All of the art hosted on OGA is free to use, including in commercial projects. However, each piece of art is released under a particular (or perhaps many) license. Different licenses have different conditions, and if you use art from OGA, you must be careful to follow the terms of one of its licenses. None of the licenses that OGA accepts prevent you from modifying and using art, including in commercial projects, however some have conditions which you may want to avoid as a commercial developer.
On the left panel, you can see that it is released under the following licenses:
CC-BY 3.0
CC-BY-SA 3.0
GPL 2.0
GPL 3.0
OGA-BY 3.0
If you use that art, you may select ANY ONE of those licenses, and safely ignore the others. Each license has its own conditions, which are described briefly in the FAQ, and in more detail by Capbros here. To my knowledge, nobody affiliated with OGA is a lawyer, and our understanding of the license requirements is often not clear, and may be innacurate. It is your responsability to ensure that you meet the license requirements.
Specifically regarding the Share-Alike requirement:
If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
So it seems like they believe that you don't have to license your entire work under -SA if you use -SA content from them.
But as redshrike noted, the only thing that really matters is what a court decides. I think the legal precedent that capbros linked to about the printed atlas including a -SA picture supports the idea that simply including and displaying -SA content in a larger work does not trigger the -SA clause.
And in fact it seems like some contributors only really wanted the art to be covered, while others want the games covered as well. I think the best advice regarding this license is to either play it safe, or ask the copyright owner for permission.
Also, I like the idea of putting the animated gifs directly into your description, instead of requring people to click through them in previews to see it animate. I think I'll be doing this on my future posts!
Briefly scanning the paper it looks like it focuses on things like mods, add-ons, plugins, and let's plays. So it looks at derivatives OF video games, not video games being derivatives of other things, which are generally derivatives or redistributions of "All-rights-reserved" content, and therefore not as applicable.
May be something useful in there regarding this conversation, but I doubt it.
Whoops, I missed that legal disclaimer. I think that is sufficient.
Regarding the collage, I think the question is more whether or not the resulting collage needs to be released under -SA, given that it uses -SA images. If the images in the collage are unaltered, and simply displayed, it seems more like a collective work than a derivative to me.
Insofar as a video game just displays unaltered -SA images (or plays sounds, ignoring for the moment synchronization), I think it falls under similar use to the book you refer to, in which the -SA image was incorporated (and displayed) into a larger work, but the larger work was not an adaptation - just a means to display the -SA content.
Conversely, it may be argued that the way the code displays the art is a derivative. For instance, nobody ever displays the entire spritesheet in its original form - code chops it up, and dynamically cycles through frames depending on the state of the object, which depends on user input. I would argue that this still doesn't count as a derivative though. If it did, and somebody released a spritesheet under CC-BY, then some jerk might come along, arange the sprites in order of the animation sequence, produce an animation and call it a new work, slapping a proprietary license on it, and making the original CC-BY asset unusable for everyone else, including the original creator. So I think that the types of remixes applied in games cannot reasonably be considered derivatives, but rather just means of displaying the original content.
It's definitely not clear though. I also found this page which states
Share-Alike (SA) – You can use this asset (or a version of it that you have modified) in your game, but your game must be released under a similar license to the asset in question.
No Derivative Works – You can use this asset in your game, but only if the original work was not modified in any way.
Clearly (at least) one of those is wrong - if the game is a derivative then you cannot use -ND content in it. If the game is NOT a derivative, then you don't have to release the game under a similar license. So I guess the question of whether or not -SA content may be used in a non-freely licensed game is identical whether or not -ND content may be used in games.
All of the art hosted on OGA is free to use, including in commercial projects. However, each piece of art is released under a particular (or perhaps many) license. Different licenses have different conditions, and if you use art from OGA, you must be careful to follow the terms of one of its licenses. None of the licenses that OGA accepts prevent you from modifying and using art, including in commercial projects, however some have conditions which you may want to avoid as a commercial developer.
