ADR3-N 2017-02-01 19:50:22

@Kyron20, I'd just like to point out that A, @RealFaction is not a moderator and B, Newgrounds is not responsible for the abuse we've suffered at the hands of the GD community. Yes, we could have gone to drastic measures such as totally shutting down our AP to stop the thefts, but ultimately, the thefts were brought on by GD's implementation of custom songs as well as the cancerous side of the GD kitty pool, making the water turn green and whatnot whenever things didn't go their way (just look at the death threats sent our way over song usage), uploading thousands of stolen songs weekly.

C. Custom levels are way more of a intellectual property rights issue than you realize. Consider these break the licenses of 99% of the artists I know, since Rob is getting paid every time someone's music is "featured" in a custom level, and until this update is applied, we can't opt out of this without giving the finger to our fanbases and disabling downloads, that's a tough load of shit you're telling us shouldn't be hard to swallow raw -- without any compensation for our licenses being broken without our consent.

D. Troisnyx, RealFaction, and all the others that signed that petition and/or flagged the game for violating their rights did not act alone, nor solely in their own interest, nor in the interest of profit. Laws, morals, ethics, and principles are what guide us. We upload our craft for the love of it, and our craft was (and still is at the time of writing) being treated like dollar store cologne at best -- at worst, personal lubricant.

Rob was (and again is at time of writing) getting paid based off of this use and abuse of our craft, and no one was aware ANYTHING was being done except him and Bren until that petition. It was necessary, and I will not apologize for it, least of all to the community whose small but loud minority thinks a DMCA takedown merits death threats -- directed at Troisnyx, who wasn't even the culprit; it was me, RealFaction, and everyone who flagged the game on Steam for violating their intellectual property rights -- which we had the moral, ethical, and legal high ground to do, since NOTHING appeared to be being done about it despite repeated attempts to contact the developer.

I frankly don't give a shit who disagrees with me. You cannot paint this picture in any way so as to show that the other side of the fence was right without grasping for straws and/or outright distorting the facts of the rampant misuse and abuse Newgrounds has suffered for the past 3 years since GD 1.9.

Kyron20 2017-02-01 20:01:25

I understand where you're coming from, but let's dive a bit deeper into these.

Users pay $2.00 for Geometry Dash normally. Apple/Google takes a cut of that, let's assume 20%. That leaves Rob with a whopping $1.60 per sale. Let's say he takes a dollar of that, or perhaps even less. Even with $1.60 to be split up among Newgrounds artists, there are hundreds of artist's songs that are and will be used. That's already less than a cent for each sale. Rob has to divide it among everyone, and then go through and determine the amount of followers and the popularity of the songs and then split the money accordingly. After that, it really just becomes chaos for everyone for so little gain. It would take normal users I'd say around 10,000 sales to get somewhere near a dollar, and that's if Rob gave everything he earns to Newgrounds. As much as I think it's a good idea, in the end it would become a hassle for almost nothing.

By saying you acted alone, I didn't mean you by yourself. I meant the moderators, without the help of Tom, who was already working to get the issue resolved. I know it's hard when you're not getting a response, but even then, there were other things you could have tried. I personally believe I would have gone to Tom first, but then again, what do I know? I may have done the same as you. My point is, it seems that you may have tried multiple times, but only in a couple ways. I'm mostly just confused as to why Tom wasn't talked to about this, since it involves a large portion of his website, but I understand everyone has their reasons.

The reason I feel that you should apologize is because there are thousands of other Geometry Dash players, a couple of which I know, that feel they were treated unfairly. In generalizing the community, you ended up calling a lot of level-headed, reasonable people toxic and cancerous, while proceeding to mess with something they care about. After getting what you were after, they probably feel like you got everything you wanted while insulting and affecting them. My point is, even though there are people who commented that will be mad forever, you still have the majority of the Geometry Dash community against you. I understand if you can't apologize to the entirety of the Geometry Dash community. That's completely understandable. If you can't do it for them, at least do it for the people who did nothing wrong yet who were affected by this. And I'm not just talking about you. I think they deserve an apology from all three of you which I mentioned in my previous post.

I'm trying to help you guys, and I've been trying for a while. I've been doing what I can to report tracks that are being uploaded for the purpose of being used in Geometry Dash. Now I'm trying to help you recreate the bond with the majority of the Geometry Dash community. I do have everyone's best interests in mind, and I really hope you can see that. In fact, I've been dealing with the same portion of the community that you have been dealing with for about a year now, so I think I can effectively say that I'm on your side. I still feel that the people who have not wronged anyone should be compensated, and I feel like an apology to them would do that pretty quickly.

