About CC-SA
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 10:08
If I make a model for example and licence it with CC share alike does it remain to that model or if they add it to a project all other assets needs to be made SA?
If it is intrusive I will go with CC-BY
I'm resonably sure that a CC lincence (and most any licence) applies only to the work you put that licence on. Therefore, if they make changes to your model, they must release the changes they make under the SA licence, but they can freely include other models of any licence in their project.
The individual pieces of art are very self contained, which is why this is the case, in contrast to code which has to link to every piece of the code one way or the other.
Lattice's analysis seems to be the accepted view.
It's disappointing to me though. When I started releasing art under CC-BY-SA I thought that my art used in games would be like GPL code. Instead, because art is treated as modular, it's more like LGPL.
If there were a CC license for games that operated more like GPL I'd release all my future art under that instead.
That seems to be the most prevalent interpretation, but there isn't really any clear response on this one. Hopefully they'll have a look at it in the CC-4 process.
The trouble seems to be that the definition of Derivative Work isn't clear when individual pieces of music or art are used in games.
If someone uses a background song unchanged in a game, is that game a derivative work?
(if Yes, games that use CC-BY-SA art must also be licensed CC-BY-SA).
CC doesn't mention video games, but does give this example:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_a_der...
"Under Creative Commons’ core licenses, synching music in timed-relation with a moving image is considered to be a derivative work."
Based on that, I'd lean towards games actually being derivative works of the individual pieces of art used. But it's absolutely not spelled out. So hopefully that is cleared up in the future. Thing is, Creative Commons can't change or define what "Derivative Work" means... that's a term of copyright law itself.
At the very least, I try to mention on my works "contact me if you'd like to use this art under different terms". If anyone asks nicely I'm likely to let them use my art for anything.
If a game is considered derived work and thus gets the game to become CC-SA doesn't that mean that all assets inside the game become CC-SA thus exactly my point?
But I guess its not the case because the game does not derive the assets(as a finished derivative rather then something to be derived from) but the assets derive the game
Anyways looks like SA is volatile
I wish they'd made a more clear cut licence for assets that derivatives are limited to that particular asset
I saw something interesting on the Syntensity hompage. When describing the license of the IntensityEngine they explicitly define what is not considered to be a derivative work. Maybe you can do the same with your game.
Another exception could be another explicit license. Like a CC-BY-SA content can't make a GPL licensed engine and code CC-BY-SA, and thus not making the whole game a derivative work. But of course separating engine and content is easier than separating some artwork in the content.
Yes but in the case of intensity games are not derived works of the engine aka C++ code part
But that doesn't meant that games cannot become derived works from assets as you don't own the copyright to clear the definition
They also have a separate licence for assets in that you give content in the syntensity project and everyone in it can freely use it but you still retain copyright and licence it however you like
Thing is i'm actually making a project on it but I want to licence it so it can be used outside syntensity too
Actually, making a license that "contaminates" a whole project is likely near impossible. There would always be ways around it, eg. only distributing the engine and having the users download the content themselves.
Maybe and maybe not it may actually depend on the level of contamination
IF assets contaminates a game it would be CC-SA as it is a derivate work
So if someone downloads the game and modifies and changes the game even making a total conversion of the game it will still be CC-SA as you derive it form the game
The assets might have different licences as there not derived works but the end game would have to be CC-SA
The best licence we currently have currently is CC-BY
We need a same asset derivate licence
The GPL is already a virus in and of itself. That's not exactly a bad thing but we 'really' don't need yet another bloody license that does that. CC-By basically only asks for attribution. That's the point of the license and it does it quite well. And FYI, IANAL.
GPL isn't recommended for art (the GNU folks say so). Most of the GPL is about access to the source code; art doesn't have source code. The closest thing might be the original project files before export (.psd, .blend, .xcf) but people don't always distribute those with art marked as GPL. And other parts of the GPL plain don't make sense for art (GPL3's stuff about patents, etc).
CC-SA is the best copyleft license for art. So a lot of us open source game developers care about how CC-SA is interpreted.
On the other hand, you sometimes want to force people to provide .psd/.blend/.xcf, and GPL seems to be the only license forcing this :(
To be slightly obnoxious, it's really CC-BY-SA and not CC-SA. CC dropped all non-attribution licenses quite a while ago, IIRC. They don't support them at this moment anyhow.
@Robin They do support PD and CC0, both do not require attribution
PS: There were licenses with no attribution requirement of the nc/nd/sa flavours? I didn't know. Very curious if true.
Yes, I know they do. I meant the “standard” CC licenses: BY[-NC][-SA|-ND].
And there were, but no-one was interested in a license without attribution.
Funny you'd say that, I've been wanting a SA no-attribution license for a while now...
@Robin please excuse, I didn't mean to express "if true" but rather "if that is what you meant" :)
I'd guess SA without BY would be impractical though. (Although ND without BY even moreso.)
... although I'm not exactly sure why that would be.
EDIT: @qubodup: heh.