How is this not explicit?

License(s): CC-BY 3.0 GPL 3.0 GPL 2.0

@caeles:  You're welcome to do that, it's kind of overkill.

The art submission form is already too busy as it is, and the fact that there's so much to fill out is a frequent complaint that we get from people submitting art.  Checking a box beside the license icon (which is linked to the text of the license) is a perfectly reasonable way for a submitter to indicate which licenses they're releasing their work under.  If they *want* to add additional info, they're free to do so in the Copyright / Attribution Notice section, but for people (like myself) who aren't particularly picky about how they're credited, I don't want to force them through an extra step on a page where there are already too many steps.

Regarding the possibility of confusion about whether or not the icon is an ad for the GPL, I'll say this much:  OGA has been around for half a decade now, and in that time, even with all the varying confusion about licenses, we've never once (to my knowledge) had that particular issue.  And if we did, really the worst thing that will happen is that the user might ask the artist for permission (which does happen on occasion if people don't know what the licenses mean).  I'd be much more concerned about the possibility of a false positive (that is, someone believing that a work has a license that it doesn't have) rather than a false negative (that is, someone being overly cautious).

That said, if any of this stuff really is a point of confusion for people, I'd like to hear from the community.

I think caeles admitted mistaking the GPL icon as an ad was an exagerated example, I think his point was just that there is nothing that explicitly links the work with the license boxes.  I kinda get where he is coming from.  From an extremely cautious/paranoid viewpoint, you might not want to use art from the site because someone could try to come after you later, feigning ingnorance of how the site works or what the license icons represent.   I don't know if such a claim would pass the smell test, but I could see where as a hypothetical it's possible.

I do think there is some room for people to miss the license section entirely.  I do occasionally see posts asking about what the license for a work is.  I don't know how to combat this.  Maybe as a layout thing, you could put the license boxes closer to the download links (or the other way around).

And I've advocated this before, so I know I'm being a broken record here, but I personally think all work on the site should be distributed in archive format along with a copy of all applicable licenses and copyright/attribtution instructions.  That way, if you download the art, you get a copy of the license with it.  That's how it's done with source code and it's certainly withstood the test of time there. 

Finally, I don't know if I would encourage people to put anything beyond attribution instructions in the 'notes' section.   First, it seems silly to have you check boxes for which license and then also manually type them in.  Also, it's always hard to get any kind of standardization for things that get typed into a text box, so my guess is each submitter would have his/her own way of phrasing the license grant.  Finally, I fear submitters would get confused and see it as a place to add additional license restrictions/notices, which, aside from being forbidden by most the licenses, would make searching the site by license type difficult if not impossible.  This is actually something that already happens from time to time with the existing notes field. 

Just wanted to say that I'm actually completely on board with archiving submissions with their respective license files; it's just something that will take a big effort to implement and will likely be bug prone for a while, so it's something I can't really touch until I have more time. 

Consider this edge case:  Someone submits a bunch of art with one license, and a week later, they go back and remove that license and add a different one.  There are two ways this could be handled, and both are ugly:

• Keep uncompressed copies of every file on the site, along with the compressed ones.  This would increase space usage by a good 50% or so, and space is already at a premium.
• Uncompress the archive file into a temp directory, remove the license file, add a new license file, and then recompress the archive, which is time-consuming and kind of complicated.

There's also the matter of "I submitted this zip file, so why can't you just put the license in that file, rather than zipping up the license and my zip file inside another zip file?"  I mean, yeah, it would make sense to slip the license files into existing archives, but that would add another layer of complexity.

And these are just the issues that I'm anticipating right now when I'm typing this up. :)

Anyway, like I said, I want to address this, but it would open up a host of issues that I don't have time to deal with at the moment.  Also note that if you go to your downloads tab, you can download a credits file that lists each and every thing you've downloaded, along with all the files that were contained in the submission, the author, the attribution notice, and the license(s), which I think addresses this to at least some extent.

> Just wanted to say that I'm actually completely on board with archiving submissions

> with their respective license files

yay!  ok, I'll try to stop pestering about it then! ;)

re: all the issues said idea presents, I totally understand.  It seems like exactly the kind of thing that's easy to suggest but very hard to do, esp. considering the volume of existing submisions you have.  

Not to drag you into a technical discussion on how to implement such a feature, but a quick thought about the archive issues:  what about just dynamically building the archive everytime you serve up the file?  So you click on 'cool_sprites.png' and you get handed (via redirects and magic) 'SUBMISSION_NAME_by_AUTHOR.zip' which contains 'cool_sprites.png', 'ReadMe.txt' w/ submission description and notes in there, and CC-BY-3.0.txt, etc.

