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| noxdraconis |
 Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 5:28 am |
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Joined: 13 Jan 2007
Posts: 7
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Since there has been a bit of discussion in the build a world project forum about whether the project should include art (3D/2D) which could be freely modified and used by other projects (open art) or whether all the art would remain proprietary to the project (as Planeshift does), I thought it might be a good idea to give the topic its own thread.
I know it states in the social contract that all 2D/3D/Artwork/leveldesign will be licensed under the creative commons sharealike-attribution license, but are people still on board with this? More to the point, do people feel that having open art is as important as having an open rule-independent client/server?
I personally see this project as a seed from which many worlds could grow. I know I have my own ideas for a MMORPG (guess I'm not here out of purely altruistic motives ...) and having a body of high quality art to draw on would certainly be help in this regard.
anyhow, thoughts?
nox |
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| Alystan |
| Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 7:08 am |
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Joined: 28 Nov 2006
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Location: Sydney, Australia
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Hi Noxdraconis,
If I understand properly, you call Creative Commons Sharealike-attribution Licence "open art". And your question is: do we really want open art, or do we want to artists to "donate" their work to the project and retain the property of artwork.
First, licence and copyright are two different things. As for GPL and friends, it is not because I release a piece of code in GPL that I loose its copyright. I actually don't, which enables me to also release the same pice of code under another licence if I feel like it. In particular, I can sell it to a private company allowing them to distribute binaries which include some of my code without have to GPL their product.
I assume here it works in the same way for artwork, in which case people would probably not want to contribute to a project to which they have to give away my copyright and never be able to reuse it again. I am not sure how planeshift manages this and I am no expert in the area.
Creative common seems to be the most flexible and open system: you contribute and keep your copyright. If you leave the project, anybody can reuse and continue your work as long as long as they give you credit.
Any artist here to give their opinion?
Alystan / Jeremy |
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| noxdraconis |
| Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 8:15 pm |
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Joined: 13 Jan 2007
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Alystan wrote:
If I understand properly, you call Creative Commons Sharealike-attribution Licence "open art". And your question is: do we really want open art, or do we want to artists to "donate" their work to the project and retain the property of artwork.
No, of course I am not asking artist to donate their work to the project. The creative commons sharealike-attribution is what I consider to be open art. As long as I can make use someone else's work and modify it for my own purpose, that is all I want. The fact that the artist retains all other rights, etc is fine.
In fact, as a personal point, I beleive that the artist should always retain ownership of their work, whether it is published under a commercial or creative-commons license.
Closed art would not allow reuse, republication or modification. This is the way the planeshift license is written. to wit--
All artwork, musics, dialogues, stories, names, 3d models, etc... are under a proprietary license. This means you cannot reuse those in any way. If you plan to create another game based on our source code, remember you will have to redo all art,music,models,stories,etc...
http://www.planeshift.it/license.html
Alystan wrote:
Creative common seems to be the most flexible and open system: you contribute and keep your copyright. If you leave the project, anybody can reuse and continue your work as long as long as they give you credit.
Actually there are six creative-commons licenses, some more restrictive, some less. But yes, in general, I agree.
nox |
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| Julius |
| Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2007 6:17 pm |
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Joined: 06 Jan 2007
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As far as I am concerned that is the most important part of this project.
And yes it has to be a GPL like copy-left licence like the current social contacts states. |
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FreeGameArts |
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| Edward |
| Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 4:13 am |
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Joined: 15 Jan 2007
Posts: 32
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| recentcoin |
| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 3:31 am |
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Joined: 15 Jan 2007
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Actually, if you plan on making artists use the CC license in any form, you are in fact forcing them to donate their art, unless you plan to pay them for releasing it under that license.
Unfortunately, this is quite a thorny issue when dealing with artists. They have strong emotional attachments to their artwork and this is not something that most coders understand. They produce code and release it but there isn't that depth of emotional attachment.
I've heard many artists compare creating a work to giving birth. The process is quite trying for them and when it's done, they have the same kind of emotional attachment that piece of art that a newly delivered mother does to a newborn baby. It is that deep and intense for many of them.
Walking up to them and demanding the right to use their art in anyway you see fit is quite similar to walking up to a pregnant woman and telling her that you'll be her unborn child's pimp. You will get roughly the same reaction.
