Pondering Licening
(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
I was looking into using CC-BY-SA art from here on Open Game art for use in a project. It appears it cannot be used with Unreal Engine or Unity, because neither of them are distributed under a CC-BY-SA compatible license. Releasing a game with CC-BY-SA or GPL licensed content would require the engine source to be released under the same license. This would also include such content as the Unity logo, Unreal logo, or any other trademarks, if they are displayed in your game or it's icon.
On UE4 Answerhub, a staff member clears this up here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/345491/why-is-denied-creative...
The unity engine source code is only released under this license: https://unity3d.com/legal/licenses/Unity_Reference_Only_License
So I guess this means we can't use any game engines that aren't CC0 or CC-SA, since they would contain proprietary code not developed by us? Even if we were to release our game under CC-BY-SA? What game engines have been released under CC0 or CC-SA?
If we take this a step further, does this mean we wouldn't be able to, for example, use any Microsoft binaries in our game (.Net Framework components, like System.Collections) or Mono components (in the case of Unity)? Exactly how far up the chain does this go?
If the asset is released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 (not 3.0) that would at least include GPLv3 licensed engines (https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/com...).
I have searched a lot about licensing on these forums, and have seen a lot of good arguments for both sides. In my opinion, Epic's answer (in the link) is the most authoritative I've seen, as they would have developed this policy in coordination with their legal team.
If every Unreal or Unity developer was scrupulous and followed every license accurately, this excludes a large portion of OGA.
Everything licensed under a CC-BY-SA or GPL License would be out of the question. Only the OGA-BY, CC non-SA, and the LGPL licensed content would be doable. This leaves roughly 20% of the assets unusable.
So I guess my question is... Am I interpreting all of this correctly? And if I am, are these licenses actually bad for game or software assets of any kind?
edit: fixed a word substitution error
I don't believe that is necessarily an accurate interpretation.
See this discussion: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-sha...
Artwork and code are separately licensed. Art can be CC-BY-SA, but code can be another license. Any art derived from CC-BY-SA art must also be CC-BY-SA, but game code is rarely derived from artwork. This part bears repeating:
GAME CODE IS RARELY DERIVED FROM ARTWORK. Unless you took an art asset, and somehow morphed it into code or an AI script, then sure, that code is derived from the artwork and must be licensed as a derivative of the artwork. Otherwise, the code is not a derivative of the artwork and does not inherit the license.
This is even supported by some of the available information from the Free Software Foundation:
As well as this clarification:
This was primarily in reference to GPL, but I believe it applies to CC-BY-SA as well, especially since CC-BY-SA is on the FSF "list of free licenses" as well as being "one-way compatible" with GPL: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/cc-by-4-0-and-cc-by-sa-4-0-added-to-...
In most cases, games can have separate licenses for Code and Data. Assets are usually data.
However, this is not a short discussion. It has been hashed out many times before. I would recommend reading the existing discussions (and contributing to those discussions) before starting yet another identical topic about how CC-BY-SA artwork affects game code and engine license:
--Medicine StormI've read all of those except for the last one. I didn't know about the last until now, but I don't have time to read it at the moment. I will take some time tomorrow to read and digest that one.
The Apple thread isn't as relevant as the others, it focuses more on the philosophy of open source, and less on the specifics. It's about helping an artist choose a license and not a developer choose an art, an important distinction when discussing if I'm legally able to use an art vs an artist casually choosing what box to tick when they upload. And it doesn't seem to speak to the specifics, unless I missed something.
The other threads are primarily what led me to the restrictions as I understand them. So in short, you said I was wrong, then posted all the same research I did that led me to think that CC-BY-SA requires the derivative work to have the same license.
CC-BY-SA 4.0 is only one-way compatible with GPL, meaning if I have a derivative work made from a CC-BY-SA 4.0 asset, I may choose to license the derivative under GPL 3.0 instead. But GPL 3.0 seems to still require making the source available (if a binary is distributed), which many developers don't want to do.
It almost seems like many people are encouraged by various online communities (including members here) to attempt a license gridlock where it is uncertain who owns what in hopes that the artist either doesn't mind that you use their art, or can't afford an attorney. I might as well flip a coin, or ask a hundred artists for permission, wait for their response, only to really end up using one singular 8x8 png and waste everyone's time.
Also, I'm sorry for making a new thread, I've seen a few people complain about necro posting and thought a fresh thread was the community expectation.
The question basically boils down to whether a game that includes a pile of assets is merely a 'collection' of those assets, or if it is a 'derivative work' made from those assets.
Officially, the Wesnoth team seems to take the stance that Wesnoth is a 'collection'. They allow -ND sprites to be used in the game - if the game were a derivative work of the sprites then obviously that would be a violation of the license.
Personally, what I do is ask the artist and make sure what I'm doing is in line with what they want, because whether or not it's legally okay is very different from whether or not you're gonna piss off people by exploiting what seems - to them - like a nitpicky loophole.
