Downloading Decks and Copyright

[purple_scorp]

Hello all,

I'm new to this forum and wanted to know what the situation was with regard to downloading decks from the exchange section in terms of copyright.

Thanks

purple_sorp

[Programmer]

A couple of other people have asked about this, if you do a forum search on the word copyright I am sure you will find the relevant posts.

Cheers :)

[purple_scorp]

Hi Richard,

Let me start by saying that I'm asking this question because I have some decks that are not currently in the exchange and I was wondering about the legality of uploading them.

I did the search as you suggested (and I apologise for not doing that first). I found one of your posts where you wrote:

My strong conviction is that most deck creators would be happy to have scans of their decks exchanged in this way, given that nearly all users of this progam are keen tarot deck collectors and having a sampler of the deck in Orphalese Tarot format will often prompt them to purchase the real thing. It would be desirable to try to track down the copyright holder of every deck that is uploaded here and confirm this, but given that this is not practical the assumption will be that the author does not mind until they indicate that they do.

At the risk of sounding like the copyright police (which I'm not, nor do I have any connection too .-)) but how would the author know that their deck was available for download, so that they could then complain, if they weren't happy about it? Some of them may not have even heard of this software (shock, horror, yes I know!!!).

Personally, I agree with your statement where you suggest that seeing the deck in Orphalese would prompt a person to buy it. The same works in reverse in that, you might not go and buy it because you don't like it as much as you thought you would. Orphalese is fantastic for giving you exposure to decks that you would not otherwise have seen.

I expect that an author would have no problems with people having the deck in Orphalese if they had a real copy of the deck (like Tarot of Dreams for example - which I have). It's a bit like burning a copy of a cd for yoursElf from a real copy that you had purchased. But burning mp3's off the net is a different matter.

So, is their an onus on the person uploading the deck to go and check with the author first?

Regards
purple_scorp

[Programmer]

Hi Purple,

I think if you wanted to double check with the deck's author, and you managed to do that, that would be fine. If you wanted to enthuse them about the program and interest them in doing a software/deck bundle (as with the Tarot of Dreams) that would be even better! But I would not like to talk in terms of an onus on users to do this, because I think that in many cases it would not be possible anyway and it would simply put people off uploading.

I think your metaphor about copying a CD you already bought v making an illegal copy of a song off the internet is not really appropriate. To my way of thinking it misses the point that music is an abstract thing, the experience of listening to it is the same in both cases (CD or illegal mp3). But a tarot card is something that has a tangible reality, so a photographic scan of a card is not the same as the card itself.

It would bother me a lot if people were using deck scans that they downloaded here to physically print out a tarot deck. There have been cases of this kind of copyright theft, where people have commercially marketed decks printed off from scans they found on the internet (I don't mean with the Orphalese Tarot, I mean from the internet in general). My experience of corresponding with the several artists whose deck scans are in the Other Decks section has shown that this is a shared preocupation, and I have encouraged them to provide scans at a sufficient resolution that work well on screen, but without enough resolution to make them printable. Actually this is very easy. You need a lot more resolution to make a deck printable, and you can still get good results on screen with smaller files.

Cheers
Richard

[purple_scorp]

Hi Richard,

thanks for replying and apologies for such a late response from me.

I have a feeling that the Australian Copyright law states that you cannot reproduce more than 10 of an artists' work without their permission. 10 relates to an individual piece of art (such as one card) not as in 10 of the total deck. So, and I might be incorrect, you would only be able to reproduce a small section (10) of each card. This covers any type of media reproduction whether it be printing/photocopying etc.

Having said that, I can definitely see a difference in downloading a deck for your own private (screen) use versus downloading a deck for commerical reproduction. And personally, I don't have a problem with the former.

Thanks for clarifying the issue for me.

with love
purple_scorp