Open Source Art License?

CarbonJames

At Carbon we're very supportive of Open Source software--in fact we use a ton of it in AirMech. (not art production tools, but things for building the engine) We also have open sourced parts of the engine we have developed. So, Open Source is cool with us.

So the art side of things, I've wanted for a long time to "open source" our art. I'm happy to zip up our models and textures and give them out to anyone who wants them, with the condition that they are not used for commercial projects, or uploaded to TurboSquid, or whatever. My rationale is that anyone who wants to can extract this stuff from our game data with a little effort, so why not just release all the source stuff so people can play around with it?

Does anyone have a license that's suitable for distribution with art assets that covers you well enough? We're indie and can do what we want, but we also practice CYA as any good company should to protect ourselves from being taken advantage of.

If we can get a suitable license, we'll release the AirMech game assets. Here's some random stuff from the game rendered "nice" below. It's all relatively low poly (just no more than needed) and low res textures.

AtticusMars

Would Creative Commons work? It's what flicker uses for their images. Cool idea either way.

Unrelated but the music FLA did for your game is amazing

CarbonJames

Thanks! I've been a longtime FLA fan and was amazed they agreed to do the music. They're not far from us (Vancouver, and we're in Seattle) so we just drove up, hammered out the details and away it went. I love the results, listen to it all the time.

Anyway, about the license, would this one feel right to people here? I want something that covers us but also isn't too scary:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

oXYnary

Neat! The first thing I thought was those were toys. Or 3d printed miniatures.

What about here?

http://opengameart.org/content/faq

Edit: Here is another alternative license. They can use in commercial ventures, but must give you credit.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

CarbonJames

We're definitely not ok with commercial use of the art assets. If someone wants to license them, that's fine, but we're not giving them away for use in paid projects.

That's the main point of confusion I want to avoid--you can see the license I linked above is the CC version without commercial rights. The other site you linked talks about the CC licenses as qualification to be uploaded, and our art would not qualify to be there.

I was only going to share the files here for this community--I don't want them uploaded to other sites with the license removed. Is that something reasonable to expect people to follow? I'd love to share the art, we get a lot of fan requests for it, but I don't want to spend my time sending legal letters to people who use our art in their iOS games or whatever.

CarbonJames

Oh, and glad you like the renders! I never spend any time on rendering, and they are done incredibly low-tech. Just Max with LightTracer, 1 bounce, depth map also rendered then use that in Photoshop as a mask for a simple Gaussian blur. Drop a grunge layer on top as an overlay, done. Takes 10 minutes tops to render and post process.

Someone who feels motivated could probably generate papercraft models pretty easily--all the look is painted into the textures, so papercraft lit in the real world would probably look really close to the renders.

cptSwing

Yeah, still loving those models and would love a look-see.

CarbonJames

So maybe a bit of a problem. A lot of reaction from people on our social networks about releasing the models/textures even for non-commercial use was that people want to make games (free I suppose) with them. This is really not the intention of wanting to release them, and I need to figure out a good way to communicate that.

Here's what I want:

- educational use
- fan use, to take and modify for making AirMech art
- modification use, for making new units and stuff for AirMech (workshop-like)

Here's what I don't want:

- use the assets for other games, even free games
- slightly modifying the assets, then using in free/paid games

Any thoughts on how to position this right? Valve must have this understanding with gamers with their workshop things, of course they can back things up with lawyers when needed. We definitely don't have the time/money to do that, and don't want to cause problems for ourselves by releasing the art.

So what to do?

Conor

Really glad to hear about this. I'd totally do some AirMech fan-art.

As for how to release the assets - I've released many of my games with the CC license you linked above, and in some cases I've released the source code with no license at all (allowing any use). I'm not aware of anyone trying to use my art assets in their own games, however I have had people contact me directly asking for permission to use stuff in their indie/free games. Usually, I let them use it, unless it's something really distinctive and recognizable in which case I ask them not to use it.

You're probably going to get many people ignoring the license entirely and making shmups and RTS games with your assets, and there's basically nothing you can do about it. However, I don't think this is going to lose you any customers or damage your brand much, as these are never going to be big games that many people will see. Worst case, some small-time iOS devs will rip your assets and put them into their own iOS game - Apple will approve it not knowing it's stolen art, and you'll have to start complaining to Apple to block it, if you could be bothered. Anyone who has the resources to make a large game that might actually compete with AirMech won't be using ripped assets in the first place.

P.S. I'm 'monoRAIL' on the Carbon forums. Love the game and the soundtrack.