Re: New piecepack game design contest

[Ben Finney <ben+yahoogroups@...>]

Jorge Arroyo <trozo@...> writes:

> Why should people not want to limit comercial use of their games?

That's for them to decide. You might just as easily ask why people would
not want to limit commercial use of programs and music; yet there is
plenty of such culture free of commercial restriction.

In fact, there's a nice game set design that you might have heard of,
where the creators have very good reason not to limit derived works and
commercial use. I believe it's called Piecepack.

I can tell you why I would do it: to ensure that my work can be sold by
people in a position to do so, getting the work into many more people's
hands without needing to involve me in the process of selling it.

With attribution required (the CC-BY clause), I still get the reputation
as an author of the work; and with redistribution restricted to the same
license terms (the CC-SA clause), every recipient must receive the same
freedoms in the work, preventing a monopoly.

Others may find their own reasons. I'm encouraging CC-BY-SA-3.0 as being
an easy-to-apply license that would guarantee the work remains free
while making it easy for recipients to develop and sell.

> I guess by participating in the contest you're already giving them
> permission to publish the rules to your game. If they don't say
> anything about licenses I guess it means they don't care beyond that.

Unfortunately, the default situation with creative works like game
designs is that, once they are in a tangible form (such as writing them
into an electronic document for submission to a game design contest)
they are automatically copyright to the person who did it.

Nobody apart from the copyright holder has any right (with very limited
exceptions) to any of the acts of copyright — including copying, and/or
modifying, and/or redistributing, etc. — without explicit license from
the copyright holder. The default situation is “all rights reserved”,
and it takes explicit grant of license to change that.

Receiving a game design from someone without an explicit copyright
license does nothing to change that situation.

That's a really annoying situation, since it means everyone who wants
someone else to use their work must learn how to apply a proper
copyright license. It's why generally-useable free licenses like the GPL
or CC-BY-SA are a good thing, because they can be easily applied to
grant freedom in the work if that's what the copyright holder intends.

> And I'm fine with it...

I would be fine with it too, but we don't have that unless the copyright
holder (by default, the authors of the game design) explicitly grants
recipients that freedom in a copyright license properly applied.

-- 
 &#92;      “The best mind-altering drug is truth.” —Jane Wagner, via Lily |
  `&#92;                                                            Tomlin |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney