Quote from TheCakeIsASpy on December 24, 2011, 4:34 am

If you used a part of the OST, and since you don't make money off mods/custom maps, it counts as Fair Use, meaning that you can use it without premission whatsoever as long as you don't make money out of it.

More on fair use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Quote from Spam Nugget on December 24, 2011, 6:59 am

While on the subject of copyright, whats Valve's stance on taking materials or models form, say Portal 1 and packaging and using them in a Portal 2 map?

Quote from chimera201 on December 24, 2011, 8:32 am

@ TheCakeIsASpy : Thanks.

Quote from iWork925 on December 24, 2011, 7:43 pm

Spam Nugget wrote:

While on the subject of copyright, whats Valve's stance on taking materials or models form, say Portal 1 and packaging and using them in a Portal 2 map?

I doubt valve would take legal action against a mapper releasing free content.

Quote from Tailgunner on December 24, 2011, 8:02 pm

Fair Use only applies to US citizens. But since this site is hosted in the US I am probably just hair splitting.

Edit:
I am not sure if Fair Use applies here as it is (according to the Wikipedia article) intended for "commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship".

Which of those applies to maps?

Quote from Djinndrache on December 25, 2011, 2:10 am

Tailgunner wrote:

Fair Use only applies to US citizens. But since this site is hosted in the US I am probably just hair splitting.

Edit:
I am not sure if Fair Use applies here as it is (according to the Wikipedia article) intended for "commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship".

Which of those applies to maps?

I had some copyright questions some months ago and asked a big company a few questions about it. They told me about the Fair Use law of USA and gave me this site as reference: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

From what you can read there (and from what I got told) I would say it's legal. It's not always 100% clear if some things are "Fair Use", and those wikipedia points you listed are only some clearly legal uses.
If you read the four factors which need to be considered I'd say it's a legal case of Fair Use because:
- it's not commercial
- it's only a very minor part of the map (it's not all the game, it's just the credits)
- (I ASSUME:) it's not helping the map to be much better or more popular. It's just a nice sideeffect. (I suppose) It wouldn't be fair use anymore if he would shout out his map like "PLAY IT, AWESOME MUSIC BY XXX INSIDE. XXX FANS MUST PLAY!!!!!111oneleven"

One more important factor that I don't know about in this case would be if the artist has an official saying like "Never use my work for anything". Then - of course - it wouldn't be much of Fair Use anymore, if he explicitly forbids it. I don't think that many artists would do that though and i don't know who it is about in this case.

About the USA only thing.. It's not only about where the server is. If his country forbids it, then he may not upload the stuff to an USA server and host it there. It's like if you would be forbidden to upload movies in your country but you just rent a server in an other country and host tons of movies there. That's not legal

Quote from TheCakeIsASpy on December 25, 2011, 2:46 am

Tailgunner wrote:

Fair Use only applies to US citizens. But since this site is hosted in the US I am probably just hair splitting.

Edit:
I am not sure if Fair Use applies here as it is (according to the Wikipedia article) intended for "commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship".

Which of those applies to maps?

None, but these are only examples. Fair use applies to what I said: Using a small part from a copyrighted creation without making profit off it is Fair use.

Also, I live in Israel and we have Fair Use here.