Nothing wrong with that. OGA uses CC-BY for official commissions, so as to make them available to as broad an audience as possible. And while I haven't done any counts (it would be interesting to run a count, actually), my impression is that CC-BY is the most popular license on the site.
First things first: I'm convinced that the FAQ needs to be updated. If your goal is to convince me of that, you've succeeded. I'll be changing it as soon as I can work out what to write.
But I'll be honest here; this started out as an explanation of why you believe I'm wrong about CC-BY-SA and then transitioned into an opinion piece about why you think it's unreasonable for artists to want their work to only be included in FOSS projects. It's not my place (or yours) to tell artists whether the conditions they're putting on the use of their art are egregious or unreasonable in any way. OpenGameArt hosts art that can be used in FOSS software (and as a consequence of this, a lot of the art here, but not necessarily all of it, is practical for use in closed-source, commercial software). If someone wants to make art that doesn't fit in with OGA, while it's not something we'd host here, I'm not going to tell them that their requirements for using it (whatever they may be) are unreasonable. As the creator of a piece of art, the artist has the legal right to license it however they wish, and the fact that someone might dislike those terms doesn't make the artist in any way unreasonable.
To put this another way, most works of art are just copyrighted (that is, all rights reserved). I wouldn't walk into an art gallery and tell an artist displaying their work there that they need to allow me to use their art in my computer game and saying no would somehow be "egregious" of them.
Of the allowed licenses, I have no plans to encourage or discourage the use of any of them. OGA's official position on licensing has always been (and will remain) that it's entirely up to the artist.
I'm tempted to go on more about this, but I have a feeling we might need to agree to disagree on some of this stuff rather than take this discussion off into a long and unproductive debate about whether or not a game constitutes a work of art (your third to last paragraph is a humorous illustration of how silly and pedantic such debates can get). I do agree with you that the FAQ needs to be updated to indicate this ambiguity in CC-BY-SA (and you've convinced me that it would be irresponsible of me not to do so). On the other hand, it would be similarly irresponsible of me just to switch the question over such that it reassures developers that it's always okay just to use CC-BY-SA art in closed-source projects; in fact, it's my responsibility to warn developers that the interpretation of the license is up to the artist, so if the artist's interpretation is more broad than yours is, then they may end up in court (but on the other hand, the artists needs to be warned that even if they take someone to court over using their CC-BY-SA art in a closed-source game, they could very well lose).
Finally, I would like to make a note about legal confusion:
Ambiguities in a license aren't always the end of the world, so long as the license clearly allows at least some things and clearly disallows others. For instance, I believe we can agree on CC-BY-SA that it is clearly not okay to modify the art and fail to license the modification under CC-BY-SA. None of the other licenses clearly have that requirement (the GPL is mode about code and less about other media, so it's not really a perfect fit for art), so even if this ambiguity exists, CC-BY-SA still has obvious utility in that case. What people need to know is that there may not be a fool-proof way of preventing art from being used in closed-source projects.
In conclusion, while I don't necessarily believe a judge and jury would buy into your interpretation of the license, I'm also not entirely convinced they wouldn't, so the FAQ obviously needs to be changed. Are we in agreement about that?
Bart
P.S. If this discussion was sparked because there was a particular piece of CC-BY-SA art that you want to used in a closed-source project, just ask the artist. If the artist says to go for it, their explicit permission is all the license you'll ever need. And if they say no, I would of course encourage you to respect their wishes.
P.P.S. This should go without saying, but OGA is neither in the business of enforcing other peoples' copyrights, nor protecting people from copyright infringement claims.
P.P.P.S I haven't earned a law degree since my previous comment, so I'm still not a lawyer, and this still isn't legal advice. ;)
Forward: This deserves as much of an answer as I can give it, so what you see below are my rambling thoughts on the matter. Other people are free to chime in if they like, with the caveat that, apart from a FAQ update, opinions here on OGA are unlikely to change anything (believe me, we've tried).
I would really appreciate any help on re-working the FAQ question, which is really long overdue.
I am not a laywer, and this is not legal advice.
The license is CC-BY-SA 3.0. The Open Game Art FAQ says of this license, "This license requires you to release the source your entire project under the same license or one with similar terms, such as the GNU GPL. If you're trying to sell a game, this is probably something you want to avoid, as you will be required to distribute the source code, and your users will be allowed to distribute it as well."
Are you sure?
I was pretty sure when I wrote the faq five years ago, but now I'm no longer 100% certain it's correct. On the other hand, I'm not 100% certain that it's incorrect.
