Allow/switch to CC-BY-SA as license for graphics and sounds

[Jenalya]

I've been contacting people from creative commons and gnu to get a better educated opinion whether it's possible to use graphics together of which some might be only GPL and some only CC-BY-SA, and the overall conclusion was that the copyleft of both licenses probably clashes (accompanied by "INAL", "TINLA" disclaimers).
It might be that these interpretations are overly pessimistic, because going with that interpretation the solution would be 'don't combine' and therefore no risk.
I'm starting to wonder if it'd be the best to actually get legal advise about this.

[o11c]

In that case, I think it would be best just to say:

• For the current game world, everything is GPL.
• For future worlds, they may choose to be CC or GPL.
• In order to use graphics in multiple worlds, it is still beneficial to dual-license individual pieces.

[Ablu]

What kind of future worlds do you mean?

[o11c]

What kind of future worlds do you mean?

Like tmwa-adventures, when it eventually gets made.

[AnonDuck]

Of course the GPL always wins. It's the more viral of the two...

I'm in favor of a more practical approach. TMW is always in need of art.

If the artist wants it to be CC licensed..Cool. If it's GPL licensed.. That's cool too. As long as it's up to the author and TMW has permission to use their art, I don't see any huge problem.

The TMW client just displays artwork in a combined and overlaid view, much like a web browser would display a fancy gallery of differently licensed photographs. Neither of these licenses prohibit packaging or displaying the art along with works that are licensed differently.

Where it gets tricky is actually combining the files. You can't take pixels from a GPL artwork and add it to a CC artwork, and probably not the other way around either. Not unless the author is willing to re-license.

Overlaying images as the client does is a bit of a grey area, but it is doing this dynamically as it displays them... It could be considered "dynamic linking" of a sort.. But also maybe not. People have been arguing about linking for decades and have come to no solid court-backed solution so I wouldn't worry. I don't see photographers suing Mozilla and Microsoft Photosynth for combining their images with others in odd ways..

You also have to remember that the likelihood of such a thing going to court is almost nonexistent, whereas the likelihood of TMW needing more art is 100%.

Respect the authors wishes and everything will be fine!

[4144]

CC-BY-SA-2.0 is non free license, atleast by debian classifications.
becuase this if choice CC-BY-SA it must be only CC-BY-SA-3.0 or higher.

[Reid]

CC-BY-SA-2.0 is non free license, atleast by debian classifications.
becuase this if choice CC-BY-SA it must be only CC-BY-SA-3.0 or higher.

You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Japan).

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US));

It seems to be compatible with later versions of the license, so re-licesing a CC BY-SA 2.0 into CC BY-SA 3.0 seems to be possible.

Also, you can't mix up a GPL and a CC contents licensed all together in the same file, it's not supported by the GPL and CC.
Why not doing it like Evol?
We usually write every authors and contributors on the side of the work in a file. And when every authors agreed for the dual-license, we change the license.

[Nard]

Don't forget the "Fair Use" which makes the subtile differences even more unstable and may become the glu between both licenses.
I agree with MadCamel, the point is respect the authors, and no problem will occur. Both GPL and CC seem to fit the same goal which is ours: keep this project and it's creations free. Choose the best one to fit this goal. In our case GPL for code and code related (maps), CC for the rest as long as the author does not disagree.


Note:
Please just take care that music is (very) different from sound.

[Nard]

CC-BY-SA-2.0 is non free license, atleast by debian classifications.
becuase this if choice CC-BY-SA it must be only CC-BY-SA-3.0 or higher.

debian deals with software licenses as GPL and it's list is about open source. graphics, music... is not software, but content, data...

GNU General Public License (#GPLOther)

The GNU GPL can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case. As it turns out, the DSL (see below) also requires that you determine what the “source code” is, using approximately the same definition that the GPL uses.


Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY) (#ccby)

This is a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and entertainment works, and educational works. Please don't use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

(#which-cc) Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to change the work to state clearly and visibly whichof the Creative Commons license it uses. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask “Which Creative Commons license?” before proceeding any further.


Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY-SA) (#ccbysa)

This is a copyleft free license that is good for artistic and entertainment works, and educational works. Please don't use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

Please be specific about which Creative Commons license is being used.

Computer software, or just software, is any set of machine-readable instructions (most often in the form of a computer program) that directs a computer's processor to perform specific operations

Definitions
(computing) the programs that can be used with a particular computer system

...

[Nard]

When will the decision be taken?

Emblems:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
http://www.gnu.org/graphics/license-logos.html

gpl.png (4.07 KiB) Viewed 4057 times

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads

[Jenalya]

When will the decision be taken?

Since it seems to be a legally unclear situation, we're not going to use graphics that are licensed only CC-BY-SA while we still use graphics that are licensed GPL only.

I've talked to Alige and he's going to provide the information of authors for the graphics used in tmw he collected. Once we have that list, we can check it for completeness, and see which authors we need to contact to ask them to dual-license their work. To my understanding, once everything is dual-licensed it'd be possible to use all the graphics under the terms of CC-BY-SA.

[Jenalya]

Alige collected information about which artist contritbuted to which graphics. Thanks a lot for that work!
Here's the result so far:
https://github.com/jtoelke/tmwa-client- ... 506a04eafc

There is still some information missing, so additions would be welcome.

[Ablu]

Nami's Art was CC BY SA too, right?

[EJlol]

Orange icon is mine:
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4160

Will check for the other art later, when I'm at home.

[Reid]

Like I said on IRC, you'll need to differency who's the original author from contributors of your graphics and sounds in order to fully respect the CC BY-SA 3.0.