For instance a recent submission http://opengameart.org/content/game-backgrounds-0.
On the left panel, you can see that it is released under the following licenses:
CC-BY 3.0
CC-BY-SA 3.0
GPL 2.0
GPL 3.0
OGA-BY 3.0
If you use that art, you may select ANY ONE of those licenses, and safely ignore the others. Each license has its own conditions, which are described briefly in the FAQ, and in more detail by Capbros here. To my knowledge, nobody affiliated with OGA is a lawyer, and our understanding of the license requirements is often not clear, and may be innacurate. It is your responsability to ensure that you meet the license requirements.
Just to add, Wikipedia licenses its text content under CC-BY-SA, and they have a short guide for how to comply with those terms (with the caveat that the guide is not actual legal advice). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content#Re-use_of_text_under_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike
Specifically regarding the Share-Alike requirement:
So it seems like they believe that you don't have to license your entire work under -SA if you use -SA content from them.
But as redshrike noted, the only thing that really matters is what a court decides. I think the legal precedent that capbros linked to about the printed atlas including a -SA picture supports the idea that simply including and displaying -SA content in a larger work does not trigger the -SA clause.
Really gorgeous! Heads up though, you should add commas between each of your tags for OHA, otherwise it gets treated as one giant long tag.
Love it!
Hopefully you'll hear something back. It seems like this has been discussed to death multiple times on OGA, with no real consensus.
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/practicality-of-cc-by-sa
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/cc-by-sa-and-apple-licensing-incompati...
And in fact it seems like some contributors only really wanted the art to be covered, while others want the games covered as well. I think the best advice regarding this license is to either play it safe, or ask the copyright owner for permission.
Also, I like the idea of putting the animated gifs directly into your description, instead of requring people to click through them in previews to see it animate. I think I'll be doing this on my future posts!
Hahaha, cute!
I got an unsafe content warning when I tried to visit this link.
Briefly scanning the paper it looks like it focuses on things like mods, add-ons, plugins, and let's plays. So it looks at derivatives OF video games, not video games being derivatives of other things, which are generally derivatives or redistributions of "All-rights-reserved" content, and therefore not as applicable.
May be something useful in there regarding this conversation, but I doubt it.
@capbros
Whoops, I missed that legal disclaimer. I think that is sufficient.
Regarding the collage, I think the question is more whether or not the resulting collage needs to be released under -SA, given that it uses -SA images. If the images in the collage are unaltered, and simply displayed, it seems more like a collective work than a derivative to me.
Insofar as a video game just displays unaltered -SA images (or plays sounds, ignoring for the moment synchronization), I think it falls under similar use to the book you refer to, in which the -SA image was incorporated (and displayed) into a larger work, but the larger work was not an adaptation - just a means to display the -SA content.
Conversely, it may be argued that the way the code displays the art is a derivative. For instance, nobody ever displays the entire spritesheet in its original form - code chops it up, and dynamically cycles through frames depending on the state of the object, which depends on user input. I would argue that this still doesn't count as a derivative though. If it did, and somebody released a spritesheet under CC-BY, then some jerk might come along, arange the sprites in order of the animation sequence, produce an animation and call it a new work, slapping a proprietary license on it, and making the original CC-BY asset unusable for everyone else, including the original creator. So I think that the types of remixes applied in games cannot reasonably be considered derivatives, but rather just means of displaying the original content.
It's definitely not clear though. I also found this page which states
Clearly (at least) one of those is wrong - if the game is a derivative then you cannot use -ND content in it. If the game is NOT a derivative, then you don't have to release the game under a similar license. So I guess the question of whether or not -SA content may be used in a non-freely licensed game is identical whether or not -ND content may be used in games.
I also found this paper: Computer Games and Intellectual Property Law: Derivative Works, Copyright and Copyleft. It can be downloaded for free by connecting with google+ info. I'll hopefully read through it when I have time, but I imagine it may have some useful nuggets.
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