commercial usage of OGA assets, and more
Friday, September 9, 2011 - 19:37
these questions are a bit tricky and can be seen from many angles, so let's cut to the chase:
would donations count as commercial usage?
if one were to release an open source game on a "pay what you want" base, giving the end-users the ability to freely copy and redistribute the game, would that be ok, if OGA resources are in and individual licenses are respected?
The reason of this questions is that we want to raise money to hire a coder to do a few changes to the engine, since none of us knows how to do anything complex in that domain.
We would also like to donate some of the earnings back to OGA as a sign of appreciation from the many resources we have used.
You're right, the question of what counts as "commercial use" is particularly thorny and ill defined. It raises a number of unfortunate and hard to resolve issues. That's why no non-commercia licenses are allowed on OGA. That's right! All assets on OGA are allowed for commercial use! As long as you respect the individual licenses you're good to go, and none of them will tell you you can't use it commercially.
I mean, I'm not about to discourage you from donating to OGA, but there you have it.
To be clear:
ALL assets on OpenGameArt can be used commercially. We do not allow licenses here that prevent commercial use.
This is easy to understand for CC0 / Public Domain art: it can be used basically any way you want.
CC-BY is simple too. It can be used with attribution: give credit to the original artist (e.g. list them in the Credits of your commercial game).
Commercial use of CC-BY-SA art is perfectly okay but must be done carefully. CC-BY-SA art can only be combined with other CC-BY-SA or compatible art. If you are mixing CC-BY-SA art with CC0, Public Domain, or CC-BY art it is fine. You are not permitted to distribute CC-BY-SA art mixed with closed/proprietary art. You can use CC-BY-SA art with a closed-source engine, which means your players can reshare all the art but not the code.
Of course, GPL code and CC-BY-SA art can be done commercially too. Although users can freely share your entire game, you can still sell copies. Or it can be pay-what-you-want, or donation-based, or ad-supported, etc.
"You can use CC-BY-SA art with a closed-source engine, which means your players can reshare all the art but not the code."
I am developing a browser game with unity 3d. With unity in general art assets are packaged in such a way that they are not accesible to the user, with browser games this is doubly true. I know I can distribute the art seperately from the website or in an adjacent folder but do I have to? I am not changing the art (other than maybe adding transparency) just using it and people can get it here. It just seems like a hassle with no real purpose.
Anon: CC FAQ's Is_Creative_Commons_involved_in_digital_rights_management? points out the following part of by-sa 3.0 (4.a.):
To make sure this is being followed, I'm afraid you have to read and understand the entire license text.
My guess is that in Unity3D you do not use the format you found on this website but convert files into another format by importing them. If this format can be distributed separately, you probably will have to give users access to the converted file format, as it is a derivate work of the original cc-by-sa work.
Probably not on topic: notice that modifying the uv texture of a model licensed under cc-by-sa also requires sharing the changed version, if the uv texture is also covered by cc-by-sa. Creating a uv texture independant from existing cc-by-sa uv textures for the model might allow you to use a non-cc-by-sa uv texture on a cc-by-sa model, but it also might be that a uv texture can be seen as a derivate work of the model it belongs to, which would require the self-made texture to be cc-by-sa as well.
IWIWALNWID (I wish I was a lawyer. No, wait, I don't!)