Kyron20 2017-02-01 20:10:17

@EDM364 I think you misunderstood. I think having to sort through all of the illegal submissions is awful, and I never said it wasn't. I also never said Newgrounds is responsible for your actions. What I did say was that with your actions you made Newgrounds look bad in the eyes of the Geometry Dash users.

Rob actually doesn't get paid for "featured" levels. He gets paid once from when people download the app. I don't know exactly where you got that information from, but it's not true. I also never said that you shouldn't be paid and that new systems should be put into place. I'm on your side with this one, believe it or not. I explained much of this in greater detail in my previous post. Please read that to help yourself understand better.

I don't mean to be rude with these posts at all. I respect you guys, and I try to help you out. So if you have anything else to comment about, please keep that in mind while doing so.

ADR3-N 2017-02-01 20:30:11

You're mistaken @Kyron20. Rob gets paid each time an ad on the free version is displayed, which is pretty frequent. Consider that the custom levels are why people buy the game, and they were VERY clumsily implemented in a way that basically told people "use any song you want", not "follow NG rules and use what's already here". This is being touched up in the next update thankfully and shouldn't be as much of a problem.

You have to understand that 99% of the GD users we had coming at us on NG were not the garden variety good folks. They were the cancerous mass which is currently still dogging us all over the web and sending us death threats (and exhorting all of YT to do the same). We were never talking about the quiet people. In fact, I barely talked about anything except the daily infringements I ran into as well as the infringements upon my, Real's, and @Xtrullor's rights. I won't be issuing an apology, because it was never them I was talking about, and I'm not sorry for agreeing wholly with Troisnyx's initial post about GD abusers, even if it should have been more about our rights being infringed for pay than the pinheads hell bent on abusing our site.

I feel like we're going to argue into a hole here. My opinion on this likely is not going to change whatsoever until the hotfixes are implemented and the abusers start heeding RobTop's announcement and stop sending in death threat after death threat after "hijo de puta madre" yadda yadda. After all, most people worship him as some God anyway, and what is my word to a community whose voice vastly outstrips my own, who has gas-lighted me, and whose creator has not acknowledged his own part in allowing a sizable portion of a VERY large community to trample us underfoot. Again, all the users who signed that petition and flagged the game had the moral and righteous reason for doing so.

Kyron20 2017-02-01 21:09:04

@EDM364 You could consider that, but the majority of users bought the game before custom songs were implemented. Also, every song that is used in the free version is a song Rob got permission to edit and use for that purpose, so I don't know why this is being brought up. Rob has also said things about following the rules here, although because about half of the community speaks Spanish they didn't understand, and the other people that upload illegal music here and such are likely younger than twelve and don't care for rules or anything at all.

I hope you understand that by "coming at you," that just shows how they are the immature group of the bunch. What you can't see is the hundreds of thousands that didn't post here because they were level-headed enough not to. Even though you may have kept your mouth shut when it came to calling the Geometry Dash community names, you still did celebrate a victory by taking the game off of multiple platforms. Even that might and can upset users.

Your third paragraph again proves my point that a large portion of the community is Spanish. They make up most of what's happening here. You may think RobTop controls his community, but he really can't. Rob is nearly a slave to his community. In fact, he said Newgrounds was not involved in the removal of Geometry Dash from Steam, even though he was mistaken.

You're making a lot of assumptions about certain things. Rob has been working on this issue with Tom and Brent. Rob also makes the majority of his money from purchases of the full version. He isn't obligated to share the free version money because he has permission from the artists that contributed to that. The full version is the problem here, and I've explained why it is so irrational. Nobody here would make any significant amount of money if Rob shared the pay, even if he gave 100% of it to the people who's audio is used, it would still be an insignificant amount of money.

My main point is, I still believe an apology should be due. While you may not have said anything about Geometry Dash users being cancerous or toxic, you have said and done things that still offended people. You still generalized and therefore you caused some users to feel mistreated and misjudged. Remember, these are not my complaints, but multiple others' complaints. We will only argue into a hole if we refuse to accept what each other is saying.

