SRB2's assets & intellectual property

PixL

PixL

Member
I am currently trying to research which exact parts of SRB2's assets (as of writing v2.2.11) do and don't infringe on the intellectual property of SEGA, Nintendo, etc.. Since I expect this to be a long-term discussion, I've opened this thread to keep track of our findings. If you happen to know anything about a yet-unaddressed or yet-ambiguous part of the game files, please post what you've found. If you find some other resource (such as Wiki pages) which can offer more information on this, please share those in here as well.

To illustrate the goal of this thread, let me start with a few broad strokes I gained from digging through the files in SLADE:

srb2.pk3: This is the big one, which sparked the idea for this thread. As this PK3 contains the majority of assets and as such a multitude of different file types of varying structures and purposes, it naturally seems to have varying degrees of ambiguity to it's content. While more generic assets such as a snowman are clearly fine and very specific assets such as Pipe Towers' textures obviously classify, most of the assets used are ambiguous due to these unaddressed questions:​
  • Were they even pulled from external sources when there's no obvious reference in the file? If yes, did these sources freely license them (e.g. stock assets under public domain or CC-BY-*)?
  • Is the type of file even protectable in the first place (e.g. screen transitions)?
Due to the sheer mass of assets to which these questions apply, a lot of clarification is needed for this PK3.​
​
zones.pk3: This one is probably fine. Although the level select pictures naturally depend on the textures' appearance, SRB2's standard maps (unlike a lot of open source games, actually) don't seem to directly reference anything protected without referencing the base assets provided by srb2.pk3.​
​
player.dta would almost entirely classify. As this WAD contains all playable characters, almost every internal file depicts something which falls under SEGA's IP.​
​
music.dta is arguable. While there are some tracks that are undeniably taken from other sources (e.g. DISCO being pulled from the Earthworm Jim series), most of the music has thankfully been composed specifically for the game. According to some rumors, a lot of SRB2's original music may still classify though, as it allegedly relies on Leitmotifs taken from S3&K. If you happen to know any more specifics on that issue, please comment.​
 
PixL said:
According to some rumors, a lot of SRB2's original music may still classify though, as it allegedly relies on Leitmotifs taken from S3&K
Click to expand...
SRB2’s main theme is taken from the Virtual Sonic album:

The Wiki has more info: https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/List_of_music

This project will also not be complete unless you consider which assets are taken from Doom, such as the Cacodemon and missile sounds.

Furthermore, zones.pk3 would not be clean as it uses copyrighted textures and depicts copyrighted characters, like the Cirno Easter Egg: https://tcrf.net/File:SRB2-Cirno-EasterEgg.png

Finally, remember that several levels were made by the community, not by the devs. This includes but is not limited to:

- Aerial Garden
- Haunted Heights
- Sapphire Falls
- Frozen Hillside
- Pipe Towers
 
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DylanDude said:
SRB2’s main theme is taken from the Virtual Sonic album:

The Wiki has more info: https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/List_of_music

This project will also not be complete unless you consider which assets are taken from Doom, such as the Cacodemon and missile sounds.

Furthermore, zones.pk3 would not be clean as it uses copyrighted textures and depicts copyrighted characters, like the Cirno Easter Egg: https://tcrf.net/File:SRB2-Cirno-EasterEgg.png

Finally, remember that several levels were made by the community, not by the devs. This includes but is not limited to:

- Aerial Garden
- Haunted Heights
- Sapphire Falls
- Frozen Hillside
- Pipe Towers
Click to expand...
zones.pk3 does not contain any textures itself though, just the map geometry, level thumbnails, object defs, etc. The Cirno easter egg may count (as it looks to be geometrically-based), but Sapphire Falls using a Green Hill Zone remix doesn't "taint" zones.pk3. You could most likely swap out srb2.pk3 and still play a perfectly non-infringing version of Sapphire Falls by using zones.pk3 as-is.
 
The first thing that pops into mind for me is the reuse of a few skyboxes, such as Aerial Garden using what is IIRC the background texture from Sonic Advance's Angel Island Zone. I'm pretty sure that by now such things are already well documented though.
 
If I remember correctly, the Attraction Shield's sprites are recoloured from one of the Sonic Advance games.
 
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