i see that many of the songs that are produced in the music community tends to be more open to the idea of sampling. where you get to take a portion of the sound from another artist's song and use it on your own without the need to fear about copyrights and backlash from the community. you can see lots of such examples on song remixes, even on popular songs and they seem to thrive especially not just on the underground scene but on more popular platforms as well such as tiktok sound remixes / sampling & other forms of memes.

you can see some of the more popular mainstream songs that also uses sampling from other songs such as

Future - Mask Off which has sampled songs from a 70s soul music called Prison Song

DJ Khaled - Wild Thoughts which sampled from Santana - Maria Maria

and much more which there is too much to mention.

of course, this should not be compared to pure plagiarism. which is the act of purely copying a song without any modifications. this article might explain better what The difference between plagiarism and sampling is.

now back on topic, when i started delving into the indie game community, it felt overwhelming that the guidelines of copyright infringements are very strict, to the point where someone using an open source art could get some backlash for simply not crediting all of the assets used on their game. which i'm not saying that to not credit someone is a good thing either. but it felt very compelling to see lots of hate towards the freedom of modification of assets on your game in a free and open way just like how songs are created, without getting copyrighted to oblivion or called out by the masses for simply using an asset / song that was used on a previous game.  i mean, you are simply creating a free game without any profits for the fun of making games and it hurts nobody, just like how you simply create remixes of your favorite artists as a tribute to his artistry. what difference does it make to create your own mario version as a tribute to your favorite video game without getting yourself copyrighted, content removed for having a mario asset on your game for copyright infringement towards the original mario.

i know that this topic is more controversial on the indie community where people seem to be more divided on this issue, but i'm wiling to hear why it seems to be extremely hateful to the idea of a more open community like how the music community does with its sampling.

Good question! I wrote about this many years ago, and things haven't changed much since.

I agree that it’d be nice to see more games open their assets up for others to benefit from. I would point to a couple of things though:

Games are in kind of a weird space where they use huge amounts of media compared to most other art forms. Taking an asset from a game might just mean taking a tiny piece of the whole, but that piece is still usually a complete work of art on its’ own. If I had to guess, that might be part of why it’s less socially acceptable. Not to mention that in the case of Mario, we’re running into a major global brand. Most big media companies are protective of their properties regardless of medium, just look at how Disney acts for example.

it felt overwhelming that the guidelines of copyright infringements are very strict, to the point where someone using an open source art could get some backlash for simply not crediting all of the assets used on their game

This might just be me, but I haven’t personally seen anyone get that sort of backlash over open-source assets. More importantly, as someone who helps run an open-source modding platform… there is a very valuable reason for those rules when it comes to open source. I’d argue that these licenses aren’t really to benefit the creator, but to protect the remixer.

In most spaces where the use of such licenses when sharing isn’t common, a creator can potentially change their mind and sue someone for using their work. Will they win? Who knows! But you can see this effect in music–some smaller bands have sued big ones long after their work was re-used to try and “get a slice of the pie”, so to speak. With a contract in place that explicitly lets you use the work, that’s not really possible.

Ultimately, I think many small artists are fine with pieces of their work being re-used so long as you talk to them and show good faith. I make my game assets free to use with a couple of basic restrictions, but those restrictions mostly exist to prevent people from plagiarizing my work; if you took a small asset from a game of mine but didn’t give credit, as long as you weren’t doing anything nefarious I’d probably just ask politely in private rather than stirring up a big fuss.

I'm sorry, but saying that an indie developer should have the strength to hire more people and make more stuff themselves is a bit unfair. I, for one, have a full time job, a family, and not a lot of free time. Still I want to make games, still I have story ideas that I want to make into games. What's wrong in using assets that are free to use? Where's the problem on giving the right credit? Most people don't realize that even big companies use assets from other sources from time to time. But we little developers should be able to live without?