I think we should continue what's being done now, that is, submitting alternate licenses under compatible ones. The only problem I see is that the compatibility combinations aren't clear, we really need (a) legal advice, or (b) a notable precedence, before deciding whether license-foo is compatible with license-bar. Note however licenses like MIT/BSD are clearly compatible with GPL at least, as FSF has already weighed into this particular combination and it has plenty of precedence.

Here's what I see:

• CC licenses were designed to be flexible in their attribution, being compatible with other licenses is one of its design goals
• I don't see any ethical problem with relicensing, as long as the original license terms are satisfied. For example, GPL has no qualms against reselling, and even encourages it as an alternate business model. If I wanted to use GPL and not allow users to resell, then I should have picked a non-commercial (and hence non-free) license. All I care about is whether my chosen license was adhered to. There's some hostility with relicensing because it's seen as a form of "stealing credit", but this is easily solved if the original author chose an attribution-required license. Again, if you don't want something, don't grant it in the license you picked! Complaining about users following your license is hypocrisy.
• We shouldn't add more licenses than strictly necessary. It's very simple to follow CC licenses. Adding other licenses makes it more confusing for users, puts the onus on them to understand what their rights and obligations are, makes searchability worse. If I want to search for art that only requires attribution, I don't want to have to check 10 boxes.

"Other" has the risk of ending up with non-Free or custom licences, and would require policing to remove unsuitably licenced art from the site.

If art is labelled as CC BY 3.0 and isn't actually CC BY 3.0, then I'd say that's been wrongly categorised, and an alternative licence in the main text isn't acceptable imo. Are there examples of this? If there is demand for a licence such as BSD there's an argument for adding it as an option (I think one of the downsides is it's unclear how BSD/MIT apply to art rather than software, so people don't necessarily want to encourage that licence as a choice for new art).

Man I guess there's no easy way to do this right...Did I mention how much I hate copyright laws? It really holds art back a lot I think. 

I honestly don't think a Japanese copyright is valid at all in the United States.  Not only am I covering my bases as far as their terms of use, but at the same time, it's not even valid here because it's a different country...They would need to actually file a different copyright for it to be valid here....That is unless the Trans Pacific Partnership goes through. 

While having numerious lisencese or "other" does make it so that more art could be on the site, it does make it -much- harder for us to police the art and make sure that its legal to use.

We try (but dont guarentee) to make it so that all the art on the site is actually legal to use under the liscense provided and we do our best to ensure that so that programmers, artists, etc that use OGA are able to trust art that is on the site.

There is quite a large amount of art that we have unfortunintly had to reject for various reasons over the years (mostly due to unliscensed use of stuff like mario)

Also all work submitted under a liscense should be aviable under that liscense, if it is not please flag a liscense issue so someone can review the problem.

> Did I mention how much I hate copyright laws? It really holds art back a lot I think. 

Quite the opposite; ignorance of copyright law, which includes licensing, holds a lot of art back. It leads to people using unsuitable and custom licenses, which lead to this problem in the first place. If more people used widely-accepted and tested licenses like CC then we'd have less of this problem. I've spoken to several artists about these issues who were eventually happy to relicense under an equivalent CC license.

> I honestly don't think a Japanese copyright is valid at all in the United States.

Japan, like most of the world, is a signatory of the Berne Convention which grants automatic copyright among all signatories, so its copyright absolutely holds in USA. This has nothing to do with TPP.

Why have any licenses at all? If you don't want to share, then don't release it on the internet. People should be free to make modifications of whatever they see, if they want to make the next Star Trek series, they totally can if they get the crew together to build it...Sure you know who came up with it first, but others  would be free to do with it what they want.

This is the type of license I would want on all my stuff...If I don't want people to use it or see it, then I'll keep it off the internet. 

Understanding more about what you can't do results in fewer things being created...Lots of people have made stuff that was modified from other stuff, but they got away with it beacuse nobody noticed...You'd have to take away about 60% of all the art out there. 

I just want to share it, and I'll do it the right way if I have to, but basically what I hear is that there's no way to make it work out, so I feel resentment toward it...Isn't that natural?

