So he/she can make money off of ads without doing any of the work.



Yes, and although I am not a lawyer, my understanding is that there is no legal distinction for freeware (in the US). Which means that you have to prove that the redistribution caused harm to you. Since Cemetech users are not making money off of uploading their programs here, it would probably be impossible to prove that you were harmed in court.

That being said, andressevilla is completely in the wrong here and I would be upset if they hosted my programs without permission. Unfortunately I am sure they don't care about doing the right thing and would rather bring their ad revenue in as long as they can't be touched behind their screen. Oh well. People suck sometimes.

EDIT: I looked through both sites and I could not find the ads mentioned by someone else. I don't want to blame anyone prematurely, but the points still stand for the most part. This is greed vs morality, even if the host isn't making money off the downloads.

Doesn't this complicate fair use exceptions for many of us who have designed games based off of other popular games, that fall within the purview of fair use because no profit is being made off them? If another person took those projects, hosted them on a website with ads, wouldn't that then cause problems for the project developers, or even for andres, for profiting off a copyrighted work?

Let's not turn this thread into "flame someone trying to bring interest to the calculator community", albeit in ways that we may not entirely agree with.

Hey dankcalculatorbro. I don't know if you read the rest of the posts in this thread, but I'll try to address your concerns.

Why I run ads: to support the costs of running the website. I was running the website largely at a loss for nearly 1.5 years (supported only by my YouTube channel), I have only recently added Adsense. I have to pay for my compute engine server VM, bandwidth usage and SSD storage for that VM, bandwidth/storage for my GCP buckets hosting the downloads, and more. As I am sure the admins of Cemetech and TICalc.org can tell you, we are not exactly getting rich off of these websites.

Why I insist on hosting my own files: I discussed this a bit on SAX, but my reasoning is largely in line with that of Lionel Debroux. In addition to his philosophy, I have also been trying to eliminate as many barriers as possible for people to get into calculator programming, and as you probably know, games are the main entry point for that. The problem with sites like Cemetech and ticalc.org is that the average user comes on, downloads a game, and then it doesn't work in many cases because of some mysterious thing called "libload" (bernard-young is case in point). My downloads come bundled with all the necessary libraries to avoid this problem.

I have largely moved away from calculator programming to web development and computer programming, but helping others get into calculators is still a massive part of my life. My resources have exposed nearly two million people to TI-84 calculator programming and I have helped literally thousands of people one on one with their issues via YouTube comments on my videos, emails, and on Reddit.

Good night guys,

Andres Sevilla

This is absolutely not OK guys. Please do not send these things to people because they have a negative opinion of Cemetech, this will never change someones mind; if anything it'll strengthen their opinion that Cemetech is a bad community.

If that reddit user would like to talk, I am /u/comicidiot on Reddit, please feel free to send me a DM.

dankcalculatorbro: as _iPhoenix_ wrote, don't be so harsh on him.
Also, maybe you should amend / rethink what I read as your copyright maximalist stance: sharing culture and knowledge is usually to be considered a good thing, no matter how hard the audio / video major companies have been trying hard to make people (and especially those in power !) think differently.


Likewise for TI-Planet: we're haven't operated it at a loss for years (and not necessarily thanks to ads), but it doesn't make us really rich. If it did, we'd have to change the administrative structure anyway: we've been using a non-profit (French "association loi 1901"). We're using the money for paying for the server(s) and multiple domain names, contests, shipping contest prizes, trips for calc-related shows and events, buying some used calculators or related equipment if the item is expensive enough, etc.


This means that you need to update your downloads every time a new version of any of the bundled components is released... therefore, in order to make it a tractable problem, technically, how do you automatically a) monitor all upgrades for dependencies and b) create + update your bundles ?

Dumbing down the process of making programs work by bundling everything together is a way of spoon-feeding lazy users, rather than forcing them to (slightly) increase their level on vital computer skills (reading the README, at worst using a search engine to download the libraries separately if the writer of the README didn't link them directly, installing TI-Connect / TI-Connect CE / TINCLS / TINCS / TILP on their computers); there are both upsides and downsides to this (or pretty much any) approach...

EDIT: forgot to mention that we can only echo Alex's note about the fact that sending "nasty DMs" is improper behaviour.

If each one of his "bundles" contained a file that's akin to a makefile, specifying the lib versions required, he could write a script to fetch the correct libs and latest version of the file, and then zip it into a file.

I think the whole hostility here started with the fact that software was taken, and then some of the creators and the community they work with trashed by a downloadee simply because he didn't understand how to use the program. I think that we've gotten that lumped up with Andres in a way that it kind of fell onto him when I'm not sure he shares that view. He seems to genuinely be trying to stir up interest in calculators and programming, which is great.
That being said, as I've mentioned a few times in this thread... @Andres it's better to ask permission than forgiveness. You're more likely to get someone to let you to use their software if you ask first, rather than just do it and say "oh, well can I?". Plus, you have to take care to make sure that you send all debugging concerns to their respective authors... post contact info for the software's developer. You, or someone else who did not design the software, trying to debug it would be like a nuclear physicist trying to do a doctor's job. And lastly, for such things as my TI Trek game, Fruit Ninja, Mario, and others that are based on copyrighted games or movies, there are fair use considerations that you must respect when hosting, like not placing ads on the page.