That said, creative commons really dropped the ball on this license, and despite me nagging them on multiple occasions they haven't done much to clear things up - I honestly wish -BY-SA didn't exist in its current form, because it doesn't do a good job of transparently communicating what can and cannot be done (which is the whole point of standard license).
My point wasn't that you were wrong, my point was that it is a never-ending discussion. :P My opinion is that art collections do not need the same license as the code that uses them.
I am confident in this opinion because I have verified it with the lead intellectual property attorney of a fortune 100 company. However, I verified it with the details of my own project. Other projects are not subject to legal generalization, so you'll either have to hire your own lawyer or check with all those artists in order to be sure yourself. Sorry. :/
Also, who here on OGA condemned comments on old topics? If the thread is relevant and there is new questions or new information to share, it's best to contribute to an existing conversation than to start a new one where all the same stuff will have to be said again. :)
--Medicine StormSee, I understand the reason someone might want to use a CC-BY-SA. They made art freely available, and want to promote others to do the same. It makes sense. It's the philosophy behind the open source movement. But the issue comes down to whether or not the asset's license is compatible with the game engine.
It's not about trying to exploit people. This argument is not even about trying to make financial gain from someone else's work (That's what the NC licenses are for). It's about the ability to use the art in software. It's about Epic's answer in the link I provided earlier. That proves that, at least in Epic's eyes, the entire game is considered a derivative. It doesn't matter if that's 100% accurate, what matters is they have control over the usage of their engine, and their legal team interprets the CC-BY-SA license to require releasing the game and game engine source under CC-BY-SA. In practicality, this means that Epic forbids the use of CC-BY-SA assets in any game made with Unreal Engine, since you cannot license your game under a CC-BY-SA license. Doing so would risk the developer losing their license to use the Unreal Engine, regardless of whether or not their interpretation of CC-BY-SA is correct.
I guess the biggest thing that makes everything murky is that no one is pointing to established case law. It appears the courts have yet to weigh in on this issue, or at least no one has noticed if they did.
It doesn't help that the Creative Commons organization doesn't want to take on the issue. It's as if they want to keep the ambiguity, which kind of goes against their own mission statement.
Hypocrisy!
They really need to explicitly define, in the license text, how ShareAlike works with assets inside a game or software. Then both the game developers and artists would know what the license entails, and can choose licenses and assets appropriately. The other use cases of the license are more self explanatory, like making a derivative in the same format, making a video that uses images, etc. Until then, it may be impossible to make even a free and freely distributable game binary if you use a CC-BY-SA asset, such as those awesome LPC assets that I keep rediscovering and that make me do all of this research all over again.
I guess that's why it seems like everyone's flocking to Godot these days, since it's under the MIT license and they explicitly state you can release your game under any license, you just have to include a statement that your game uses the Godot engine, which is under MIT license. https://godotengine.org/license
But I only use game engines that start with "Un," so until they rename it Undot, I won't use it. Jokes aside, game engines are tools and you pick the best tool for the job, and some engines are better for some games. Sometimes you want to use Unity. Sometimes you want to use Godot. Sometimes you want to use Ren'Py.
My dream would be for OGA and all game asset aggregate sites (I would name a few, not sure if forum rules allow) to do away with the misguided Creative Commons and get together and develop licenses geared for games. There can still be a share alike, just one that carefully defines what sharing alike in the context of a game really means. One that explicitly defines the allowed use in a project that is not compatible with the CC share alike licenses (Unreal, Unity, etc) Credit where credit's due: the OGA-BY license doing exactly that by existing to fix a game specific issue caused by CC-BY, Godot using the MIT license.
It's been a few years now, but I did speak directly to someone at Creative Commons about this (and several other licensing questions that come up often on OGA) and was told very directly that source code, game engines, etc. are NOT considered 'derivative' works under the CC-BY-SA license.
They were very clear that just using an CC-BY-SA art work (be it music, image, animation, etc) in a game would not require the game's source code to be redistributed under CC-BY-SA.
Whether or not the technical wording of the license itself bears this out, I can't say, but I can tell you that the representative I spoke with was very clear about this issue.
The message I got from my conversation with the CC rep was that they are concerned with protecting and licensing 'creative' works not technical works (eg. code).
As an example, the rep told me that if you made some sprites and released them under CC-BY-SA and some one took those sprites and used them in a game, the game itself would not be considered a derivative work. Indeed, even if they made modifications to your sprites, only those modifications and not the game they were used in would be considered subject to the 'share alike' principle.
However, if you made some sprites, say for a group of anthropomorphic flowers, /AND/ you added a little background or story to go with them, something like 'The Flower Family frolics in the fields until the Evil Patrick Pesticide arrives and they must embark on an epic quest to save themselves from this awful man and his vicious chemical concoctions'. If someone were to make a game using elements of that story or those characters, then that game WOULD be considered a derivative work and need to be shared under the 'share alike' principle. However, even in this case, 'share alike' would apply only to the game executable, not the original source code.