The page says "Use for whatever you want, but credit the looseleaf character generator". If I have done that, then can't my character sheet be released under public domain? Or could I actually credit the looseleaf character generator in the actual picture itself? 

If I did that then I have satisfied their license directly on the image itself. If I did that, then the image that I release can be in the public domain, right? It's absolutely lock-tight...But I'm guessing it's not ok for some reason? 

You guys definitely do more than try, I feel like I'm arguing legal frameworks with a Lawyer here. I'm glad you guys are smart but I don't think I'm even close to real violation of any license... 

It just seems like a big pain in the ass. 

I am asking if there is any license on your site that fits the circumstances of what I've posted.  

Basically the rules are that whoever is the biggest copyright troll gets whatever they want. 

I definitely totally 100% expected that there was no way for it to work out, try as I may.

The only way that it would be acceptable is if I drew everything pixel by pixel.  

There are no "copyright trolls" in this case, whatever that means. The problem is that the original author chose some strange custom license. If it were in plain English, a widely used license, then there would be no problem. Perhaps you can contact them, and say that a lot of good work is missing out because the license is unclear.

This reminds me of that "evil JSON" license bs. An author felt the need to use a custom but legally vague license, and as a result no one could practically use the work, and it was rewritten repeatedly, resulting in countless hours of duplicate effort. This also reminds me of someone who spent a lot of time making a game based on ZDoom, with the intention to sell it, but thanks to its custom non-commercial license, all that work was gone to waste.

To protect people from becoming victims like them (and to an extent, you!) we have to disallow these custom, non-free licenses. Because if we do allow them, apart from devaluing OGA and its mission, we simply attract more potential victims, who use these assets and think they are clear, but oops! The license doesn't let you do what you think it does!

This is a big reason why OGA is such a valuable resource: all the art is free, free as in speech, free as in free culture. You can use the art here for any purpose, derive and adapt it in any way, sell it, package it, as long as you follow the simple license terms.

What about profit-share licenses? i.e. requiring sharing with author some profit.

For example, a large owner of clipart may allow free use, as long as you don't make bucks, but you're still allowed to monetize, compared to CC-BY-NC, as long as you share profits with the owner. I.e. these licenses would fall between CC-BY and CC-BY-NC.

I'm totally cool with that agreement...All about working together and sharing in the profit. 

I claim no ownership over anything I've posted here, and I think it's ok to post it. I'm willing to do what it takes to be cool licensing wise but able to post my shit...I don't like ownershp and I don't believe you can own an idea...That's why what I share is under public domain, because I want it to be changed, improved, used for benefit of others...

capbros,

There are gradations of freedom:

CC0 > CC-BY > CC-BY-SA and GPL > Profit Share > CC-BY-NC > various unclear licenses > no license specified or copyright holder explicitly disallows using his stuff for some or all purposes - i.e. Nintendo sprites can be used only with Nintendo's games, while sound libraries requiring you to DRM their sounds or limit use to single project and working place.

I personally am open to seeing more licenses here on Open Game Art. However, I am unsure what the best picks would be. Looking at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative's (OSI) lists would be a good start, but many of those are intended for programs and may or may not be suitable here.

There are weakness in the gradient provided here. For example if you want a license that does not require credit you have to choose the CC0, which is probably a poor choice. What if you want a strong copyleft license like the GPL, but do not want credit unless the file is distributed as a resource like the zlib? There is no license here (or anywhere else I know of for that matter) that can fill that role.

Side note there is no "just credit me" license on OGA. The closest thing to that is either the OGA-BY ( http://static.opengameart.org/OGA-BY-3.0.txt ).

For me...The license I want is "here, I made this. I used this other tool to generate it and it's awesome, I claim no ownership over it at all, I want you all to enjoy it and maybe find it useful, thanks for taking interest!".

But that seems almost unatainable in the modern era.

@section31 - doesn't CC0 ( https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) fulfil that?

@Saliv: "What if you want a strong copyleft license like the GPL, but do not want credit unless the file is distributed as a resource like the zlib?"

