Licenses Contradictory in different websites
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - 11:41
That it can happen with licenses contradictory??
for example: an author's creation have license:cc:BY in opengameart, but the same author have license:© in deviantart or more websites with the same creation.
is a trap, how defend??
have open game art rules about it??
Artists may license their work (even the SAME work) in different ways on different platforms. You are allowed to pick whichever license you prefer and adhere to that one.
However, you should always download the asset from the same place that shows the license you want to adhere to. Do NOT download an asset from one site, but adhere to the license from a different site. The two works may only be very similar, but not the same. The author may have chosen to license the two differently for that reason.
If you provide specific links, I can provide a more in-depth answer. :)
--Medicine StormThis is something I'm worried about too. Also - licenses that suddenly change behind-the-curtains, silently.
(Poliigon, which suddenly went from offering creative commons content for free, to now expecting money for the use of that same content. Cubebrush is another one, that (sometimes) offers 'freebies' with commercial use at a cost of $10 for content that already allows commercial use in its original license).
I know that there are (US) laws protecting 'consumers' against having the rug pulled from under our feet, but perhaps the responsibility is on us to prove everything, and that's not quite so easy. I've made a habit of documenting as much as I can, including saving the EULA/TOS pages of websites I've outsourced from, at the time I've outsourced from them, but whether or not that is any kind of viable protection is not for me to answer.
Attribution is another tricky topic - is it a reasonable expectation that the author of outsourced content be credited every single time their work appears in a screenshot, for every single instance of a screenshot?
Ultimately, we'd need someone with actual knowledge about the law to answer these questions.
@LDAsh: The cubebrush and poliigon license changes are similar to the discusson about Josepharaoh's "fiery explosion" pixabay derivative.
If you downloaded an asset when it was CC-[anything], it doesn't matter if the author or source-website changes the license later. Your CC license for that asset is irrevocable. Heck, even if the asset is no longer available under a CC0 license, you could upload it to an art sharing website (like OGA) and list it as CC0 even if the author didn't want that. I would recommend AGAINST doing that, since we want to have a good relationship with authors even if we are legally allowed to piss them off. Never-the-less, once something is released under one of the CC-* licenses, it can always be used under that license, even if people try to make it unavailable.
I tend to record where, when, and under what license I got my assets. That always helps in proving they are legit, but I understand that may not always be feasible for you: It's kind of a pain, or you forgot one time, or you do that now, but didn't know to do that on assets you've obtained previously.
In those cases, you can usually prove provenance with the internet archive: https://archive.org/ shows what a website said in the past, even if it has since been changed. It doesn't always show the exact date and sub-page you are looking for, but it's worked for me enough times that I have to recommend donating to them for being such a great resource.
Short answer: Yes. Attribute every author and asset.
Long answer: Depends on how they're appearing. If the author's content is showing up in a game, there is no need to flash an attribution message on the screen for every frame of animation that contains that asset. Just give attribution once in the credits screen/page/file. That one attribution covers all instances of the asset appearing throughout the game. If a Twitch Gamer or Lets-Player screencaps the game, that is generally considered fair use. Assuming the gamer indicates in their video or media what game it is from, the game's internal credits covers it. Another example would be a photo-art book. The publisher of the book containing a bunch of artwork doesn't need to give credit on every page where a particular art asset appears (they can if they want, though); a credit blurb once at the end of the book is sufficient.
However, let's say you are showing off some assets on your blog. If you display 20 images, 4 are by artist-A, 3 are from artist-B, 2 are from artist-C, and the rest are 1 each from artists-D through -L... you need 12 attributions. One attribution per Author, not per asset. But each author's attribution should indicate which asset(s) it corresponds to. You can have all 12 attributions in the same spot (even if the images are scattered throughout the blog) for the sake of organization, but they ALL get attributions. One attribution per author per collection. ("collection" being the group unit that is utilizing the assets: 1 blog, 1 game, 1 book, etc.)
Note that you don't need to track every instance of an asset. If you display sprite-10 a total of 44 times in your game (44 instances of 1 asset), there is no need to indicate forty four times that sprite-10 was by author-D:
EXAMPLE CREDITS PAGE:
Even if an asset is used multiple times, you only need to credit once for that author and indicate which assets belong to that author, not every instance of every asset that belongs to that author.
--Medicine StormWhere does this information come from? It's difficult to research and I'm inclined to disagree about a few things, admittedly based only on instinct and logic.
I would assume the license that applies (legally binding) is the one that's been put forth at the 'point of no return' for a project, at release or publication, at which point there is no way to remove it, not just the point of when it was acquired - otherwise everyone could just say they downloaded when the author accidentally made a typo and labelled it as public domain in those first few minutes. The onus being on the licensee to keep updated with the agreement up until that point.
Also the proof of 2 things - that the one uploading it can prove 100% original authorship of the content, and proof that they are the one who uploaded it and labelled it as a particular license. It's foolish to pretend that everything that's uploaded and given a license on these kind of sites is 100% the property of the people uploading it, knowingly or not. I know a few things about public domain license, that something like a photo can technically be in the public domain, but almost everything in the actual photo (people, company trademarks, etc.) can not be used and makes you liable to lawsuits if you do.
At the end of the day, all of this would be settled in a lawsuit, and it's all about the type of evidence provided and validity of that evidence. Best case scenario, if things go south, is a settlement to pay to license the content after the fact and hope that it's a reasonable sum. I imagine this happens all the time, possibly years after a project has been released.
As for attribution, it's just not practical to credit every single person for every single screenshot. To me, attribution means having an official record of credits, a dedicated webpage and the 'credits sequence', unless explicitly demanded by the author in the license agreement. Trying to keep track of which texture on which polygon belongs to which artist and where it came from is just not a reasonable expectation, and sometimes not even possible.