To put it in another way, if you took a CC-BY-SA image and painted a copy of it on the side of a building, they would not need the blue prints for the building. Or if you printed out some copies of a CC-BY-SA image and handed them out at the park, they would not need the patent for your printer.
Again, it was a ways back now, so I'd need to review my notes for any of the finer points, but I do recall leaving the conversation being quite sure that the Creative Commons people were not at all interested in forcing anyone to release source code for anything. Again, whether this is born out by the actual legalese I can't say, but they definitely made it clear to me what their intent was.
Regarding GoDot MIT, I'll certainly agree, MIT license is among the gold standards for flexibility and using it is definitely to GoDot's benefit, especially when compared to the complex licensing agreements governing the commercial engines like Unity and Unreal.
https://withthelove.itch.io/
>do away with the misguided Creative Commons and get together and develop licenses geared for games.
that isnt changing oga thats getting rid of oga completely and making whole other website
no need to wait for that you can make new game licenses and host game art on a new site right now
It's not a problem limited to OGA. It's not about getting rid of OGA. No one wants that. It can't be solved by just making another website. It's a problem within the entire indie gaming community. There are too many artificial barriers simply because someone doesn't want to define if a game is a derivative work or a change in format or simply a performance IN the license text. Every person interested in making games, art for games, or other assets for games would benefit from such an explicit definition.
It appears CC-BY-SA 4.0 doesn't dictate the license of the game if a game is considered a format change. It would if the game is considered a derivative work. So which is it? Obviously we have all heard it both ways! The game dev community needs a license that explicitly states which it is, and for that to become the gold standard.
doing away with creative commons = eliminating all art on oga right now
oga isnt going to do away with cc licenses until a new site is available that does it better
make the new better licenses get them used and adopted by the game dev community __then__ oga will change
before that its just making good assets unavailalbe to people that dont have the same problem with license vs game engine
OGA has 'improved' on CC-BY license with OGA-BY, I suppose we could do the same with CC-BY-SA by spinning off an OGA-BY-SA license. It could be just a copy of CC-BY-SA but with some added language to explicitly state that games or other apps that use the artwork will not be considered 'derivative works' and will not be subject to the 'share alike' clause. A line clarifying that source code would never fall under the 'share alike' clause could be added as well.
I do agree that there is something of a gap in CC stuff when it comes to games. I first learned about CC from OpenGameArt so I just kind of assumed the CC licenses were created with games in mind, but after reading into it and talking to the CC rep, I realized they were actually created with more traditional arts (photography, painting, writing, etc) in mind.
The issue, as it appears regularly on OGA discussions, seems to boil down to two different takes on what 'share alike' means, eg.
"Here's my work, if you create something with it, you need to share your creation under the same license."
OR
"Here's my work, if you modify it, you need to share your modifications under the same license."
From what I can tell, as a matter of practicality, the CC people are aiming more for the later definition but folks can certainly be forgiven for assuming the former when they hear the words 'share alike'.
Thus it's hard to know an artists' intent when they choose to license a work under CC-BY-SA. And that's without getting into the weeds of what all the legalese actually means in practice.
https://withthelove.itch.io/
I think it also depends about how the assets are packaged with the game, multiple CC licences technically prevent making the assets impossible to obtain, the packaging process of the game engines where it puts assets in a proprietary file format might violate this rule, however, loading the assets at runtime from a directory where they're in an easy to read format doesn't violate it
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I compose music inspired by the Japanese style of composition.
I also program games.
The problem is how UE4 works. It bakes the assets creating a "derivative work", then stores them into a package. And since this packaging and the new asset format is proprietary, you can't do it for CC-SA. However, IMO, it's perfectly fine to load these assets (from the original format, or other common one) at runtime. But again, while possible, this is not how UE was designed to work, nor Unity...
And the second issue is of course the license mess.
That's an interesting point about the various engines 'packaging' up assets into obscure or otherwise inaccessible formats.
First, is the simple solution just to include the assets in their original form along with the rest of the game package? So, if you have a zip, it includes both the Unreal formatted asset and the original asset? Even if the game doesn't technically use the asset in it's original format, you are distributing it with your game and ensuring that end users can access it.
Second, it's interesting to note that GPL specifically side steps this issue. When you get into the fine print, GPL only requires that you make the original source available, not that you always distribute the source with every instance of the software. That's why you can distribute pre-built binaries of GPL'd software without any source code in there. GPL doesn't care if the source is included everywhere, as long as it is made available /somewhere/. Wish CC folks had thought along the same lines when they crafted their license. You could argue that allowing stuff to be distributed without full source creates space for malicious actors to cause trouble, but I think history shows it's worked out pretty well for GPL'd software.
https://withthelove.itch.io/