I think the "attribution" of the GPL is that copyright messages must be left intact, but you can just leave that to be the standard gpl.txt licence without putting your name in it.

COPYRIGHT NERD + OGA MOD CHECKING IN.

If ANY art entry says it's a CC license that seems incorrectly applied, please click Flag Licensing Issues and I'll take a look at it. Send me a direct message if it needs my urgent attention, or if you have info about the original license. Either I can remove the listing, or contact the original artist to request proper CC license.

I am strict AS FUCK about CC licensing. It's my pleasure. I want this site to have clean license sources on everything.

If the original creator hasn't specified a CC license, it probably shouldn't be uploaded to OGA without contacting that artist first. Even if the original creator uses a very similar license (e.g. WTFPL instead of CC0), it's best practice to ask the creator to specifically allow their work to be released on OGA under the CC license.

---

As far as having other licenses, it's something we often debate here. MIT, BSD, LGPL, etc. used to be upload options. But those CODE licenses are fundamentally wrong for art. We're a big curator of copyleft game art, and I think we have a duty to encourage proper licenses. 

GPL is the wrong license for art, but there is an important legacy reason we allow it. Copyleft GPL game art existed before Creative Commons was a thing. Example: Battle of Wesnoth uses all GPL art, and that project was big before anyone had even heard of CC licenses.

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Strict licenses are what allows people to safely use our art in both free and commercial games. If we are not strict with licenses, this website becomes useless to anyone doing real game development.

Anyone with copyright licenses questions or rants can send them my way.

"click Flag Licensing Issues"

All I've got is a "report spam" button. Is "Flag Licensing Issues" a moderator-only thing?

Hm maybe that is a mod only button. For me, while logged in, the "Flag Licensing Issue" button appears just under the licenses icons on the left sidebar. This is when viewing a single art submission.

If the button really is mod only, we can ask Bart K to open it up to other registered users.

In any case, if you have a license question about an art entry, please do post a comment on that art entry. Ask the submitter whether they've gotten specific permission to relicense. These kind of comments will help me with context and save me some legwork.

Thanks capbros. Those are flagged now.

And thanks Nikita_Sadkov for contributing. No worries -- we'll get on the same page with licensing issues. When in any doubt, let's get permission from the original artist.

Maybe we can build an updated licensing help page. One that can help artists at submit-time, and covering some of the more common FAQs.

Imagine a "Help?!" button next to the license choices. A pop-up could briefly explain the main licenses, explain what choosing multiple licenses means, and what to do when the exact license isn't available.

It could also include examples of things we can't allow, that I end up deleting often. Trademarked characters, cgtextures, paint-overs of closed works, etc.

Well, I won't be  bothering authors to change the license to the less free one and it won't be possible, because most authors can't be contacted. That means these assets are off OGA.

Someone will likely start a competing site in future anyway, so no worries.

>Is there honestly no room for an 'Other License' category?

Judging from what Clint said (i.e. "no hair splitting"), OGA has underlaying politics of promoting Creative Commons as the single right way. It would likely be the other way around, with GPL and Public Domain being removed at some point,

I'll share my personal opinions -- if this were my site (it's not, I'm just a volunteer mod for Bart K).

I would attempt to deprecate GPL as a main art license option for new uploads.

I would then consider listing WTFPL, BSD, MIT, LGPL, and GPL (or just Other, fill in the blank) as options that only Mods can choose when editing items. Then these code licenses can appear under "Advanced Search", or something similar.

These options would only be used when relicensing as CC is not possible. Here's an example where I feel it would be highly appropriate to host a BSD art set here on OGA: an open source game gets abandoned and there's a set of BSD art assets that deserves preservation and reuse. And none of the artists are available to relicense as CC-BY.

An updated search interface could allow searching by License still, but also searching by Requirements. Example:

---

Filter by Art License:

[ ] CC0

[ ] CC-BY

[ ] CC-BY-SA

[+] (Show advanced license options...)