In any case, your reasoning is flawed in a couple of ways:
Since the Artwork is licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0, that causes the Changes to Artwork to also be licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 because that sits directly above the artwork. That doesn't cause the Game Project to become licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 because the Game Project sits underneath the Artwork. Under this same reasoning, any closed source commercial tools that I use as part of the game like a proprietary game engine that sits under the Game Project does not suddenly become licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 (all because I happened to use artwork licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0). Which in turn means that the native operating system tools that the software uses doesn't suddenly get transformed to CC-BY-CA 3.0.
First and foremost, the art is always included in the game, whereas the creation software is not. It's a lot easier to make the argument that the game is a derivative work of the art than it is to say that the game is a derivative work of the creation software.
Secondly, sometimes the license of the creation software can actually have an effect on the license of the game. For instance, if I used GPLed game creation software that comes with a GPLed redistributable library to go along with the game executable, since my game is linking to that library, it triggers the GPL's linking requirement and my game legally has to be GPLed (interestingly enough, the FSF has clarified that art does not trigger the GPL's linking requirement, but the CC has made no such statements about any of their licenses to my knowledge). As an aside, the linking requirement of the GPL gets violated all the time, but it is still technically there, and if someone wanted to enforce it, they could.
In short, not only is there a difference because the art is always included in the game, it's also true that the game can actually in some cases be a derivative of the creation software, or at least affected by the license.
This all gets into the ugly question of what constitutes a "work" with respect to copyright. Just because a game might be a combination of different works doesn't mean that it can't also be a derivative of those works. (Think of it in terms of just art. You can make a piece of art by combining a bunch of assets, and that piece of art is a derivative of all of those assets. A game is still arguably art, although in a different medium, so it could easily be argued that your game that you make with a piece of art is a derivative of that art.)
Note that if this has actually been established in court one way or the other, I'm not aware of it. What you're getting here is my best guess given that tremendous number of (sometimes painful) discussions I've had on this topic. I have had someone who was at the time an employee of the CC (and has since left amicably to pursue other work) essentially assure me that CC-BY-SA would cover code, but he's not a lawyer and is thus no more qualified to make that determination than I am.
We've also had very long discussions about making a license that is 100% clear that it covers the game itself in addition to the art, but I haven't found that many people outside of OGA are willing to have a serious discussion about that. Unfortunately, not only would I need a lawyer to write such a license, I would have to be able to convince the FSF and Debian Legal that it doesn't violate the fundamental tenants of what makes a license compatible with free software.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: Licensing is extremely hairy. It is often unpleasantly ambiguous, particularly for those of us who are used to dealing with computer code. In some ways, I kind of suspect that the only reason it works at all is that people kind of agree not to be overly picky about it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that when an artist picks a license, since they're the one responsible for enforcing their licensing terms, how they interpret that license is to some extent up to them. In absense of a court case saying that a game is absolutely not a derivative work, it's quite possible that an artist could take a game developer to court over CC-BY-SA and win. Judges and juries aren't computers. If the artist is clear that they feel that a game is a derivative work of their art, then that might be enough to convince them that the license would apply.
I've had game developers ask me this question a few times about art that's not mine, and my response has always been "I can't interpret or enforce licenses for other people. Ask the artist."
TL;DR: The FAQ needs to be updated to reflect all of these caveats. I probably should have done it a while ago.
@undesired: Do you consider this issue closed now, or are their further problems? If there are further problems, please be specific about the sound files in question, and link to evidence of infringement so I can check into it, rather than making vague comments. For the record, I googled this stuff, and I got a lot of dead links and no evidence of anything.
I need to make some things about copyright clear to you:
Using a similar palette to something else is not a copyright violation.
Using a similar style to something else is not a copyright violation.
It's only a copyright violation if there was actual copying, which clearly did not happen here.
Contrary to what you appear to be telling the world, we take allegations of copyright infringement very seriously here, and we appreciate reports of actual copyright infringement when it takes place.
Some of your allegations of infringement have been correct, and as I said, I appreciate your reports (the offending content has been taken down). Even though you've been exceptionally rude, I'm looking into all of them. However, I have made it clear in another comment that taking inspiration from something isn't a violation of copyright law, even if the source of that inspiration is obvious.
You can't copy a specific character, but it's perfectly legal to have generic humans, orcs, dwarves, and undead, even if they're in a style that's obviously inspired by Warcraft.
So, I'd like to ask a few things of you:
In the future, when you claim that there's a violation of copyright, don't be rude and sarcastic about it. Nastiness isn't something that this community needs.
