Talbain, please, using the legal argument for the basis of the moral argument is weak as I've already stated ("basing morality on legality, with an exception or justifiable exemption for their own position"). Aren't you going into a field of law? (shutters)



 Really, so who's on the minority side of the line? None that I've seen so far. You draw your conclusions on immature assumptions. It is funny to see where the line is drawn.


Right.. because importance or where someone ranks in the scene, is who's opinion you should be aligned with. Welcome to the masses.

If that's the case, then that's pretty shitty of him and he's just holding the patch for ransom (as some others have done). Donations are supposed to be given/accepted after the fact, not before.



 The translation/hacker scene VS NightWolve is the pot calling the kettle black. I've seen no amount of arguments that prove otherwise.

 I'm *not* justifying NightWolve's side of the argument, I'm saying the argument from the translation scene point of view is weak (although sa♥tsu made a good point). Falcom is in the right, NightWolve is in the wrong, and rest of the translation scene is in the wrong. Do I think he should charge for his patches? No but really, I couldn't care less what he does with his *own* patches. It doesn't effect me or insult the effort and time I put into my project work, and it doesn't make it worth any less. The idea that NightWolve being the greater of the two evils, somehow justifies or liberates the rest of the translation community is bullsh*t. If you can't see this, then I'm sorry - there really isn't much more to say at this point.

(I'm done  )

...I don't think anyone's really complaining about him taking donations... Donations being people giving him money for out of the goodness of their hearts.

...More the way that he's putting a price on his patch. That turns it into commerce, and people paying for a service. I think that's where people are getting morally hung up on. No, I don't see it as particularly hypocritical. In my "scene," we do illegal things, but we have our own code that (most) of us follow. I don't see it as hypocritical to do so.

RedComet in particular was hypothesising on the eventual release of the patch itself, not the donations received already in goodwill. Not that it matters, all it takes is for one person to get it, and it'd make the rounds.

Personally, my opinion is just the opinion of a spectator. I'm a scanlator, not a romhacker (therefore not part of the "scene"), and I don't like Ys to begin with (so I'm not going to pay for it, or play it in the first place). Deuce seems a nice enough fellow though, so I'd be a little sad if his work went to waste, but on the whole, Nightwolve can sit on it forever, for all it'll affect me.

I, too, ask for money. But I don't ask it for myself. I ask for donations to charities that I support (see my site for more info.)

I don't give two shits about the guy. Donations are fine. Charging a fee for something that is pretty illegal isn't, and if he keeps doing it it'll bring hell upon those of us who don't ask for anything in return other than a thank you from time to time.

Umm... actually it *is* the salient point.  I see nothing in your argument expressing an idea beyond that you want it for free.

Yes, you are correct that I am the one who introduced the concept of "not at all"... but it is indeed an option.  I believe that he will continue to do his translation hacks in future, but that they will never be released beyond a small group of people who are trusted - and who wouldn't violate that trust.  The reason ?  Because of all this childish bickering.  It's certainly not as if the donations he received were worth the trouble.

So I believe that he won't ever again ask for money in exchange for a translation patch.  Happy now ?


Gosh, you sound like an old neighbor of mine who tried to tell me how often to cut my grass because he felt "there was an unwritten rule" that everybody should do as he did, so he could have a nice little white picket-fence neighborhood like he always dreamed about.  And BOY, could he complain when somebody violated his imaginary rule.

So, two minor points of fact:
(1) I don't recall hearing/signing anything about rules, and I've been around a *LONG* time.  As has been raised many times before, creating a derivative work is not strictly legal in the first place, so... neither I nor a court would distinguish a difference.  A court would instead use the measure of whether the original author could demonstrate financial damages, NOT whether the infringer was profiting (however it might be slightly easier to demonstrate damages in the case of charging for a patch - but that is not my problem).
(2) I don't believe I see NightWolve hanging around here trying to be "part of the community" and "abiding by its unwritten rules".


I believe that you are contradicting yourself here.
Furthermore, I believe that any bad scrutiny will come whether or not anybody charges for a patch.
In fact, these cute little arguments probably draw a WHOLE lot more attention than an individual asking for money.


Don't kid yourself.  It's tolerated because it is a fringe group - small, basically unknown, and with diffuse targets (few people have created many hacks).  And for the most part, most people in it don't have enough assets to be worth suing.

But you know, you made me think of something else... if any of us can disagree on what "fair conduct" is, what makes you think that the copyright owners are thinking similarly to one another ?  I don't believe for a moment that they do.  One of them will turn at some point, and pursue somebody for making a hack.  And it will most likely be for a more recent property, such as Grand Theft Auto (you, know, like that "hot coffee" hack).  But afterward, nobody would consider the people here to be any different from the author of that hack.

I guess you could say that my point of view is that you can't really expect your own point of view to be automatically adopted by somebody else (ever)... particularly when you yourself are not following rules in the greater community (ie. laws) on the same subject matter.  It's hypocritical, as Tomaitheous had said previously.

So, since complaining about it isn't likely to do any good, I would advise people to ignore anybody you disagree with.


Well put, and I agree.


If these rules (stated above) are in RHDN's charter, then you have every right to cut links in order to distance yourself.  But until your post, I just didn't see any objective to the endless complaining.  It was always "He shouldn't...", not "We shouldn't..."

You have cleared all that up - RHDN can ignore him entirely if they see fit to do so.  Or accept him.  But whining serves no purpose.

Now RHDN was mentioned in this discussion, maybe it's time to say something about our stance on the matter.

Nightwolve contacted us and requested all of his works and references to his works to be removed from our site. He is propably pissed off by this thread (I'd like to see if he has anything to say on his site about new distribution policies or anything, but I can't access it since he blocked access from something like 75% of the world outside the US to his website out of paranoia) I guess.

So, we'll remove the entries and won't carry new ones of course. That should already be the bottom line of things, we just don't care anymore what he is doing.

Another note about "scene rules"

We are not the scene, we only offer a site which serves as a meeting point for the biggest part of it. Hence we can't really enforce any kind of rules for the scene as a whole. If Nightwolve will break any ethic laws (if such a thing really exists), all he has to fear is being shunned by the community here on the site. Since he isn't a member here he won't give a damn about it. So ignoring him is the only thing we can really do.

While dshadoff is propably right, whining won't change anything, I won't close this thread. Feel free to discuss this further, but please take care not to repeat the same arguments over and over again. It looks like the thread is dangerously headed in that direction.

Since this topic was also brought up to discuss how the scene and the site should react to this kind of stuff in the future. Of course Nightcrawler has the final word on this (he is currently not around, too bad he missed this intersting discussion entirely), but I think I can safely say that we won't support people who sell their patches actively anytime in the future. Since selling translations is clearly illegal and we don't want to have legal trouble for our site we can't support such people. A link that the translation exists somewhere is propably the most we might do (propably not even that).