Re: game screenshots with incompatibly licensed content
Hi Martin,
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Martin Erik Werner
<martinerikwerner@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm involved in the game Red Eclipse[1], both in Debian and upstream.
>
> We (upstream) were recently discussing including "art content" (in this
> case a sky texture) licensed under the GPL (v2+ or v3 likely). (Yes, GPL
> for art content is not a good idea in general, but that's a separate
> issue.)
>
> Red Eclipse currently includes a lot of art content licensed under the
> CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, and as far as I have understood this license is
> incompatible with the GPL license?
> (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa mentions only
> version 2.0)
First off, IANAL.
The general consensus seems to be that CC-BY 3.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0, and
CC0 are DFSG-compatible and GPL-compatible; see the Debian wiki
article on DFSG Licenses [1], and also the fact that the Debian logo
itself is licensed under GPLv3+/CC-BY-SA 3.0 [2]. I know that there's
probably a few people on -legal who may not see the CC licenses as
being DFSG-compatible, but licenses are judged to be DFSG-compliant
and suitable for main by ftpmasters, not by debian-legal. ;)
> My impression is that using content under both licenses is fine in the
> game itself, since it's dynamically used/displayed and not combined
> otherwise.
>
> However, what struck me as a problem here are screenshots, videos, etc.
> showing the game and the art content in it. A screenshot showing both a
> CC-BY-SA-3.0 texture and a GPL texture would be a derivative work of
> both pieces of content, and in that case said screenshot would be
> undistributable, since the licenses are incompatible.
I've never actually encountered a work that was dual-licensed under
both GPL and CC at the same time. Usually it's code being licensed
under the GPL and the game's assets licensed under the CC. I'm curious
as to whether this is legally allowed too, and the implications of
having game assets dual licensed under the GPL & CC licenses.
> Is this assumption correct? And should combinations of art content with
> incompatible licenses in software that displays combinations of them, be
> something to be wary about (when creating screenshots and similar) for
> this reason?
>
> The counsel regarding thumbnails in screenshots.d.n covered screenshots
> and copyright in some aspects
> http://wiki.debian.org/ScreenShots#License_of_screenshots
> however it doesn't (I think) deal directly with this particular
> question.
>
>
> [1]
> http://redeclipse.net
> http://packages.qa.debian.org/r/redeclipse.html
> http://packages.qa.debian.org/r/redeclipse-data.html
> (redeclipse-data is non-free due to much of the art content missing
> "sources" (by the same argument that PDF files can be non-free))
>
Regards,
Vincent
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Creative_Commons_Attribution_Share-Alike_.28CC-BY-SA.29_v3.0
[2] http://www.debian.org/logos/
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