Don't make claims about copyright violations if there's no copyright violation going on.
Provide links with real evidence.
Again, to reiterate, I take all of these claims seriously. There is no "clique" or other type of conspiracy here on OGA to allow unlicensed art to be posted here; in fact, it's very important to me that game developers are safe using the assets they get from here, and that means I need to take these reports seriously regardless of who they came from or who they are against.
In conclusion: Neither I nor the community in general have any desire to be your adversary about any of this stuff. If you want to sift through the archives and look for copyright issues, I would be extremely grateful for that; however, you need to be aware that I can't just take things down unless you give me enough evidence to look into it myself. I would also appreciate it if you stopped assuming malice every time you see a potential issue. Just report the issue without being rude about it, and let me dig into it. Note that if I don't respond to you, I am not deliberately ignoring you; sometimes I just don't see messages. Feel free to send me an admin message, catch me on IRC, post to the forums, talk to another admin, or do anything you need to to get my attention. I hope that you're willing to work with us.
One other thing, if someone is rude to you personally, I would prefer that in the future you take it up with me rather than deleting all of your art, then taking your ball and going home. I would rather deal with rudeness directly than have someone delete all their art assets and walk off without ever letting me know that there was a problem. Unfortunately, I can't personally police all of the comments on the site, but I'm more than willing to deal with issues if I'm made aware of them.
Yeah, I'm still planning on it, although it should be noted that I'm only planning on an OGA-BY at this time.
I understand that we may want to avoid the appearance that OGA endorses this particular license over other ones, so if someone has any suggestions for names, I'm happy to listen.
Note that the name will need to sound reasonable and also make it clear that it's analogous to CC-BY. That is, the name should be in the form of ____-BY. If I don't get any good ones, I'm just going to go with OGA-BY.
Just wanted to let you know that I support this project. I've got a couple of notes:
Your license on the website is CC-BY-SA, but you say to contact you for commercial use. Just so you're aware, CC-BY-SA explicitly allows commercial use. (You may already know that -- it's fine to ask people to contact you, and most people will, but you can't actually require it and still have the license be CC-BY-SA.)
Back when we did the Liberated Pixel Cup, we had a lot of luck when we put together a style guide and a color palette. The LPC art set is very consistent, especially given how many people contributed to it. For best results, I'd suggest making a style guide. :)
Sorry, it's an old joke. Back in the 90s, there was this ad campaign for a shoe company (don't remember which), and the tagline was "The Revolution will not be televised."
Nothing wrong with that. OGA uses CC-BY for official commissions, so as to make them available to as broad an audience as possible. And while I haven't done any counts (it would be interesting to run a count, actually), my impression is that CC-BY is the most popular license on the site.
First things first: I'm convinced that the FAQ needs to be updated. If your goal is to convince me of that, you've succeeded. I'll be changing it as soon as I can work out what to write.
But I'll be honest here; this started out as an explanation of why you believe I'm wrong about CC-BY-SA and then transitioned into an opinion piece about why you think it's unreasonable for artists to want their work to only be included in FOSS projects. It's not my place (or yours) to tell artists whether the conditions they're putting on the use of their art are egregious or unreasonable in any way. OpenGameArt hosts art that can be used in FOSS software (and as a consequence of this, a lot of the art here, but not necessarily all of it, is practical for use in closed-source, commercial software). If someone wants to make art that doesn't fit in with OGA, while it's not something we'd host here, I'm not going to tell them that their requirements for using it (whatever they may be) are unreasonable. As the creator of a piece of art, the artist has the legal right to license it however they wish, and the fact that someone might dislike those terms doesn't make the artist in any way unreasonable.
To put this another way, most works of art are just copyrighted (that is, all rights reserved). I wouldn't walk into an art gallery and tell an artist displaying their work there that they need to allow me to use their art in my computer game and saying no would somehow be "egregious" of them.
Of the allowed licenses, I have no plans to encourage or discourage the use of any of them. OGA's official position on licensing has always been (and will remain) that it's entirely up to the artist.
I'm tempted to go on more about this, but I have a feeling we might need to agree to disagree on some of this stuff rather than take this discussion off into a long and unproductive debate about whether or not a game constitutes a work of art (your third to last paragraph is a humorous illustration of how silly and pedantic such debates can get). I do agree with you that the FAQ needs to be updated to indicate this ambiguity in CC-BY-SA (and you've convinced me that it would be irresponsible of me not to do so). On the other hand, it would be similarly irresponsible of me just to switch the question over such that it reassures developers that it's always okay just to use CC-BY-SA art in closed-source projects; in fact, it's my responsibility to warn developers that the interpretation of the license is up to the artist, so if the artist's interpretation is more broad than yours is, then they may end up in court (but on the other hand, the artists needs to be warned that even if they take someone to court over using their CC-BY-SA art in a closed-source game, they could very well lose).