Filter by License Requirements:

[ ] No restrictions (CC0, also includes rare Public Domain and WTFPL results)

[ ] Attribution Only (CC-BY, also includes rare BSD, MIT results)

[ ] Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA, also includes rare LGPL and GPL results)

---

Note we wouldn't have a Non-Commercial search option, as we strictly don't allow those licenses here (CC-BY-NC, etc). Non-commercial restrictions are incompatible with most open source code licenses, so we just don't allow them.

>The idea being that it's ok for one artist on a team to submit works on behalf of the entire team, but otherwise folks shouldn't be submitting works that are not their own.   

If project is GPL, BSD or public domain, then whole world is the team and can do with it whaetever they want, as long as it doesn't conflict with license. If you want maintaineers' permission, then I can simply fork it, rename, add a few sprites/code-lines, then brand it as unique project.

We are splitting the hair again. If you want to have artist-oriented resource and please artists (as opposed to developers), the right way would be disallowing uploading any work, which you haven't done yourself.

I.e. you must clearly determine who is the target auditory: artists or developers.

Futuremore, artists care about moral aspects and ethics, while developers, in general, care only about maintaining formalities (i.e. it is okay to kill, if law allows). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

> I am not out to pick on Nikita_Sadkov or his submissions, here's an alternate example of the issues presented by allowing third party submissions:

>http://opengameart.org/content/420-pixel-art-icons-for-medievalfantasy-rpg

Actually, that icon set includes illegal sprites from commercial game and the author states that explicitly:

http://7soul1.deviantart.com/art/420-Pixel-Art-Icons-for-RPG-129892453

>Someone pointed out to me that using something from a commercial game as a base and making it public is a bad move, even when unintentional. Sorry for the inconvenience.

that mess is what you get, when intellectual property gets shared by someone other than its author.

@capbros Thanks for bringing this one to my attention.

I"ve updated this page http://opengameart.org/content/420-pixel-art-icons-for-medievalfantasy-rpg

The download is no longer available, and I've added notices and links to the new pack.

Usually we catch licensing issues early and we can just delete offending entries. But this one's been on OGA a long time and gotten heavy traffic. I think leaving the stub page for that obsolete collection is a good call for this situation.

Hey Clint!  Side note, but it's good to see you around here, and good to know you're going to be taking on licensing issues.

Allowing mods to be able to select the other (GPL, BSD etc) licences is a reasonable solution. I think it'd be good to have a specific place where people can post suggestions of such for mods to upload (unless it's done as capbros says - people can choose such options, but it requires a mod to approve it).

Regarding the wording on the FAQ - I think the biggest improvement would be to put this text on the "Submit art" itself. At least, put it in the "Submission guidelines" that's linked from the "Submit art" page.

I think it would be sad to disallow uploading free art unless you're the author. Aside from the practical effect of limiting the art on this site, it seems to go against one of the major benefits of Free licencing (that a clear Free licence means I can use it without having to contact the author every time).

For the problem where an incorrectly licenced art (e.g., it's a derivative work of something that isn't Free) doesn't get updated on OGA - yes, it is a problem, but I'd argue it's a problem that can occur anyway: the author might never notice; the author might notice, but forget they also uploaded to OGA. Also consider that even if OGA is uploaded, if I've already downloaded from OGA to include in a game, I may not notice whether or not OGA is updated.

Yes these problems are reduced if art only exists on one site, but then why bother with OGA at all? Much of the benefit of OGA is that it has become a go-to site for Free game art, rather than having to search the web because lots of artists have different places they like to upload to.

I want to reiterate what mdwh said "a clear Free licence means I can use it without having to contact the author every time".

The artists might have even released their work under one of those licenses specifically so people will stop bothering them with those same questions. The problem is not 3rd party submitted works, it's failure to verify the license is clear. I still think asking the artist is a good idea just to make sure, but requiring it would uneccessarily eliminate a lot of the really great stuff on this site. Not because nobody wants to ask, because the artist can't be reached.

