Upcoming Music and Art licensing changes

[pyndragon]

Unless Wesnoth can just say, "We'll allow CC-BY-ND, but it's not our problem if someone makes a derivative work." (?)

That works as long as you're prepared to receive and deal with DMCA take-down requests. I don't think active policing is required, but even under the GPL, if someone were to complain about uncredited use of their assets, I'm fairly confident we'd be legally obligated to remove the offending content; but IANAL.

But I'd like to re-emphasize that this doesn't change based on whether the content is GPL/CC BY-SA/CC BY-ND. Each of those licenses has terms of use, it's just a matter of what's required to satisfy them.

[doofus-01]

That works as long as you're prepared to receive and deal with DMCA take-down requests.

Cute. So -ND should not be allowed.

But I'd like to re-emphasize that this doesn't change based on whether the content is GPL/CC BY-SA/CC BY-ND.

I think you are missing the point that muddying the waters with multiple licenses is a headache the Wesnoth project doesn't need. Choose a better one than GPL, or lobby for whatever you want, I'm not wading deeper into this. Have fun playing lawyer.

[pyndragon]

Cute. So -ND should not be allowed.

No? It means that -ND is another facet of a problem that already exists. The fact that we currently aren't dealing with license violations because no-one has complained about any doesn't mean that we wouldn't have to if someone did.

I think you are missing the point that muddying the waters with multiple licenses is a headache the Wesnoth project doesn't need.

If we make any license change whatsoever, there will be multiple licenses. (I don't think we're going to be able to hunt down every past contributor and get them to change). No-one ever said this would be the easiest route, but that doesn't mean changing licenses isn't the right move.

Choose a better one than GPL, or lobby for whatever you want

See also: the OP.

[Iris]

Unless Wesnoth can just say, "We'll allow CC-BY-ND, but it's not our problem if someone makes a derivative work." (?)

That works as long as you're prepared to receive and deal with DMCA take-down requests. I don't think active policing is required, but even under the GPL, if someone were to complain about uncredited use of their assets, I'm fairly confident we'd be legally obligated to remove the offending content; but IANAL.

We’ve always removed content that is reported to violate copyright — as in, was published without the author’s permission under the terms of the GNU GPL, meaning it wasn’t originally licensed under a GNU GPL-compatible license (read: taken from a non-GNU GPL source, such as if you used <insert non-free game here>’s assets for your own add-on). We’ve also always had a preemptive approach at dealing with potentially trademarked material and copyright grey areas (everything to do with Tolkien’s works). It’s a lot of work to scour the add-ons server for potential copyright violations, so we usually don’t do that; however, we’ve always taken immediate action upon reports. This isn’t going to change, and yes, it will remain each individual author or user’s responsibility to 1) follow the rules; and 2) report violations to us providing as much information as possible.

[GunChleoc]

How about:

- Mainline: CC-BY-SA for everything new going forward, try to relicense past contributions.
- UMC: CC-BY-SA only for starters + GPL for past compatibility. CC0 if there is demand for it. Then revisit this in the future to evaluate if -NC makes sense.

I think allowing Creative Commons makes a lot of sense and having them in sooner than later is good. We should start with the GPL-compatible ones though and then see how it goes - adding licenses is always easier than removing them.

And I agree that it needs to be clearly visible in the user interface.

[vultraz]

I'm temporarily locking this thread while we mull over how to deal with the feedback we have received in recent days.