In essence, you'd be throwing CPU at the problem.  But actually given the size of the existing archive, that might not be the worst solution.  I'm guessing just the initial run of archiving the existing content would take days to complete.  So maybe, archiving bit by bit as requested is actually not the worst idea.  

I'd also add that archives within archives isn't that big a deal.  Yes it's silly, but it's not that big a hassle for users to deal with and it wouldn't be the first time it's been done ;)

ok, like I said, I don't want to drag you into a big discussion on this, since i know you are a busy enough guy as it is, so I'll just shut up now.

Just to keep things complicated: I personally loath having to download a zip file. Sometimes I want to have a quick look at some assets and if I can click an image link, I can view the image in-line. The zip file needs to be downloaded and navigated, and if I decide that I don't want it afterall I need to delete it manually. In short, I need to do more work. If I'm browsing stuff on my tablet it's even worse.

Of course it could be argued that this is what the preview is supposed to be for, but sometimes these don't show all the assets very clearly.

All of that beeing said: the ability to download an image with associated meta-data would be useful. I usually place these (along with a link to oga) in a separate text file of the same name.

At the end of the day there is no way to please everyone, so do whatever makes the most sense.

I always save a copy of the page and upload it along with the media source if I'm using something.

Maybe you should offer a full (data)database dump like Wikipedia? (Or on DVDs? for order like linux distros)
That way there will be backups.

Flightgear does the same with it's world-gis-database (I think it might be a few blurays now), that way you can get it all rather than DLing it peacemeal (and there are physical backups)

[quote]> From an extremely cautious/paranoid viewpoint, you might not want to use art from the site because someone could try to come after you later, feigning ingnorance of how the site works or what the license icons represent.[/quote]

I would just tell them to pound sand. Once something is used in a project of mine, I do not care if you get a supreme court of a country ruling against me, I'm using it forever. I'm not going to let a project get ripped apart by claims. I checked beforehand, if a person want's to claim license violations I will not listen to them, nor will I listen to a court. I did due diligence, the issue is settled for all time.

(When a licensor is making a claim often it is because they do not understand fully copyright law in your jurisdiction and believe they can restrict the work further after licensing it out under libre terms (which varies by country if they can), when random others are making claims it's just to attack your project)

I always check and document licensing. But I will not listen to any claims.
Just as I would not dislodge a brick from a house because someone claimed that it was his. And if he tries to dislodge that brick himself, the owner will physically stop him dead.

It is a fairly common tactic for people who dislike you (especially one's social politics: ie if you are not "SJW" enough) to make false licensing claims.

Free software is not about a point of copyright law. It exists to subvert and destroy copyright law (that is the stated goal) and uses copyright licensing as a tool to do so.

Just document what you use, and also contribute in the same way you take (everything libre).

So, a quick note, because we've had issues with this in the past:

• OGA will always respect the wishes of artists who want to have their art taken down.  However, people need to be aware that those licenses are, in fact, irrevocable, and we cannot and will not assist anyone trying to revoke a license.  Furthermore, records of removed art are retained offline in case there's ever a question of whether they were posted.  Eventually, we'll be making those records viewable (without the downloads available) so that people can check them on their own.  In the rare case where an artist "takes there ball and goes home" and removes all text and previews from their submissions before requesting to have them taken down (this has happened more than once), we willl revert those submissions to the last "good faith" posting before putting up the deletion record.
• Regardless of the license on a work, we don't accept art that's obviously not intended to be distributed as game art.  We had an individual who cut commercial game art out of a CC-BY-SA screenshot from an indie game and post it here.  While that is legal to do, it's incredibly disrespectful of the artist, and we won't archive it here.  Likewise, if an artist is selling their own freely-licensed art, OGA isn't going to undermine them by distributing it for free.  Note that this is all site policy and not a legal requirement.  This is a bannable offense, although we generally issue warnings first, at our discretion.
• If an artist doesn't own a piece of art in the first place, they don't have a right to put their own license on it, and the license was never valid.  If that's the case, people still need to remove that work from their projects.  In the near future, I'm going to add a notification system to let registered users know if art that they have downloaded has been flagged with a licensing issue.

I don't get the impression that anyone here has any misconceptions abouot this stuff, but for people wandering through and seeing this thread, I want to make sure that common misconceptions are cleared up.