If you want art, you have to be open and willing to work with the artist in way that makes them comfortable. This is not an area where you can negotiate with them. If you refuse to play on their terms, they will simply take their toys and go home. This is an area where I see a lot of projects go awry.
They start demanding that the artists comply with license X, Y, or Z. Since many of these licenses are ...quite sweeping in their terms, many artists do not want to comply and simply refuse to participate at all. It greatly restricts the pool of artists that are available and willing to participate in any given project. |
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TIA,
RecentCoin
Epoch The Game
www.magnaturris.com
Project Angela
www.rpg-gamerz.com |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:01 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 82
Location: Germany
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Probably the best thing to do is allow the individual artists to choose the license under which they work. Allow the artist to stipulate whether commercial use is allowed or whether derivative work is allowed.
BaW needs to be attractive to artists. To be attractive, artists need to feel that they have a say. |
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The Ruleset Modeling Language - A project for making it easier to design virtual worlds. |
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| Xavier Antoviaque |
| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:44 pm |
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Joined: 15 Nov 2006
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I think the most important for the BaW project is to have at least a base set of artwork under Attribution-Share alike; everyone should be able to copy, modify and redistribute the sample world, including artworks. That's the basic requirement to have it included in Linux distributions such as Debian for example, otherwise we'd go to contrib and non-free and that's counter-productive.
However, the BaW project shouldn't prevent projects to build worlds with proprietary assets - that's also part of the VCA social contract. So we could very well have a 100% "libre" sample world and graphical assets libraries, and optional proprietary libraries of graphical assets. That's pretty much the way main and non-free repositories work in Debian.
Last but not least, we still haven't talked of donations program, but one of them could very well be dedicated to fund bounties. If we can't find enough artists willing to free their work, that's a way to compensate. |
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Xavier. |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 5:37 pm |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
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Location: Germany
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| Lets see who is willing to work under what licenses first. We may end up with multiple branches where everything under one branch is share-share alike 2.5 and other branches have anti-commercial or no-tamper variants of CC. |
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The Ruleset Modeling Language - A project for making it easier to design virtual worlds. |
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| Edward |
| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:21 pm |
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Joined: 15 Jan 2007
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| I think it's important to keep open-source art in a different repository from art which cannot be modified or which can only be used for non-commercial purposes. If Wikimedia is otherwise suitable, perhaps we should use it for the open-source art. The Project Angela repository could be used for art which shouldn't go in Wikimedia. |
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| Xavier Antoviaque |
| Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 12:54 am |
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Joined: 15 Nov 2006
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Edward wrote: I think it's important to keep open-source art in a different repository from art which cannot be modified or which can only be used for non-commercial purposes. If Wikimedia is otherwise suitable, perhaps we should use it for the open-source art. The Project Angela repository could be used for art which shouldn't go in Wikimedia.
Agreed.
About wikimedia: I haven't really used it apart from a quick look; do you think it is suitable to host such a repository? I've seen images, videos and sound, but no 3D category for example. How is the contribution process? |
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Xavier. |
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| Edward |
| Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 7:35 pm |
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Joined: 15 Jan 2007
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Xavier Antoviaque wrote: About wikimedia: I haven't really used it apart from a quick look; do you think it is suitable to host such a repository? I've seen images, videos and sound, but no 3D category for example. How is the contribution process?
I haven't used it either. I posted at BuildaWorld.net about it.
http://www.buildaworld.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=73 |
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| burlingk |
| Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 4:25 pm |
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Joined: 20 Jan 2007
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Cayle wrote: Probably the best thing to do is allow the individual artists to choose the license under which they work. Allow the artist to stipulate whether commercial use is allowed or whether derivative work is allowed.
BaW needs to be attractive to artists. To be attractive, artists need to feel that they have a say.
Personally, I like that idea.
The GPL does leave room to differentiation between the code and the content. As long as there is differentiation between the two, they can be concidered separate projects for the purpose of liscensing.
Please remember that most of my comments on GPL are based on version 2, not version 3. Version 3 is still a little scary, and I dojn't plan to use it myself. ;P
Version two is still likable ^_^ |
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| sayad |
| Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 12:59 am |
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Joined: 11 Feb 2008
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