I'm gonna do a little thought piece here while I clean up the mess. I get these questions pretty frequently, and I know some others might peep this thread since it's hot and/or they might be trying to score free whistle points -- keep in mind this is why the abusive review thread was locked several years ago. It's easy to notice over time when you just flag someone else's public reports and that's not what this thread is about, so don't get any ideas.
With that out of the way, I'm always happy to see people curious about the AP and how it works, why it is the way it is, and what we can do to fix it. If you ever have a question or just want to know something about the AP, our rules (and the reasons behind them), and how you can help out, just ask! Someone else might be wondering too, after all.
At 6/10/17 07:33 AM, BraydenGD wrote:
why doesn't newgrounds have better stolen song catchers? this was released in 2015.
To answer your question, our "catchers" are all human -- like you and me. We don't have the $$$ of greedy copyright bullies like the big 3 record companies financing audio analysis algorithm AI here, the money to implement it all in one swoop, or the servers to take the kind of load required to analyze every single file in the AP. I wouldn't even use YouTube as an example of "good" safety nets because they certainly aren't for the community's own good.
YT essentially neutered their creators and censored them to death with all their song catching. It's not in the name of being "family friendly" either, like the bs policy and legal nonsense insist. Google could give a shit less about the creators and community. They just want the ad revenue to keep rolling in. Anyone who spooks the herd of bank trucks and their profiteering/AI investors, especially by spreading information/content they don't want the public to know about or be able to access, gets disenfranchised and/or deleted. To keep in the good graces, you've got to censor yourself to all hell. We don't have that problem here on NG, and hot damn if I don't intend to spend part of my first legal pay stub on a supporter upgrade helping make sure it stays that way.
Anyway, unlike YouTube (Google), we're not financially motivated or capable to get kickbacks from our userbase's hard work via making a deal with the labels to threaten/extort them and "de-monetize" (more accurately "re-monetize") their content and transfer the ad revenue to the already monstrously rich, in the case of music specifically.
Instead we depend on the userbase to help us keep things clean and user-created only. It doesn't work for every case ; no one can catch everything, but it's a fairer system that is much more rewarding to the community as a whole. Everyone wants a deity whistle and hopefully wants to help the community too, but regardless, it's rewarding. Feels much better than ratting out some submitter on YT for posting a lyric video so corporate assholes can get a kickback on the traffic of already popular works -- displaying all those ads.
Rather than having a team of anonymous snipes and a draconian AI to clean people's clocks, our volunteers actually show face when we roll out the ban hammer-- no hiding in the shadows. Despite our shortcomings, we're a lot more creator friendly, and more importantly for those we serve, transparent, impartial, fair, AND honest. You won't see us throwing our users to the wolves or exploiting them for profit like YouTube.
As for stolen submissions going back as far as 2015 and before, this is when Geometry Dash theft started getting really bad, much more widespread than we realized. The custom song update that sparked it all was very poorly implemented by RobTop, with the focus on the addition of custom songs to the game, not the NG community's already existing library of original music, so the unenlightened GD crowd assumed this meant they should be able to jam out to Skrillex for circle levels and such, and we ended up with thousands of people coming to our community who had no idea what Newgrounds was about. Neither did they care so long as their toy worked.
Our site was and still is being trashed as a file dump, as you can see, and RobTop was and still is making ad revenue from our work from the free version of the game. At the time our individual users couldn't opt out of their songs being used in game or even issue a takedown notice without disabling the downloads on our entire catalog. Things almost got ugly before the public even knew what the problem was, up to and including legal issues for us, and still few GD players know or care that what they're doing is endangering our community.
The only way to fight GD theft past what we're already doing is to spread the word that Newgrounds is a community for original work and no new song IDs will get through unless they're original work posted by the original artist AND RobTop manually approves them. At least this is what we've been told since the big GD explosion on Twitter months ago where, believe it or not, hundreds if not thousands of players were directly and indirectly sending death threats to people like @Troisnyx, @RealFaction, myself, and everyone who signed the petition to remove Geometry Dash from all the app stores because our rights as musicians were being abused (and the whole not being able to keep our intellectual property from feeding RobTop's wallet).
At least now thanks to the API settings for our submissions, we have a choice -- one which should be honored. I see more people ripping submissions from Newgrounds itself now just because some author disabled their songs for GD use. I suppose I can't stress enough times that no new artists will be able to get their tunes in legit GD copies thanks to all the past thieves ruining everything. And this figure includes present and future thieves. That sort of ruins the whole premise of custom songs, doesn't it?
At 6/10/17 08:00 PM, BraydenGD wrote:
Are songs from the Wub Machine allowed? Because I found this one which was made by the wub machine. Wub machine is a website if you are asking.
They absolutely are not. Wub Machine is essentially a formula applied to make chopped "remixes" of songs with no effort minus a file upload. By its very nature, uploading Wub Machine songs violates two to four rules, depending on how you look at it.
1. Rights violation. The files used to create most Wub Machine mp3s are usually either copyrighted, someone else's work, or both, used without attaining proper legal permissions.
2. Duplo music. Since Wub Machine mp3s are created using a strict formula with little to no variance whatsoever in how the songs are spliced, with the same bassline and percussion, it falls under the category of duplo music, which is named so because it's easily duplicated.
3. Theft. Wub Machine software formulas don't belong to the user. This is akin to posting someone else's project files as your own.
4. Essentially, submissions like this are spam/abusive in nature, and require no creativity. AP guidelines don't explicitly rule out submissions that aren't creative, but in the case of submissions that don't require intelligent input such as this, we draw the line.
So, if you see any more of these, please click the flag button above the submission. For an explanation, you can just type "Made in a remix generator, Wub Machine" or something along those lines. Someone will know what you mean.