ADR3-N 2017-02-01 22:08:35

@Kyron20, you're still misunderstanding what I'm saying -- that we aren't complaining about the official 20 levels. What we ARE complaining about, quite justly, is that GD custom songs, which are very widely played on both versions of the game (unless something has changed since I play tested 2.1) , are being used in a way that violates our licenses and TOS, especially considering custom levels are the meat of the game now.

That is WELL worth doing something about so long as we have utterly no say-so whether users can abuse our craft or not. A fix is in the pipelines for this now for GD to use a JSON call with NG we can in turn use to allow or disallow music in the game. For those of us with a non-commercial CC license, which is the norm on NG since we generally don't mind sharing our music but don't want some company like Sprint taking our equivalent of "Narwhals" for a commercial or some independent making hundreds if not thousands of dollars without paying us a cent much like what has happened with GD, it'll be a godsend for which we will kiss liljim's feet and be grateful RobTop actually managed to squeeze into his updates.

I'll be frank with you, I will not back down there so long as those CC licenses are being broken and we have no way to opt out, no matter how little money is being made per track, etc. ANY profit from breaking these licenses is against the law and morally wrong, in bad ethics. That in itself was the reason we DMCA'ed GD in the first place, not the cancerous side of the community defacing the site. Our intellectual property and livelihood has been threatened. We were well within our rights to lobby, petition, flag, and DMCA to that end, and still are until the problem is fixed. The law is being broken.

I respect that you believe I should apologize for my actions, but you must respect in turn that I believe I have no obligation to do so until the root of the problem is made right and what I am fighting for -- the freedom of NG artists such as myself to decide if their non-profit works should be used for profit without compensation or not, as well as their intellectual property rights are protected and respected according to the law and what it believes is reasonable -- not anyone else's assertion of what is reasonable or not. We are obligated to respect the rights of ALL creators, especially when there is profit involved, no matter how small. Otherwise these laws just continue to favor powerful individuals/corporations and trample the little man.

As far as the game's DMCA goes, the removal was just in the eyes of the law. The law stands above abstract concepts like fun, butthurt, and political correctness. When a product violates the laws of a nation, it's taken off the market, sometimes punishing the creator. Copyright and CC license are used globally and are protected by law. When a product breaks that for profit, it is taken off the grid in the same fashion. I think we've all been more than polite considering greedier folks such as the record labels would have just sued RobTop's ass off.

Kyron20 2017-02-01 23:20:55

@EDM364 I think the reasons our opinions differ so greatly on this is because Geometry Dash is in a bit of a grey area. RobTop isn't technically using the songs for his own benefit, but the songs are included in the game nonetheless. I guess we'll have to let our opinions differ here. Personally I believe that it's not a violation, but it could be argued either way, so I'll respect your opinion.

I am glad that Rob is taking steps to work with Newgrounds on this issue. I think it's a step forward in cleaning up this site. Again, I do think removing Geometry Dash from certain stores was a bit uncalled for. Rob was working with Tom and Brent to have the problem fixed, but I understand that there was some miscommunication.

I get that you're frustrated that you can't opt out of this now. Looking back I believe some sort of failsafe should have been added, but it's too late for that now. I do think the original terms of the agreement were a bit extreme, although I know why they were put into place. I think they were extreme because everyone would get messages from everyone and their dog about using a song for a level that will never go anywhere. Personally, I would have hated that, and I'm sure everyone who's hundreds or thousands of followers ahead would have hated it even more.

I respect your obligation to not apologize. The main reason I suggested it is because Troisnyx wants to take steps to get on better terms with the Geometry Dash community, and I know there are people that are angry about it because they feel like they did nothing wrong and still took the fall. We'll just have to see if what Rob and Tom worked out works.

Again, I believe this issue is in more of a grey area, but luckily it's being resolved as we speak (or type) so it shouldn't be a problem for too much longer. Hopefully we won't have any more issues like this in the future.

larrynachos 2017-02-02 09:18:56

yeah the gd users need to suck it up and shut up, but why pull from steam?

Really hope a compromise is found soon

larrynachos 2017-02-02 09:21:36

just read this. Interesting solution.
http://robtopgames.com/blog/2017/02/01/geometry-dash-newgrounds/

zybor 2017-02-02 10:50:52

@Kyron20

don't be salty. tom said new users can't upload track for their sneaks anymore. only verified users, keyword "famous". which means we lot all benefit from this. except you bitter and salty lots that believed GD would come back.

simply said, Troisnyx's petition KO'ed GD and your lot. Eat it up.

zybor 2017-02-02 11:01:43

@Z4memarionne

yeah it's innocent when you steal other people music, post it on an indie site, for your own selfish level design, then let the site takes all the DMCA reports because some snob kid like you wanted to play free game.

