You want to upload art by other artists? You need explicit permission to release under whatever license offered here you chose. They give different permissions.

See http://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-licenses for more info. Make sure the artists understand the terms and know the exact name of the license ("Creative Commons" is not a license name, many people confuse this for example.) :)

As for what artists mean by giving credit, ask them what they mean. OGA has a form for: name/alias (often written as "Firstname 'alias' Lastname"), website URL (for example URL to deviantart profile) and email address.

Hope this helps.

The main issues are usually that "Use my art but credit me" does not extend to anyone (especially commercial games) but just you and that the artist isn't happy about all but very minor modifications.

Thus in turn it can't be called "open".

In the future ask them specifically about creative commons licenses, and imediatly tell them why the "non-commercial" option is a bad idea (otherwise nearly every one is just choosing that one... oh how I curse who even had the idea to make that clause :( ).

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ is the best summary I know so far - as imperfect as it might be regarding covering the details of restrictions and requirements.

Speaking of paragraphs, here are some recommendations for your writing style, if I may: 1. use a browser spellchecker extension if it's not built-in, 2. use paragraphs and quotation marks instead of '........' 3. avoid writing 'lol' and informal language. I recommend reading Freenode's communication guidelines. They helped me a lot in being efficient at communicating online: http://freenode.net/channel_guidelines.shtml

It's nobel of you that you want artists to understand the terms! I think the main thing is that you link them to the license description page.

It has been a while since I asked artists for permission to re-distribute their work under a free license. And the requests that I found in my email archive have been rather specific about permission to use new versions of licenses and in other cases apparently the artists knew what GPL and CC-BY-SA 3.0 means.

Here is a template email I just wrote for this thread:

Hello [artistname],

Thank you for creating and sharing [compliment on art, for example: "beautiful 3d models"]! I think it's very useful for [optional self description, for example: "indie"] game developers [optional: "like me"].

I was wondering if you would allow using your art under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ ). I could then upload your art to OpenGameArt ( http://opengameart.org ) and it would make the terms of use clear to game creators who find your art on OpenGameArt later.

Note that the license link only shows a summary. You can find the complete legal text at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode . It is quite elaborate about how people using your art have to credit you for your work, to make sure the artist is noticed.

I hope you like the license and are cool with me and others using your art under its terms!

Best regards,

[yourname]

It might also be a good idea to include a link to similar art, showing 1. "other cool artists do it too!" and 2. removing uncertainty, because they might never seen a free production sharing website before. A useful text to add to that could be "Here is an example of similar art assets being shared on OpenGameArt: [url] ."

I also recommend to use full URLs and leave spaces between urls and brackets and full stops, as they sometimes get interpeted to be part of the URL. Especially in email.

Hope this helps and that you will have great success at introducing free licenses to game artists! :)