Hello debian-legal, in the past, I have asked visual novel authors if they would release their games under a free software license, to make them suitable for inclusion in Debian. Visual novels can be classified as mixed-media interactive fiction, featuring mostly static graphics, text, music. To me, one of the most common problems with visual novel licensing seems to be that many authors choose a Creative Commons license which features Attribution, ShareAlike (copyleft), and NonCommercial (no commercial use allowed), in short CC BY-NC-SA. Developers often point to the music they used for the reason behind that and claim that the scope of the Creative Commons ShareAlike licensing requires that code must also be licensed CC BY-NC-SA, thus definitely non-free according to DFSG and FSF criteria. One example for this is the game “Sunrider” – a visual novel with tactical space battle interludes similar to “Battle for Wesnoth”: Developers changed license from GPL to CC BY-NC-SA to have music. <http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=29130#p345907> > It would likely cost a few thousands of dollars to purchase a better > license for the music, so that's the reason for the license. I sincerely doubt that a game must necessarily be considered an adaption of its background music – since usually, game and music are very loosely coupled and one can turn off or replace the music without any breackage. (There are exceptions: In one game I shall not name, during the boss fight, the player is asked which music does play in the main menu.) AFAIK, it has long been the stance of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons, that functional data (code) and non-functional data (assets) do not necessarily interact with each other license-wise: <https://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Games_3d_printing_and_functional_content> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html#non-functional-data> I hereby want to ask the debian-legal experts regarding the scope of Creative Commons ShareAlike licensing. Must a visual novel using CC BY-NC-SA licensed background music be considered an adaption of the background music and therefore have code licensed under CC BY-NC-SA? Or can such visual novels be considered mere aggregations of music and other content, with the game code being licensed under a free license? Depending on the answer, it might be possible to package some visual novels in Debian without background music, if the developers license other, gameplay-wise necessary, assets under a free software license. Thank you, -- Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann <http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>
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