Update

public_domain.md

@@ -32,9 +32,9 @@ We therefore devise the term **safe/strong public domain**. Under this we includ
 
 There are a number of places on the internet to look for public domain works, for a list see below.
 
-**Should you release you own works to the public domain?** Definitely yes! From [our](lrs.md) point of view public domain is the only option as we deem any "intellectual property" immoral, however even if you disagree with us, you may want to release at least some of your works into public domain, if only out of altruism, no longer caring about your old works, out of curiosity or to make yourself a bit popular in the free culture community (thought this is a motivation we don't entirely embrace). **Are you afraid to do so?** It is natural, letting go of something you spend part of your life on can raise a bit of anxiety, but this is just a fear of making the first step to the unknown, a fear almost entirely artificial, created by [capitalist](capitalism.md) propaganda; making this decision will really most likely only have positive effects unless you actually had SERIOUS plans to make a business of your proprietary art. Practically the worst that can happen is that your work goes unnoticed and unappreciated. If you are still hesitant, try to go slowly, first release one thing, something small, and see what happens.
+**Should you release you own works to the public domain?** Definitely yes! In [our](lrs.md) opinion public domain is the only option as we deem any "intellectual property" immoral, however even if you disagree with us or feel reluctant about going "all in", you may want to release at least some of your works into public domain, if only out of spontaneous feel-good [altruism](altruism.md), no longer caring about your old works, out of curiosity or even to make yourself a bit popular in the free culture community (thought this is a motivation we don't entirely embrace). **Are you scared of doing it?** It is natural, letting go of something you spent part of your life on can induce a bit of anxiety, but this is just a fear of the first step to the unknown, a fear almost entirely artificial, created by [capitalist](capitalism.md) propaganda; making this decision will really most likely only have positive effects unless you actually had SERIOUS plans to make a business of your proprietary art. Practically the worst that can happen is that your work goes unnoticed and unappreciated. If you are still hesitant, try to go slowly, first release one thing, something small, and see what happens.
 
-**But isn't releasing a work into public domain dangerous?** Doesn't that just invite someone to take the work and claim it as his own? This is a pretty common question so let's take a look at it. Firstly know that **releasing a work into public domain DOES NOT give others the right to claim it as their work** -- it gives them the right to use that work in any way, even to make money (although it will be hard to make money solely by selling something that's already available for free), but someone claiming to have created a work he did not in fact create is simply [plagiarism](plagiarism.md), lying and false claim of copyright, which is not only unethical and will hurt the reputation of the individual if it's proven (which can easily be done, e.g. by showing you released the work earlier through Internet Archive etc.), but may even be punishable by law (even though plagiarism is usually not a crime in itself, it may be deemed for example a fraud). Yes, some people may still attempt to do it (just like people practice [piracy](piracy.md) despite it being illegal), but please note they can just as easily do this even if the work isn't public domain -- they can simply (though illegally) take it and claim it as their own even if you keep your copyright on it. The only "protection" against this is to simply never release the work publicly at all, i.e. the fact that you make your work public domain doesn't make it more easy to be plagiarized. From this point of view it' actually probably much more "dangerous" to for example publish the work anonymously (even if you keep "all rights reserved"), i.e. concealing your real identity when publishing the work (to which you may be pushed by the [privacy](privacy.md) hysteria of today's culture), as this will make it impossible for you to later on prove it was you who made it; if someone takes the work and starts milking it, you cannot sue him as you can't prove you hold copyright on it and he may claim it was him who originally published it anonymously (well, it actually further depends on each country how anonymously published works are treated, but in general it will be more messy and the fact you can't prove your authorship stays).
+**But isn't releasing a work into public domain dangerous?** Doesn't that just invite someone to take the work and claim it as his own? This is a pretty common question so let's tackle it. Firstly know that **releasing a work into public domain DOES NOT give others the right to claim it as their work** -- it gives them the right to use that work in any way, even to make money (although it will be hard to make money solely by selling something that's already available for free), but someone claiming to have created a work he did not in fact create is simply [plagiarism](plagiarism.md), lying and false claim of copyright, which is not only unethical and will hurt the reputation of the individual if it's proven (which can easily be done, e.g. by showing you released the work earlier through Internet Archive etc.), but may even be punishable by law (even though plagiarism is usually not a crime in itself, it may be deemed for example a fraud). Yes, some people may still attempt to do it (just like people practice [piracy](piracy.md) despite it being illegal), but please note they can just as easily do this even if the work isn't public domain -- they can simply (though illegally) take it and claim it as their own even if you keep your copyright on it. The only "protection" against this is to simply never release the work publicly at all, i.e. the fact that you make your work public domain doesn't make it more easy to be plagiarized. From this point of view it' actually probably much more "dangerous" to for example publish the work anonymously (even if you keep "all rights reserved"), i.e. concealing your real identity when publishing the work (to which you may be pushed by the [privacy](privacy.md) hysteria of today's culture), as this will make it impossible for you to later on prove it was you who made it; if someone takes the work and starts milking it, you cannot sue him as you can't prove you hold copyright on it and he may claim it was him who originally published it anonymously (well, it actually further depends on each country how anonymously published works are treated, but in general it will be more messy and the fact you can't prove your authorship stays).
 
