Art licensing guide

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What is the best license for the models, maps, textures and other content that make up free/libre games?

Contents

Derivative Works

If you make content or games based on your favorite books, movies, games, comics, or other copyrighted works - or characters and settings from these sources - your creation is considered a "derivative work." Whoever holds the copyright for the original book, movie etc. decides how your derivative work is licensed. They can even require you to stop distributing it. Thus you can not place such a work under a free license!

Free Licenses

Free licenses allow you to download, copy, modify and use content for commercial or non-commercial use.

Free Software Licenses

Free Software gives you the freedom to run the program for any purpose, study how the program works, adapt it to your needs, redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor, improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. These licenses were designed for computer software, but sometimes they are also used for game content used with the software to avoid any license incompatibility.

How to license your artwork under the GPL

For a better description go to the official GPL howto

Put in the archive of your artwork a README.txt with this text 

    <one line to give the art's name and a brief description.>
    Copyright (C) <year>  <name of artist>

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

and a copy of the GPL v.3 in a file called COPYNG.txt

Definition of "source" for artwork

Since the GPL was written with software/code in mind, it does talk about "source" which is a concept not 100% convertable to the world of art. It's definition of "source" however is that of the most easily modifiable version of the licensed work. What that means is up to you, but generally speaking it should be a lossless format and include things like layers if available (in the case of 2D artwork). Logic also dictates that you should be able to open the file with a programm that is freely available, which is however often not possible (Photoshop's .psd, 3DSMax files etc). There have also been concerns voiced from musicians that these lossless "source" files can be huge in size (several hundreds of megabytes) which is the reason why they are usually only available as .mp3s or .oggs. In this case a good compromise would be to supply the "source" files only upon personal request (as specified in the GPL).

GPL version 2 VS. GPL version 3

There has been a recent update to the text of the GPL, resulting in a updated and partially improved version of it. Due to its copyleft nature this means however that the old version is incompatible to the new one unless it is specifically specified that you can use "(at your option) any later version" in the licensing text. There has been a lenghly debate wheather or not the GPLv3 is really better than the GPLv2, but if you can live without the improvements the GPLv3 gives you it is strongly recomended to license your work under the "GPLv2 or later" as this garantees that it is compatible to both the GPLv2 and GPLv3.

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons Licenses give you several options: Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work? Will you allow modifications? Do modified versions have to be shared under the same license? Creative Commons provides human-readable Commons Deeds, lawyer-readable Legal Code, and machine-readable Digital Code for each license. Some of the Creative Commons licenses are not free licenses because they restrict derivative works or commercial use. The less restrictive licenses are similar to Free Software and Open Source licenses.

Public domain

Dedicating your work to the Public Domain is the easiest license to use and understand. You allow anyone to use your work any way they want. If they create modified versions, they can distribute them under any license.

How to release your work into the public domain

Put in the archive of your artwork a README.txt with this text (taken from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/) 

The person or persons who have associated work with this document (the "Dedicator" or "Certifier") hereby either
(a) certifies that, to the best of his knowledge, the work of authorship identified is in the public domain of the
country from which the work is published, or (b) hereby dedicates whatever copyright the dedicators holds in the
work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the public domain. A certifier, moreover, dedicates any
copyright interest he may have in the associated work, and for these purposes, is described as a "dedicator" below.

A certifier has taken reasonable steps to verify the copyright status of this work. Certifier recognizes that his
good faith efforts may not shield him from liability if in fact the work certified is not in the public domain.

Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicator's
heirs and successors. Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all
present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicator understands
that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or
otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.

Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed,
transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or
non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

Table of Licenses

License Free content DFSG free software OSI approved GPL compatible copyleft informations
GNU GPL 2.0/3.0 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes recommended for software
CC-BY 3.0 Yes No No No No No not recommended for software
CC-BY-SA 3.0 Yes No No No No Yes not recommended for software
Free Art License 1.3 Yes No No No No Yes reccomended for art by the free software foundation
WTFPL Yes Yes Yes No Yes No practically public domain

References

Creative Commons

GPL

FAL

Reasons for allowing commercial use

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