Re: Alternatives to Creative Commons
2008/9/17 Arc Riley <arcriley@gmail.com>:
> There is absolutely no issue licensing game data under the (L/A)GPL. In
> fact, this is required for at least the GPLv3 in that the license applies to
> the "whole of the work, and all it's parts, regardless of how they are
> packaged". Thus if the game code or any dependencies (ie, the engine) are
> licensed under the GPL, the data must be licensed under a GPL compatible
> license (which the CC licenses are not).
>
> After numerous conversations with copyright lawyers on the specific subject
> of games, the entire game is one copyrighted work.
This might be really relevant for us, the Games Team, as there seem to
be quite a lot of games that have a different license for the engine
and the game data, and the combination of GPL and CC-by-sa seems to be
getting more and more popular. According to what you're saying, if we
consider the entire game as one copyrighted work, that might make some
games simply not distributable.
On the other hand, for some games (and theoretically for most of
them), the same game engine can be used with different data, and some
times vice-versa. If this is the case, the situation might be similar
to a media player and media data, or to a word processor and the
document. The game engine can be seen as the program, and the game
data as the document it applies too. We've had this discussion on how
to consider the relationship between games and game data for some
time, and in fact it might have relevant consequences such as the game
being in contrib or main for some games depending on how we consider
it and, if GPL is to be understood as that, might make some games
impossible to distribute. It might probably depend on every case, and
whether different sets of data really exist, or at least could be
created.
I'm really interested on the different point of view that might exist
about this matter.
I'm CC'ing the message to the Games Team, as the thread might be
important for us.
Greetings,
Miry
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