Z4memarionne 2017-02-02 11:35:46

Please reply as soon as possible

Were you one of the ppl who are responsible for gd being taken down? Because im sure i read a post somewhere that newgrounds is not responsible.

SoundChris 2017-02-02 15:04:57

Well i am glad that this finally happened to be honest. In the past i wasnt even aware that there was something like GD. Someday i unpublished one of my tracks on NG and suddenly got lots of PM here telling me how asocial i would be to take down their GD track and that i have to republish it.

I just thought: ??? I really had no idea at all what he was talking about. In the end i found out that one or 2 of my tracks were quite popular on GD without me even knowing it. And i found my music in tons of GD videos on youtube and also on lots of filesharing places across the internet. Yay ... how great i am famous ... ehrm ... With the time i took this more and more serious because these people really started to annoy me trying to force me to make the track downloadable because its totally inaceptable to deactivate the download option. Some voted zero or even wrote a review on the tracks telling me with 0 stars and a comment how shitty i would act not to allow the downloads for them. That was the moment where i really started to HATE (sorry but its just what i do) GD.

So i just can say: Thanks Trois and all the others who finally stopped that nonsense!

FireStarGaming 2017-02-02 16:09:00

Okay. I agree with many of your points.

I am still confused to why you guys managed to take Geometry Dash off steam.

Like, isn't that illegal?

poni64 2017-02-02 16:29:33

On myth 5: Technicly speaking you made the music free to use, by using this website.
And if you dont want it to be used in GD well, "Music is what makes the game, and without it, the game might as well be a bland piece of crap not worth selling"

Now stopping talking about myth 5, There are always people who take there time to annoy the hell and bitch about everything.

But yeah, im aware it was, MORE than a few people though.

And the game was removedd from steam most likeley because RobTop didnt want to deal with legal issues and Mass Internet Freakout.

Still, what you trieed to do was compleatley justified even if most people (like me) didnt like the desicion,

And one more thing, the people of the internet are either good bad, or a prick.

ReverseIntelligence 2017-02-02 16:35:06

The new conditions to get a song working in GD seem effective. What do you think of it?

GDStirFry 2017-02-02 17:49:59

@troisnyx i still think your best option is to remove Geometry Dash for good, so that the toxic community i have unfortunately became apart of can disappear off of the face of the Earth, and so your community can once again thrive and flourish without that toxic cloud of Geometry Dash constantly looming over it. I still believe that, since RobTop technically broke the law, he should be put in prison, the rights to his game removed from him, and every penny he ever earned sent directly to Newgrounds' pockets for carrying his sorry excuse for a rhythm based platformer for 3 solid years.

Z4memarionne 2017-02-02 18:18:09

@Troisnyx what do you mean by "indirectly"?

ADR3-N 2017-02-02 19:11:44

@SoundChris Wow, and you didn't even know these guys existed until they started downrating you by the thousands. Yeah, I'm glad we did step up. Perhaps the issues were even broader than I realized.

ADR3-N 2017-02-02 20:32:20

"Personally I believe that it's not a violation, but it could be argued either way, so I'll respect your opinion."

I wish I could somehow make you understand. I suppose you can lead a horse to water.

In the eyes of the law and the artists' licenses, Rob is profiting off of a lot of music that isn't his to profit off of, abusing our rights without any compensation. Even a minuscule .001 of a cent to NG per cent earned off of ads and sales (which, btw, would contribute to us artists indirectly by allowing NG to distribute that revenue to the people who make this site great) would be better than nothing. It's akin to slavery -- the plantation owner not paying a cent to us for the crops we grew on Newgrounds, which he sells for cash. Right now, GD is just causing needless server load and Rob is profiting.

Legally, NG is indeed entitled to some of the earnings -- after all, he's literally selling the ability to play every download enabled song on site s a level. Most of these levels violate non-commercial Creative Commons license and the law because Rob sold this ability or runs ads and monetizes the levels. Does that make sense? If there were no money being made at all, we would have very few legal bones to pick.

Also, read @SoundChris's comment here and you'll see why we needed this. Most artists didn't even know they were taken advantage of. If they did know, it's because they found out rather quickly. That's what I'm getting at.

We're still being sold for profit and our craft treated like dirt. :/ The theft is just the most visible symptoms of the insidious syphilis.