Problemas hay en todas partes. tratemos de ser sinceros y respetuosos con el trabajo propio y el de los demás.

Perdón por el enlace de abajo. No sé como quitarlo.

Translated:

Problems are everywhere . try to be honest and respectful to one's own work and that of others . Sorry about the link below. I do not know how to remove it .

@Snabisch: What link are you talking about? I'm not seeing any.

One thing about the licenses that I think should be made more explicit is exactly what files or content they apply to. For example, I have seen numerous submissions where somebody included something in the preview image for demonstration purposes, but was not intended to be included with the license. There have been some specific and obvious cases (for instance this - note though that the poster has now removed the offfending preview), but I think it is pretty prevalent.

For instance in the 3D section it is common to include a screenshot of the model in Blender (such as this). In this case, the preview includes multiple Microsoft owned icons which are obviously not meant to be released under CC-BY-SA, as well as the Blender logo (in both the icon list on bottom, and in the application window at the top), which is explicitly exluded from the GPL license applied to the Blender application.

These are obviously cases where the license selected is not intended to apply to the ENTIRE preview image, however there are no clear guidelines about what is acceptable or not in the previews, and whether or not the license applies to that content as well.

I think in most cases this is probably clear to users what is or is not acceptable to take from the previews, but some added clarity specifying exactly what licenses apply to what content, a la @caeles, wouldn't hurt.

@Evert:  You make an interesting point about wanting to see the spritesheets or whatnot without jumping through a lot of hoops.  And you're right, technically the preview image should handle that, but it's doesn't always and it's not really fair to expect people to be great at creating previews that showcase their work.  Plus with larger sets it's often impractical to try and include everything in the preview.

@DezrasDragons:  That's an intereting point about the blender icons and whatnot.  Based on a prior discussion, I'd made the suggestion that the site faq be updated to explicitly state that preview images are covered by the same license as the submission:

http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/site-faqsubmission-guidelines-updatesc...

I still think this is the right idea but you raise a good point with the blender icons, etc. in previews for 3D stuff.   Generally, I think putting the preview under the submissions license makes the most sense.  For one thing, it's the best way to make sure that the site itself is not distributing copyright or incorrectly licensed works via the preview images.  Secondly, I can't think of a good case where a preview image /needs/ to include works outside of the submission.   All the same, I can't think of a good solution to the blender screen grab issue, other than to ask submitters to crop that stuff out.  I'd love to say nobody really cares about a few obviously not part of the submission icons around the edge of a screen shot, but there was a fellow on here who was very into ripping exactly that sort of stuff :(

@MikeeUSA: Downloading the whole page is an interesting idea, but doesn't that start to take up a lot of space after awhile?  Database backup is an interesting idea also, but probably not practical given the size of the archive.  What about a tool that let you download an archive for a collection, similar to the current tool that let's you pull down just the license and attribution notices for a collection?

@all:  I guess another approach would be the add a link for the text of the licenses under the 'Files:' list for each submission.   That way right where you are looking to download the file, you are also looking at the full copies of the licenses.   This would make it more like browsing a source code repository in github or some other HTTP driven interface.   I guess it might seem redundant with the license icons already being on the page, but I think it would help reinforce the connection between the work and the license.  It would also put it in 'you can't miss it' category.  I don't think we're in the same category as deviant art, where the license info is as buried as you can imagine, but I do think the current page layout makes it very possible puruse the site, grabbing files without any knowledge of the license stuff.  You do see questions sometimes asking things like 'may I use this?', 'what are the terms of use?' etc. from newer users.  Putting the license link right next to the download link might help. 

Finally:

> We had an individual who cut commercial game art out of a CC-BY-SA screenshot from an indie

> game and post it here.  While that is legal to do, it's incredibly disrespectful of the artist,

> and we won't archive it here.

Thanks bart!  You weren't around when that went down, so it's good to hear it coming straight from you :)

That said, have you had a chance to look over my summary of the faq/guideline changes stemming from that discussion:

http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/site-faqsubmission-guidelines-updatesc...

I know it's quite a list, but the incident did reveal some ambiguities in the current set of docs and I do think it would be a shame if the only thing to come out of the whole affair was the loss of a community member, albiet a justly removed one.

You mentioned in the other thread that you might be willing to rewrite the relevant changes to the FAQ yourself. which is something I'm not going to have time to do this week.  If you can do that, I'll look over them and then merge the changes in.