As I said, it would be great to actually get some solid information about this stuff instead of assumptions, from legitimate sources and from people who actually know anything about copyright law. I find a lot of forum posts with pretty bold claims but nothing to actually back it up.
Well, I could tell you this is based on my inquery to an Intellectual Property lawyer, but I'm not a lawyer myself, and such an IP lawyer would also say that these scenarios cannot be subject to generalizations and that every situation must be assessed on it's own merits and circumstances.
This is as close as you're going to get to some solid information without actually consulting a lawyer about your specific situation like I did. Sorry.
The stage of your project is irrelevant to the license. If you aquired the asset under license-X, you may use license-X's terms throughout your life and the life of the project. Proving which license you obtained it under is usually not that difficult, especially with the archive.org method I mentioned above. Besides, legally, the author challenging you in court means they have the burden of proof to prove license-X was not available to you at the time you aquired the asset. I tend not to judge what I should do based on what will happen in court, but the concern seems to be the legal risks and burden of proof despite what may have actually happened.
Wether or not an asset was shared by someone who actually had the rights to do so is a valid point. Author-A could upload the assets of Author-C and share it as CC0 without actually having Author-C's permission to do so. That would invalidate the asset and license, and anyone who downloaded it from Author-C's page would have no legal right to use it, even if those downloaders were not at fault for the mistake. That is why we are so picky about the origin of artwork here on OGA. EVERY submission is checked and weighed against a standard of reasonable certainty that the asset's license is legitimate. Sometimes we miss one and we have to take the asset down even after people have started using the asset in their project. It sucks that they have to remove or replace those assets, but it is actually very rare.
If you're not willing to credit every author and indicate which assets were created by each author, I would strongly recommend not using the asset at all. Deciding it's just not feasible to credit properly is not a valid legal defense. The stuff I outlined above doesn't seem that infeasible to me, but I don't know the complexity of your project. However, I do know that failure to properly attribute assets under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA is a violation of the license terms and will get you in trouble. The -BY means you must credit, regardless of the author's lack of explicit request for attribution.
--Medicine StormI am not a lawyer, but I was recently given a link to a free book all about open source licensing that was written by a lawyer.
https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm
The thing that I was the most surprised about when I read the book is that you sometimes can revoke a license in the absence of a contract between two parties.
That's a great resource, thanks for sharing. I will definitely get around to reading that thoroughly.
I'd be interested in hearing from other artists about the specific attribution issue.
Would you expect credit for every screenshot and every time your texture appears in the corner of a frame of a video? How about in circumstances such as a Tweet when there's a limited amount of space to fill it with every artist wanting their name there. Isn't it reasonable enough to link to a webpage of everyone who should be credited? or is the alternative to pause the video and bake in a list of credits at certain intervals, or simply not publish the video at all?
Also, what is the expectation, the final outcome? For more exposure in the hopes of being hunted down by a AAA studio, or to just ensure an official credit that can go into a portfolio.
For me personally, I would be fine with having credit in a master-list webpage and in the official credits of the project, without needing my name plastered everwhere for each instance a pixel appears - because ultimately it's just about ensuring an official 'record' of my work being used, and that's it. ...but maybe I'm in the minority.
I know you want to hear from other artists besides me, but... who is saying you need to show a list of credits at intervals or plastered everywhere for each instance an asset appears?
--Medicine StormCreative Commons also has some pretty straightforward guidelines on this: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution . See in particular this section: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution#Don... . The requirement of the license is that your attribution be reasonable for the media (in your case, video games or video game screenshots). The "reasonable" standard adopted by the community for game art seems to be a credits webpage and credits screen in the software. I'd say if you are posting screenshots, a link on the same page to the "credits" page of your website would be sufficient. Same for a tweet. So basically what you suggested ("credit in a master-list webpage and in the official credits of the project") is totally in keeping with the license requirements.
Nobody expects you to have a list of every artist of every texture alongside every screenshot. Same for every frame of a video. Rather you just need to make sure someone could reasonably get from the media (screenshot/game/video/etc) to the original author and source of the work. On the credits page, the example MedicineStorm gave is reasonable; CC requires you have the title (v3 and below), author, source, and license for every work you're using.
The "expectation" or "the final outcome" of attribution is not really relevant; the author chose to release their assets under the license terms they chose (CC, GPL, etc.), and whoever uses those assets has the legal and moral responsibility to respect those terms.
This page on Blend Swap seems to disagree:-
https://www.blendswap.com/page/crediting-authors
So I'm thinking there has to be some condition about transformative use of multiple outsourced content for promotional (non-commercial) purposes, where attribution for each asset is not "reasonable", because in practice it would mean there are violations of license 99% of the time. It would be especially unreasonable to give credit for specific content within such material, so this is where the whole ridiculous 'baking annotations into every frame of a video' thing comes from. Most information I can find pertains to use of a single music track or single instance of an asset, but in my case it could be dozens or possibly hundreds of different textures, each from a different artist, all in 1 screenshot. Video becomes even more complex. Even if I did link to a 'master-list' of credits, there's no way to tell which asset was created by which artist with that, so it leads back to the question of exactly what do people expect from attribution - instant referral or long-term resume-filler.
I'm just out to get some opinions or hope anyone can cough up further information about specifics on this. I've basically had 50/50 conflicting views about the topic.
@LDAsh: perhaps I'm misunderstanding your questions. What does the https://www.blendswap.com/page/crediting-authors page disagree with, and in what way?
--Medicine Storm