forum

[Proposal] Restricting Ranked/Loved Status of Commissioned beatmaps

posted
Total Posts
53
Topic Starter
Sparhten

"Any beatmap found to be commissioned through monetary or other gains is not eligible for the ranked or loved categories, With the only Exception being that Every file and Source material has explicit permission from the respective creators this includes: SB Sprites, Background art, Mp3/Song's, and every other file found in the folder."


The recent trend of Beatmap commissions has created a large backlash within the mapping community and thus i see no reason not to ban the ranking / loved status of these maps as previously they where considered barely okay due to a vocal few stating that they wanted them in some shape or way to stay comparing it to artists being paid for their work. Beatmaping should not be seen as something that you spend years learning to earn money from if you want something like that as a hobby you should choose another hobby.They are legal issues waiting to happen, they promote low quality mapping with low standards trying to meet the bare minimum to hit the ranked/loved sections, and they create questionable situations with motives of Bn/Nat's when pushing a map.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  • Banning commissions wont stop people from doing it behind closed doors so why bother?
  1. Currently the ranking criteria says a commissioned map can be pushed if the bn's involved are not paid for it. Meaning they in theory can still just push them in some extreme cases maybe even so their friends make money off it and who knows maybe that friend buys them a game or some league skins in the future as a thanks for pushing the map. Also in banning them all together this allows us to take action against any bn/Nat's found knowingly pushing these to ranked with punishments such as removal from the bng/nat ect. where currently we can only start an investigation and remove them if we have sufficient evidence that they where paid for the Comission itself.
    Lastly allows us to take more extreme measures if need be and unrank maps / silence or restrict players breaking these rules intentionally for monetary gain.

    I already learned mapping and don't wanted to make money off making maps though.
  2. This proposal doesn't stop you from doing that you can still make commissioned maps they just cannot be ranked or loved as that is seen as official content for the game.

    can i be commissioned for featured artists?
  3. No they made a deal to have their songs used with staff not you, you can ask them or do the preferable route and try out mappers guild where there's plenty of underutilized benefits such as helping choose future FA'S profile badges and more!

    What if i [insert Bn/Nat name here] rank a map without knowing its a commission?
  4. If you didnt not know it was a commission there likely is no need to fear as there wont be any thing saying you knew,
    if your worried about being framed or having a mixup there's a very low chance to that working as staff are very thorough on these checks there are a few cases where haste judgments are made but are usually rectified quite fast i.e. nuvolina and hailie being removed for undeadcapulets commissioned map.
    so in these cases the map would be potentially unranked and the mapper would be punished accordingly

    Punishments for those who try to sneak their way past the system.
  5. Personally i believe that if you try to cheat the system for monetary gain after its made blatantly obvious you should face some sort of capital punishment such as at minimum a month silence scaling to 6 based on infraction count and unranking of the beatmap. after say 5 infractions or less potentially 3 as that would prove you're not learning, a ban as per the regular if you cheated could be imposed. this is the part of the post im unsure about so any suggestions would be appreciated below

Fu Xuan
agree
Nozhomi
It's kinda stupid to spend money on mapping in the first place.

Also agree with that.
hypercyte
big agree
newton-
agree of above average size
3 strikes seems like a good number btw, 5 is too lenient imo
Yukiyo
agree
Zelq
agree
Duskyui
agree
JierYagtama
It's dumb to make a pay wall for mapping so please go ahead with this
Myxo
big agree
Kondou-Shinichi
yes
honne
YeS yeEs Yes YES yeS.
snowin
yes indeed
Monstrata
Some initial copyright grey areas:

What are you guys' stances on songs that are not protected by copyright? Or are royalty-free? What if the artist has not filed a proper copyright? Happens more often than you think with Doujin music especially. Or what if the song is produced in a country whose copyright treaties are not fully protected by US copyright laws? (For example, you can use certain North Korean non-state-sanctioned/approved music regardless of copyrights since NK and US lack treaties protecting all NK songs, only songs approved by the Great Leader are protected.)

Some fine-tuning to the rule:


How would you define "permission". Is it enough for an artist to say "sure, you can use my song"? I assume you also require people to inform the artist that you will be profiting off their work, so I guess the "explicit permission" should include proof that you explicitly told them that there is monetary gain on your part.

The problem with "Legal issues are bound to happen":


Many commissions nowadays range from $10-50. I think only me and Sotarks have ever had 3 or 4 digit commission requests, and I highly doubt anyone else will receive such commissions. The problem is that these numbers are far too small to attract lawsuits anyways. Copyright law is a very rare field, and you are easily looking at lawyers billing $300+ an hour to file lawsuits. I can say with certainty that legal problems are 99.99% not going to arise any time in the near future. I reserve 0.01% if Sony decides it has spare change and wants to try establishing a precedent, but it's so unlikely because the court can also just dismiss for insignificant amount-in-controversy.

Thoughts on commissions and osu!legal:


I personally don't think commissions is any worse than osu!supporter. If anything, I think the entire concept of osu!supporter is what Artists would be more upset about, because rather than missing out on like 10% of a 50 dollar commission, they are actually losing sales due to their works being freely downloadable/hosted. And osu! enjoys sanctimoniously dismissing these claims as "we are promoting their work!!!" So for me, if you want to ban commissions, definitely consider osu!'s revenue stream too. I don't mind banning commissions, because honestly I thought the decision had already been made over a year ago when I announced Mapping Mafia lol. This just seems like writing the community's general stance on commissions into actual Community Rules which honestly should have just been done like 9 months ago anyways. From a legal perspective, it's the better thing to do, and limits peppy's legal risk in the future. But I mean, this entire site is walking on a legal minefield anyways. We aren't like YouTube where you can reasonably expect user-submitted content to be original content. Virtually 99.99% of content on this site is clearly pirated and everyone knows it. Maybe in a few years Mapping Guild will make a dent in that percentage though.
Shidoni
i agree
-Atri-
I'm down on this too
-mint-
based and osupilled. i support
-MysticEyes
Really solid proposal, definitely agree.
Syph

Sparhten wrote:

They are legal issues waiting to happen


osu! in itself is a lawsuit waiting to happen, as I'm sure everyone knows considering there's 320532853278 illegal files uploaded to osu! daily. osu! is safe from that though since staff plays dumb and pretends they don't know this happens so they can just dmca stuff when requested. Taking this into consideration I'd say it's really immoral to reference that as a reason to disallow commissioned beatmaps.
Nao Tomori
still dunno what this does since people getting commissions will just lie about it (or act like sotarks and meme about it obnoxiously while staff doesn't do anything as usual) and all of these punishments are ignoring the main issue of not being able to tell if a map is commissioned lol
Sakura Blossom
Nice post should be spread around more though~
Cubby
jus put it in
DeviousPanda
Yea something needs to be done about commissions
Kizusu
agreed
Seolv

newton- wrote:

agree of above average size
3 strikes seems like a good number btw, 5 is too lenient imo


my thoughts are the same, 3 would be good
as for the suggestion itself, it's a great idea, especially because lately commissions are becoming more and more popular within the community, doing something like this would be perfect

also ur cute
Frakturehawkens
Agree, but only ranked status. I
want to believe people pay for maps (it's their choice), not for leaderboards and effort of BN who can get nothing from it, not a single cent.
-Arche
I agree !!!
skylaa
fat agree
Uber
this seems silly lol
Loarca
Go for it
Dendy
Agree!
Beomsan
agreed
show more
Please sign in to reply.

New reply