The Mana World Forums

*sighs*

Sorry, another thread about licences.

So Chicka-Maria, 4144 and me just had a discussion about following issue:
Chicka-Maria wanted her most recent creation to be CC BY-NC-SA-3.0, meaning

http://creativecommons.org wrote:You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

However, TMW only allows CC-BY-SA-3.0 + GPLv2 - same as above except for the noncommercial use part.
Shouldn't it be fine to also allow CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 only?


On a personal point of view:
Of course I'm not sure if I understood correctly, but to me CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 looks fine as it seems to cover everything TMW wants.
As a pixel artist I don't care that much, but if I created music like Chicka-Maria does (actually I once did pretty much so I understand very well), I wouldn't like the idea of other people being allowed to make money with my music.

*hopes she understood*

For me cc-by-nc look like non free license but The Mana World is free project.
Also all content in The Mana World is under GPL2 license and some or many under cc-by-sa.

And cc-by-nc without GPL for music here looks bad.

Any CC license containing "NC" and/or "ND" is not a free license. It's even against the idea of switching to the CC BY-SA 3.0 (being accessible for more peoples).

The problem is that it's not compatible with a lot of other licenses, even other CC licenses. For instance, you can't combine CC-BY-NC-SA and CC-BY-SA content. Because they are both SA (share alike) it's impossible to combine them. Any derivative works from either of those has to be published under the same/similar license, but since one of them is NC and the other isn't - you have no way out. For example, if the warlord helmet was published under CC-BY-SA and the knight helmet under CC-BY-NC-SA, and you really wanted to create an abomination by combining those two — you couldn't (never mind that such a thing shouldn't be done in the first place because it would be ugly).

Additionally, CC's definition of non-commercial is very ambiguous. And as long as it adds restrictions like that, it's not really a free license.

Look at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC for more info.

The GPL intentionally allows commercial use. It literally says so.

But due to the other rights the GPL and CC-BY-SA garant to the end-user, namely the right for unlimited redistribution under the same license, many commercial business models don't work with things under these licenses.

The GPL philosophy was always the pillar of TMW. When content creators can't accept that, then it means that they can't work for TMW.

By the way: Chicka-Maria has changed her stance and removed the non-commercial condition. So there is no reason to bash her about it.

I was just wondering if there was a license we can use so the files would be FREE to use but for NON-commercial uses. So being able to use the files and keeping them free with no money profits involved.

Either way I'll license the music so its usable with tmw, But I'd like a license *if* possible that we can use so people cant just take the music and sell it as a soundtrack or something.

If there is a license that allows music or anything for that matter "free to use" but for non commercial use. I don't see why tmw can't use it since tmw is non-profit anyway.

regards,

Chicka-Maria wrote:But I'd like a license *if* possible that we can use so people cant just take the music and sell it as a soundtrack or something.

That business model wouldn't work anyway. Anybody could just offer it for download. Nobody would buy it when they can get it for free. Unless, of course, they want to support TMW. And I see nothing wrong with selling merchandise - like an official soundtrack CD - when it is used to raise funds to support TMW. And it's not like TMW is a zero-cost effort. Currently it lives of the generosity of people who pay for the hosting out of their own pocket. One day it might become necessary to find a revenue stream.

That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia doesn't allow CC-BY-NC-SA content - because sometimes they use it to raise money, which technically is commercial usage. Even if they're a non-profit.

Getting permission from the authors all the time would be impossible, especially for the amount of content Wikipedia has, so they don't allow it at all. And neither should we, it's not a free license.

Our licenses are about freedom, as in free to use. Third parties can take anything we have as long as they give attribution and do with it as they please. This is very enabling to non-commercial uses.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that if we put a "noncommercial" limitation on something, it *cannot* be shipped by major linux distros.

Btw thanks for your answers

From my side I missed these two points:

Crush wrote:That business model wouldn't work anyway. Anybody could just offer it for download. Nobody would buy it when they can get it for free.

melkior wrote:That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia doesn't allow CC-BY-NC-SA content - because sometimes they use it to raise money, which technically is commercial usage. Even if they're a non-profit.

Totally understand now.