As capbros said, the community here is what makes OGA what it is. A major component of that community is curation. When something is submitted with unclear legal standing (which happens even when the submitter is the artist) the community says "hold, on. I don't think that's quite right. Let's get to the bottom of this."

That kinda seems like a pain, but it works. I think it could work better, sure. At least some focus could be dedicated to clarifying what should be done when licensing is not solid. Is there a reliable way to notify a moderator? What can we expect from the moderator when a submission is questionable? Should preview images be marked with a "Potential Licensing Issues" watermark at the same time? How long should the "Potential Licensing issues" hold be in place? If nothing is resolved a month later, why is it still up? Is there an avenue for OGA regulars to be interviewed as additional moderators? Or some sort of Junior Moderator that can take a second look at submissions?

Also, I agree with mdwh and capbros about putting clarifying instructions on the "Submit Art" page.

Shouldn't FAQ explicitly disallow deriviative works?

For example, http://opengameart.org/content/d3-f-dh-static-64-x-64 explicitly includes a character copyrighted by Blizzard.

Most people simply don't know that they can't use art from commercial games as base.

Disallow derivative works in general? That would invalidate pretty much every license supported by OGA. I would even say OGA encourages derivatives... as long as the terms of the source license are adhered to.

Derivative works of commerical studios and non-free intellectual propery? Yes, that is already explicitly disallowed in the FAQ: http://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-submittype

"The following kinds of art do not qualify:

• Modifications of existing commercial game art
• Art that's your work, but is clearly non-free IP (for instance, a sprite of Gordon Freeman from Half Life)"

 

Yet people still miss it and frequently submit stuff derived from non-free IP, like mario characters, while mods fail to catch them. I think pointing that at submission page would save a lot of time for everyone, including submitters, users and mods.

Well, I'm not really well versed in copyright law, nor do I claim to be, but in all honesty I really would like to see more licenses available. At the very least, an option for CC-BY-NC, as that is the license under which all of my characters are licensed (which is why you only really see tilesets from me). Without it, there's no real place for me to release those graphics from my old Ludum Dare games for people to use for non-commercial works or as placeholder art. Now, I know that this likely won't happen, as from what I've heard OGA is run mostly by really hardcore supporters of the Free Software movement, and the general consensus with that group seems to be that limited programmers and artists like that is only okay if we force them to release their source code, and well, let's just say I'm even less of a fan of copyleft than copyright (hence why as far as I remember, all of my art submitted here is either CC0/Public Domain or CC-BY). I mean, it still doesn't make logical sense to me in all honesty that there's no CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-SA-NC, though there is GPL, dispite both limiting game developers in equally (well actually, I'd argue that GPL is worse, but...) restrictive ways, but CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-SA-NC somehow are not free culture licenses whilst GPL waltzes off free as a bird. I'm just saying, if these licenses (or even just one of the two) were added, there'd be a lot more art from me around here. Some of the stuff on my DA, some Kyle the Caiman sprites and unused tilesets, my old Ludum Dare character sprites, etc.

However, I do think that allowing an other category would probably be a bad idea, as like was previously said, this could be abused to submit art that the submitters have no right to submit. For instance, I could color Mario blue, call him "Blario" or something, and submit him under whatever license Nintendo licensed the original sprite under. It'd just be too hard to moderate all of the new submissions.

As for licenses being removed, I most certainly would not like that one bit, especially since one of the ones that were brought up was the CC0/Public Domain license, which, as previously stated, a large majority of my submitted artwork is licensed under. Something like that I can safely say would drive me largely away from OGA. I'm sure that I'm not the only one here who makes sure that something is truly free when giving something away to use for free. ...and no, I do not consider GPL to be free (heck, I'd argue that even CC-SA/CC-BY-SA aren't truly free, but at least I find them to be acceptable), in case you couldn't tell. But of course, what do I know, I'm primarily a programmer...

CC-BY-NC would conflict with GPL and BSD, as that would be illegal to sell say Linux distribution, which includes a game with CC-BY-NC graphics. And you can't bundle such games with Ouya and the likes. In that way CC-BY-NC is even more restrictive than profit-share licenses, like Unreal's one.