Yes, moving forward (once school work calms down a bit...) I'll be working to address these concerns. I have been compiling a list of changes and going through the Discord/SAX history to see what other concerns people have. I've seen interesting ideas, such as TLM saying I could share ad revenue with the creators. This is an intriguing idea, and could definitely encourage more people to directly upload to the site. Not sure about the logistics and how revenue will be shared (and as I said before, it's not like creators would be getting rich), but it is something I am looking into.

About not having ads for fair use: if that is true, aren't Cemetech, TICalc.org and pretty much every other site violating that as well? For example: https://imgur.com/a/mHd4MLS

It's not the fact that the ads are there that is violating fair use. The ones on Cemetech (and other similar sites) are okay because, by uploading their programs directly to the site, file authors gave Cemetech permission to host the files in the archives, as well as to make money off of ad revenue on the site. In your case, the programs were included without permission or agreement from the actual author, which is the real issue. From what I understand, fair use only applies if no permission is given and no relevant license is included.

What I understand from ACagliano's post is that he is saying ads shouldn't be on the site specifically because of copyrighted content like Mario, Geometry Dash, Star Trek, etc. In that case, as shown by my screenshot, Cemetech is violating the same laws.

The distinction to be made here is that by uploading a program to Cemetech themselves, the author has implicitly granted Cemetech a license to redistribute. When the author is out of the loop, you can't even claim that there's an implicit license grant.

Let me give you an example. Now I'm not sure this is the case or if or for whom it might be, but here's what I have in mind. Let's say, for example, that the creators of Fruit Ninja gave Deep Thought a "license" to remake it for the calculator. This license would grant Deep Thought sole distributive license, over this particular platform's version of the game, and might indicate no one else is to distribute it except him. This means that Deep Thought can upload to Cemetech, Omnimaga, wherever. Then you come along, take his software, repackage it, and upload it yourself. You have at this point violated his license agreement with the copyright holder, which may result in him losing his license agreement and you getting legal action from the copyright holder.

Now this is a very out-there case, and its highly unlikely, but since many of us do work on prominent games and titles, some of which copyright holders do know about, you never really know. You also never really know if a copyright holder would have an issue with software posted on a site with ads. This is why it's always best to ask someone if you want to host their software. Chances are it will be fine, but on the off chance someone has a license that may be violated by your upload, you'll be told about it.

With regard to unofficial remakes of copyrighted games, I think that given the current laws, the companies that made the original works technically have a legal right to send take-down demands for them, regardless of whether ads are displayed on the download page. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not so sure that fair-use doctrine would apply to a lot of these works. The ad issue is probably in fact moot.

There was a time in the past when ticalc.org was rejecting a lot of uploads simply due to such trademark and copyright issues. At some point it appears that this restriction on uploads has become more lenient for reasons I'm unsure of. But from experience, I strongly suspect that if ticalc.org were to receive an official take-down notice complaining about a game based on a copyrighted work that happened to be in the archives, we would likely be forced to remove it regardless of popularity or noteworthiness in the community, as we don't have a huge supply of lawyers and money.

Its been a year. I should google my name more frequently...

Hi Lionel, thank you for considering me one of the best It was great working and talking with you all those years ago. I have fond memories of the tigcc discussion boards.

I did get tired of ticalc.org, and the community in general. My younger self was bothered I could never get features or news articles. Also someone talked a ticalc staffer into deleting a program of mine, that is when I quit ticalc for good.

I probably should stick hail onto ticalc.org. Hail is precious to me, I worked hard on it, and it should be available.

Hey Samuel, it's been a while
Indeed, you're one of the best, because you made important contributions to the TI-68k scene in multiple areas. But a sizable number of your utilities have disappeared for the reasons I detailed, so if you upload them to ticalc.org, there will be more copies of them, which is a good thing.
I used to use at least faststr(), occasionally the front-end to your fast replacement for next_expression_index() which did wonders with pathological inputs such as 10x10 matrices of polyEval() commands, and of course, the optimized TTUnpack decompressor used by ttstart, SuperStart and the pstarters.

I've been writing most of the ticalc.org news items for the past 3+ years, though I wrote a single one this year so far. You can write some bits of text about Hail, and a couple other utilities; I and Adriweb will probably modify the text a bit, and critor will post it

Depending on the country you live in, statute of limitations may apply. Last I checked copyright holders have 2 years to enforce their copyright against a "remake" or "port"... after that time period elapses, they lose their ability to.

Try 95 years on for size.

IANAL but a port/remake certainly constitutes a derivative work- creating derivative works is the exclusive right of the copyright holder for as long as the copyright is in force. Before 1978 this is 95 years flat, but after 1978 this extends for 70 years after the author dies in most cases, sometimes even longer