 { I remember myself how anxious I was about making the decision to release all my work into public domain, despite knowing it was the right thing to do and that I wanted to do it. I felt emotional about giving away rights to art I put so much love and energy into, fearing the evil vultures of the Internet would immediately "steal" it all as soon as I release it. I overcame the fear and now, many years later, I can say that not once have I regretted it, literally not a single case of abuse of my work happened (that I know of anyway), despite some of it becoming kind of popular. I only received love of many people who found my work useful, and even received donations from people. I've seen others put my work to use, improve it, I get mail from people thanking me for I've done. Of course this all is not why I did it, but it's nice, I write about it to share a personal experience that will maybe give you the courage to do the right thing as well. ~drummyfish }
 
@@ -44,11 +44,11 @@ To create a public domain work you must ensure that after you release it, no one
 
 If you want to create a PD work, then generally in that work **you must not reuse any non-public domain work**. So, for example, you can NOT create a public domain fan fiction story about [Harry Potter](harry_potter.md) because Harry Potter and his universe is copyrighted (your fan fiction here would be so called [derivative work](derivative_work.md) or a copyrighted work). Similarly you can't just use randomly googled images in a game you created because the images are most likely copyrighted. Small and obscure exceptions (trivial bitmap fonts, freedom of panorama, ...) to this may exist in laws but it's never good to rely on such quirky laws (they may differ between countries etc.), it's best to keep it safe and simply avoid utilizing anything non-PD within your works. If you can, create everything yourself, that's the safest bet.
 
-Note that even things such as music/sound samples, text fonts or paint brushes may sometimes be copyrighted. Just be careful, try to make everything from scratch -- yes, it sucks, because copyright sucks, but this is simply how we bypass it. Making everything yourself from the ground up also teaches you a lot and makes your art truly original, it's not a wasted time.
+Note that even things such as [music](music.md)/sound samples, text fonts or paint brushes may sometimes be copyrighted. Just be careful, try to make everything from scratch -- yes, it sucks, because copyright sucks, but this is simply how we bypass it. Making everything yourself from the ground up also teaches you a lot and makes your art truly original, it's not a wasted time.
 
 Also **you must NOT use anything under [fair use](fair_use.md)**! Even though you could lawfully use someone else's copyrighted work under fair use, inclusion of such material would, by the fair use rules, limit what others would be able to do with your work, making it restricted and therefore not public domain. Example: you can probably write a noncommercial Harry Potter fan fiction and share it with friends on the internet because that's fair use, however this fan fiction can never be public domain because it can't e.g. be used commercially, that would no longer fall under fair use, i.e. there is a non-commercial-use-only restriction burdening your work. It doesn't even help if you get an explicit permission to use a copyrighted work in your work unless such permission grants all the right to everyone (not just your work). { I got a mascot removed from [SuperTuxKart](supertuxkart.md) by this argument, mere author's permission to use his work isn't enough to make it free as in freedom. ~drummyfish }
 
-Also **do NOT USE [AI](ai.md)**, not even for things like upscaling and enhancements. NO JUST DO NOT. NO, your argument is invalid, just DO NOT USE IT. In theory it may be legit, but there's just huge amount of doubt, uncertainty and legal mess. To name a few potential issues: AI may create a derivative work of something it has seen in its training dataset (which even if "open"-licensed still may contain material of non-free things that may be legal in the context of the dataset but not in the context of the generated result, e.g. "freedom of panorama"), the copyright status of AI works themselves is not as of yet clear and even once it's established, it may differ by country AND there is a danger of retroactive changes (once it becomes too easy to create PD works with AI capitalists can just push a law that will say AI can't be used for this because "[economy](crime_against_economy.md)" and yes, it may even be used retroactively, [yes, they can do it](yes_they_can.md), it already happened). Furthermore even if AI works are made legit, terms and condition of most usable AI software will still negate this (they already do, EVEN if you pay for it), it's not even clear if they can do this (or it may depend on territory and time) but it's a threat. Also AI is shit, [bloat](bloat.md) and serves mostly [capitalists](capitalism.md) to produce huge quantities of cheap shit for consumerist games, we just don't need this. You may think "haha I'll create one trillion PD textures and post them to Opengameart and save the world" -- that's literally what everyone is doing right now, it's the worst kind of spam that is now just killing the site, please don't even think of this. Create something small but nice, something whose legitimacy as your own work that you give away can not be questioned.
+Also **do NOT USE [AI](ai.md)**, not even for routine tasks like upscaling and enhancements. NO JUST DO NOT. NO, your argument is invalid, just DO NOT USE IT. In theory it may be legit, but there's just massive doubt, uncertainty and legal mess. To name a few potential issues: AI may create a derivative work of something it has seen in its training dataset (which even if "open"-licensed still may contain material of non-free things that may be legal in the context of the dataset but not in the context of the generated result, e.g. "freedom of panorama"), the copyright status of AI works themselves is not as of yet clear and even once it's established, it may differ by country AND there is a danger of retroactive changes (once it becomes too easy to create PD works with AI capitalists can just push a law that will say AI can't be used for this because "[economy](crime_against_economy.md)" and yes, it may even be used retroactively, [yes, they can do it](yes_they_can.md), it already happened). Furthermore even if AI works are made legit, terms and condition of most usable AI software will still negate this (they already do, EVEN if you pay for it), it's not even clear if they can do this (or it may depend on territory and time) but it's a threat. Also AI is a soulless low quality crap, [bloat](bloat.md) and serves mostly [capitalists](capitalism.md) to shit out massive quantities of cheap shit for consumerist games, we just don't need this. You may think "haha I'll create one trillion PD textures and post them to Opengameart and save the world" -- that's literally what everyone is doing right now, it's the worst kind of spam that is now just killing the site, please don't even think of this. Create something small but nice, something whose legitimacy as your own work that you give away can not be questioned.
 
 So you can only use your own original creations and other public domain works within your PD work. Here you should highly prefer your own creations because that is legally the safest, no one can ever challenge your right to reuse your own creation, but there is a low but considerable chance that someone else's PD work isn't actually PD or will seize to be PD by some retroactive law change. So when it only takes a small effort to e.g. photograph your own textures for a game instead of using someone else's PD textures, choose to use your own.