In the Latest Installment of Treating Your Content Creators Like Snowflakes
For clymax’s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube or Twitter.
A while back, YouTube removed public Dislike counts as announced here (emphasis added):
We’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away.
This change will start gradually rolling out today.
Despite such a statement—and perhaps to no one’s surprise—YouTube recently finally added insult to injury by actually removing the Dislike button from Shorts, as announced here:
[W]e’re … retiring the dislike button.
Instead, we’ll rely on … “Not Interested” and “Don’t recommend this channel,” to … tune your feed and serve up content….
The update sparked discussion across the web, such as on the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit.
New Language Silently Added to “Legal & Terms” Page
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped.If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
The following new section was added via a Pull Request here with seemingly no announcement made on the website (emphasis added):
Achievement Data
Achievement titles, descriptions, and related metadata may be referenced or reused by third parties (eg: for tracking sites or community tools).
Achievement trigger logic (the code and conditions that define how achievements are evaluated) is proprietary to the RetroAchievements community and may not be reused, redistributed, or reproduced without explicit permission. The GPL-3 license covering the RetroAchievements web application source code does not extend to achievement data.
This claim may be questionable for many reasons.
Achievement [trigger] logic may not necessarily be protectible by copyright. But let’s set that aside from now.
To the extent that the achievement logic is protectible by copyright, the copyright vests, at least initially, in the achievement author. Not in Retro Achievements.
According to their Developer Code of Conduct here:
Achievement Ownership
When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time….
This language, however, does not necessarily mean that achievement authors transfer copyright to Retro Achievements.
Neither does it necessarily mean that Retro Achievements has any exclusive license to use the achievement logic.
It could mean that Retro Achievements has at best a non-exclusive license to use the achievement logic.
In that scenario, only the achievement authors have authority to decide whom else can “reuse[], redistribute[], or reproduce[]” the achievement logic.
Retro Achievements would have no authority, under copyright, to tell any party that he or she cannot “reuse[], redistribute[], or reproduce[]” the achievement logic.
Spritework Offered for Sale Without Permission, Allegedly
For clymax’s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube or Twitter.
December 2, 2025
Spriter: Am I seeing this right? Are you selling bootleg carts and including optional patches? First, get my name off of it, now. Second, many of those optional patches are my work, or include parts of my work, and, no, you are not allowed to sell them under any circumstance, in any form.
Spriter: [Seller] does not have the rights to sell or distribute the Final Fantasy IV ROM. [Seller] does not have permission to sell any of my work included in FFIV [Modification]’s optional patches. If you buy a reproduction cart from [Seller], you are purchasing an illegal product and stolen non-commercial fanart. I condemn the inclusion of my work and the use of my online handle on this eBay page.
Seller: I see, will remove
Also, be sure to send some cease and desist to this seller as well: [link redacted]
and this one: [link redacted]
there may be a few others
Spriter: Your eBay page still contains original art of mine, in addition to edited work. [3 artwork names redacted], most of the fonts.
Seller: [4 links redacted]
These all have them too
Spriter: I don’t speak for the main FFIV [Modification] project, I don’t speak for Square Enix. I don’t condone the sale of reproduction carts in general, and I don’t care to discuss creative, wrong interpretations of copyright law and enforcement. My concern is I do not want art that I created and especially not my name associated with your illegal bootlegs.
Moderator: this sounds like an excellent conversation to have in dms
Modification-Team Member A: Please leave it to the DMs guys.
If there’s something that involves someone else, please also DM them and handle it in private.
[Editor’s note: messages were deleted by Moderator]
Moderator: I am deleting the recent messages and WILL ban/kick if necessary. I, as a moderator, made a direct specific request to keep it to dms
if the dms themselves weren’t civil, there was no reason to bring it back into the public channels of this discord
[Editor’s note: Following this exchange, the Spriter was noted as no longer being in the Discord. It was not immediately clear whether the Spriter was booted from the Discord or left of his own accord.]
Modification-Team Member B: I was asked to remove some patches from the archive today in regards to a community member selling some physical copies of [Modification]. Any major combination of the existing patches in the archive are available in [Seller’s] storefront, so I was asked by a contributor to remove their content as they are not interested in this arrangement. If you also would like your patches removed from the public archive and the web patchers for any reason, now or in the future, let me know
What do you think? Do you side with the spriter or seller in this case? What’s your take on repro carts of mods in general? Comment below, or check us out on Discord.