Finally, I would like to make a note about legal confusion:
Ambiguities in a license aren't always the end of the world, so long as the license clearly allows at least some things and clearly disallows others. For instance, I believe we can agree on CC-BY-SA that it is clearly not okay to modify the art and fail to license the modification under CC-BY-SA. None of the other licenses clearly have that requirement (the GPL is mode about code and less about other media, so it's not really a perfect fit for art), so even if this ambiguity exists, CC-BY-SA still has obvious utility in that case. What people need to know is that there may not be a fool-proof way of preventing art from being used in closed-source projects.
In conclusion, while I don't necessarily believe a judge and jury would buy into your interpretation of the license, I'm also not entirely convinced they wouldn't, so the FAQ obviously needs to be changed. Are we in agreement about that?
Bart
P.S. If this discussion was sparked because there was a particular piece of CC-BY-SA art that you want to used in a closed-source project, just ask the artist. If the artist says to go for it, their explicit permission is all the license you'll ever need. And if they say no, I would of course encourage you to respect their wishes.
P.P.S. This should go without saying, but OGA is neither in the business of enforcing other peoples' copyrights, nor protecting people from copyright infringement claims.
P.P.P.S I haven't earned a law degree since my previous comment, so I'm still not a lawyer, and this still isn't legal advice. ;)
Forward: This deserves as much of an answer as I can give it, so what you see below are my rambling thoughts on the matter. Other people are free to chime in if they like, with the caveat that, apart from a FAQ update, opinions here on OGA are unlikely to change anything (believe me, we've tried).
I would really appreciate any help on re-working the FAQ question, which is really long overdue.
I am not a laywer, and this is not legal advice.
The license is CC-BY-SA 3.0. The Open Game Art FAQ says of this license, "This license requires you to release the source your entire project under the same license or one with similar terms, such as the GNU GPL. If you're trying to sell a game, this is probably something you want to avoid, as you will be required to distribute the source code, and your users will be allowed to distribute it as well."
Are you sure?
I was pretty sure when I wrote the faq five years ago, but now I'm no longer 100% certain it's correct. On the other hand, I'm not 100% certain that it's incorrect.
In any case, your reasoning is flawed in a couple of ways:
Since the Artwork is licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0, that causes the Changes to Artwork to also be licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 because that sits directly above the artwork. That doesn't cause the Game Project to become licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 because the Game Project sits underneath the Artwork. Under this same reasoning, any closed source commercial tools that I use as part of the game like a proprietary game engine that sits under the Game Project does not suddenly become licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0 (all because I happened to use artwork licensed under CC-BY-CA 3.0). Which in turn means that the native operating system tools that the software uses doesn't suddenly get transformed to CC-BY-CA 3.0.
First and foremost, the art is always included in the game, whereas the creation software is not. It's a lot easier to make the argument that the game is a derivative work of the art than it is to say that the game is a derivative work of the creation software.
Secondly, sometimes the license of the creation software can actually have an effect on the license of the game. For instance, if I used GPLed game creation software that comes with a GPLed redistributable library to go along with the game executable, since my game is linking to that library, it triggers the GPL's linking requirement and my game legally has to be GPLed (interestingly enough, the FSF has clarified that art does not trigger the GPL's linking requirement, but the CC has made no such statements about any of their licenses to my knowledge). As an aside, the linking requirement of the GPL gets violated all the time, but it is still technically there, and if someone wanted to enforce it, they could.
In short, not only is there a difference because the art is always included in the game, it's also true that the game can actually in some cases be a derivative of the creation software, or at least affected by the license.
This all gets into the ugly question of what constitutes a "work" with respect to copyright. Just because a game might be a combination of different works doesn't mean that it can't also be a derivative of those works. (Think of it in terms of just art. You can make a piece of art by combining a bunch of assets, and that piece of art is a derivative of all of those assets. A game is still arguably art, although in a different medium, so it could easily be argued that your game that you make with a piece of art is a derivative of that art.)
Note that if this has actually been established in court one way or the other, I'm not aware of it. What you're getting here is my best guess given that tremendous number of (sometimes painful) discussions I've had on this topic. I have had someone who was at the time an employee of the CC (and has since left amicably to pursue other work) essentially assure me that CC-BY-SA would cover code, but he's not a lawyer and is thus no more qualified to make that determination than I am.
