Step It Up!

Many Jewish people have heard of Step It Up, a Dance Dance Revolution clone that is pre-packaged with Jewish music. Fewer are aware that it is a rebranded version of StepMania, which is freely available—and they even release the source code.

As such, if you already own the included songs, you can create the simfiles (the files used for each song in StepMania) yourself with DancingGorilla and buy dance pads from Ebay for roughly $15 each. Likewise, many of the techno music files included with StepItUp are also from 3rd parties. Opening up the techno music’s cache files makes that clear: #CREDIT:Sync by HellRazor;

For anyone wondering about the licensing, StepMania is released under an MIT License which allows “the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so” ( Source)

However, the included songs are licensed under CC-NC, which requires attribution, prohibits commercial use, and prohibits distribution of modified materials. That is much stickier, legally, as Step It Up is clearly a commercial enterprise.

A specific example is Etude to a Dragon, which is included in the game, and has simfiles readily available online. However, looking at what appears to be the original source, Etude to a Dragon is released under a license that allows modification, but requires those changes to be released under the same license, which expressly prohibits commercial use. Oops?

The files for Step It Up are stored in a packaged format that prevents direct copying into StepMania. Given the licensing for the simfiles and media files, a fun project would be to reverse engineer the packaging used by Step It Up to regain access to them. Please let me know if you hear or know of anyone who does!