably don't know that this exact licence does not exist in the Netherlands. We do have "Authors law", but this only says that your not allowed to scrap of someones name and put on your own (this law goes onto everything thats created).

Not sure how it entirely works, since I'm no lawyer, but thought I should let you know either way.

Edit: According to a friend of mine you can't even use a CC license in court here, kinda lame..

Edit 2:

mallory wrote:It has been fully ported to the netherlands, as far as I'm aware.
A licence isn't anything like a law, it's just shorthand for creators to specify which rights they waive/reserve.

Yeah, but deciding/demanding which rights you have for a object is for specification to use in a court, when it comes down to it. So basically it does have to do with the law.

I don't think that's the point. The terms of the license are very loose, you get a lot of flexibility with it. The point is that when you do it on the forums, its just disrespectful. They put their hard work and time into this project, for free, and for us. By purposely breaking the license on their own boards is just plain disrespectful. Yes, someone will eventually do this somewhere and yes there's not much they can do to stop it from happening. I don't think they'd be very mad seeing this stuff happen elsewhere, they'd expect it to happen sooner or later. But on their own boards, it just makes you come off as a jerk. Nobody is sending anyone to court, why would they want to?

Well, I'm sorry.
Didn't think that would be such an issue, because I didn't do it to alter your work or attribute it to myself or anything. It's just that music is too awesome for it's own good and running the game in the background with the jukebox on Painful History, Cold Iron or Shadow of the Truth (or any bgm for that matter) lagged the hell out of my PC. If it didn't lag that bad I wouldn't probably care extracting it, as much of a learning experience as it was.
Anyway, sorry again. Hope you don't kill me or anything thatwise ~~'

Hmmm... that just reminded me - I noticed (in-game) that one Hanako sprite had some floating pixel, don't remember which scene was that though.

Also out of curiosity - having read the linked page it doesn't explicitly state that you can't get anything out of the archive as it doesn't alter the program itself. So I take it extracting breaches the author's moral rights, am I right? Or maybe there is something else deeper in license outside of that, that prevents from extracting those files? Or is my understanding of legal English insufficient and it does state that extracting is against license?
Not to say that I'm trying to find a way to get around the license terms, just feel kinda curious. You can disregard answering this question if you don't feel like talking to douchebags. Understandably, no offence would be taken.

Every work is protected by international copyright law, and the copyright laws of the author and the viewer.

The Creative Commons licence is just a tool that waives a number of the rights that a creator has over his works. It's written in legalese so that if you ever go to court you can state "This is what I said [the viewer] could do with my work, but they did something else..." and have something to back it up.

But, as has been pointed out above, this isn't about law or punishment or whatever, it's about resepct.

Think of it like this: Your mum has said you can have a big dessert after dinner so long as you eat a single pea. But instead of eating the pea you jam it in her eye and then eat her dessert as well.

Wow, don't start writing me off as the bad guy now. I just wanted to make a notice about it since it bothered me the moment I saw it on the frontpage of the site.

I would personally never steal others stuff, since I know how it feels to be ripped-off.

An honest question, re the 'All Ages Version' thread:

Although the FAQ states there will be an option to turn H-scenes off, it also sounds like there is interest in a 'clean' download whee the H cannot be turned on. If someone were to create a 'laundry patch' which removes the relevant files from an already-downloaded game and locks it into non-H mode, but distributes only the patch and never the resulting altered game, would this run afoul of the license?

I'm asking this based on how the LAME mp3 encoder used to be distributed, back when it was only a patch to the Fraunhofer encoder. The makers only ever distributed the patch itself, to avoid violating the Fraunhofer license. They don't do this anymore, because it's no longer a set of alterations to that encoder, but it seems to have worked for them.

Guest wrote:An honest question, re the 'All Ages Version' thread:

Although the FAQ states there will be an option to turn H-scenes off, it also sounds like there is interest in a 'clean' download whee the H cannot be turned on. If someone were to create a 'laundry patch' which removes the relevant files from an already-downloaded game and locks it into non-H mode, but distributes only the patch and never the resulting altered game, would this run afoul of the license?

I'm asking this based on how the LAME mp3 encoder used to be distributed, back when it was only a patch to the Fraunhofer encoder. The makers only ever distributed the patch itself, to avoid violating the Fraunhofer license. They don't do this anymore, because it's no longer a set of alterations to that encoder, but it seems to have worked for them.

Nobody will be able to stop anyone from doing this, but don't distribute the patch of the forums. And yes, that would be altering the game, so it's the same as if you wanted to make a patch that replaces every instance of "Hisao" with "Krunk rider".

Damnit, now they're going to make a patch that replaces "Hisao" with "Krunk Rider"

I hope you're happy.

Khaos wrote:Who cares about laws, this is a matter of respect towards the developers!

Word.

Thank goodness for this then, at least now we won't have to have our eyes raped by some badly written Katawa Afterstory fanfic.

Eh, don't get me wrong.
As much as there is bad fanfiction out there, I don't think any of the devs would use the licence to stop you creating something based on this work.

What pisses us off is doign things like breaking apart the game on our own boards.