We've also had very long discussions about making a license that is 100% clear that it covers the game itself in addition to the art, but I haven't found that many people outside of OGA are willing to have a serious discussion about that. Unfortunately, not only would I need a lawyer to write such a license, I would have to be able to convince the FSF and Debian Legal that it doesn't violate the fundamental tenants of what makes a license compatible with free software.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: Licensing is extremely hairy. It is often unpleasantly ambiguous, particularly for those of us who are used to dealing with computer code. In some ways, I kind of suspect that the only reason it works at all is that people kind of agree not to be overly picky about it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that when an artist picks a license, since they're the one responsible for enforcing their licensing terms, how they interpret that license is to some extent up to them. In absense of a court case saying that a game is absolutely not a derivative work, it's quite possible that an artist could take a game developer to court over CC-BY-SA and win. Judges and juries aren't computers. If the artist is clear that they feel that a game is a derivative work of their art, then that might be enough to convince them that the license would apply.
I've had game developers ask me this question a few times about art that's not mine, and my response has always been "I can't interpret or enforce licenses for other people. Ask the artist."
TL;DR: The FAQ needs to be updated to reflect all of these caveats. I probably should have done it a while ago.
Bart
@Blender: This post would be more appropriate (and get more attention) on the forum, so I'm moving it there.
See this thread:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/license-question
@PreciousRoy
No problem. For the record, if you see potential copyright issues in the future, definitely bring them to our attention.
@undesired: Do you consider this issue closed now, or are their further problems? If there are further problems, please be specific about the sound files in question, and link to evidence of infringement so I can check into it, rather than making vague comments. For the record, I googled this stuff, and I got a lot of dead links and no evidence of anything.
@undesired
I need to make some things about copyright clear to you:
Contrary to what you appear to be telling the world, we take allegations of copyright infringement very seriously here, and we appreciate reports of actual copyright infringement when it takes place.
Some of your allegations of infringement have been correct, and as I said, I appreciate your reports (the offending content has been taken down). Even though you've been exceptionally rude, I'm looking into all of them. However, I have made it clear in another comment that taking inspiration from something isn't a violation of copyright law, even if the source of that inspiration is obvious.
You can't copy a specific character, but it's perfectly legal to have generic humans, orcs, dwarves, and undead, even if they're in a style that's obviously inspired by Warcraft.
So, I'd like to ask a few things of you:
Again, to reiterate, I take all of these claims seriously. There is no "clique" or other type of conspiracy here on OGA to allow unlicensed art to be posted here; in fact, it's very important to me that game developers are safe using the assets they get from here, and that means I need to take these reports seriously regardless of who they came from or who they are against.
In conclusion: Neither I nor the community in general have any desire to be your adversary about any of this stuff. If you want to sift through the archives and look for copyright issues, I would be extremely grateful for that; however, you need to be aware that I can't just take things down unless you give me enough evidence to look into it myself. I would also appreciate it if you stopped assuming malice every time you see a potential issue. Just report the issue without being rude about it, and let me dig into it. Note that if I don't respond to you, I am not deliberately ignoring you; sometimes I just don't see messages. Feel free to send me an admin message, catch me on IRC, post to the forums, talk to another admin, or do anything you need to to get my attention. I hope that you're willing to work with us.
One other thing, if someone is rude to you personally, I would prefer that in the future you take it up with me rather than deleting all of your art, then taking your ball and going home. I would rather deal with rudeness directly than have someone delete all their art assets and walk off without ever letting me know that there was a problem. Unfortunately, I can't personally police all of the comments on the site, but I'm more than willing to deal with issues if I'm made aware of them.
P.S. I'm sorry for hijacking this thread.
Yeah, I'm still planning on it, although it should be noted that I'm only planning on an OGA-BY at this time.
I understand that we may want to avoid the appearance that OGA endorses this particular license over other ones, so if someone has any suggestions for names, I'm happy to listen.
Note that the name will need to sound reasonable and also make it clear that it's analogous to CC-BY. That is, the name should be in the form of ____-BY. If I don't get any good ones, I'm just going to go with OGA-BY.
Greets!
Just wanted to let you know that I support this project. I've got a couple of notes:
Best of luck with your project!
Bart
Sorry, it's an old joke. Back in the 90s, there was this ad campaign for a shoe company (don't remember which), and the tagline was "The Revolution will not be televised."
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