Copyright and app price question?

[TeamRei]

So I'm almost done with my visual novel (about 75%) but I have a question. Firstly, I'm planning on placing my VN on the Android market (me and my "team" know how to do it) but I was just wondering about the Ren'Py copyrights. So all of my sprites, backgrounds, music, everything in the
VN are all ours, but i was wondering about the fact that I used Ren'Py. We're planning on placing the app price at $0.99, but would the fact that we used Ren'Py not allow us to make it cost money? What I'm asking is Ren'Py copyrighted and do I need permission to make the app cost money? Thanks in advance!

[PyTom]

Ren'Py is copyrighted, as are the various libraries it uses.

Everything is licensed in a way that allows it to be redistributed without money changing hands - even in the case of commercial redistribution. So you can sell your game without paying me or anyone else anything.

(The jury is out as to if visual novels made with Ren'Py could be considered derivative works of Ren'Py. I think they probably can, but since the license also allows derivative works to be made without charge, that isn't an impediment to selling Ren'Py games.)

[emil14glee]

If it is copyrighted then it is very hard on your points.

[RavenBelmont]

I find this interesting, mainly because I'm planning to make a commercial visual novel in which I'm already investing money hiring artists.

So, if I happen to finish the project, coding it using renpy. There's no legal issues/commitments, right? Once the product is finished, I can sell or do anything I want with my project without any kind of legal restrictions, right?

[PyTom]

Formally, your redistribution of Ren'Py is covered by the license document:

http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/license.html

There are legal obligations, they just happen to be fairly simple ones to satisfy. You basically:

1) Need to preserve the copyright notices of Ren'Py and the various software Ren'Py uses.
2) Need to provide a written notice that tells people where to get the LGPL software Ren'Py depends on.

Ren'Py copies the license file into the renpy/ directory of a built project. The result is that you don't have to do anything by hand to satisfy these requirements.

Apart from that, I've taken care to license Ren'Py (and choose its dependencies) in a way that lets you commercially distribute a game. So even though there are legal requirements, they aren't ones that should stop you from distributing a game.

[RavenBelmont]

That's great, thank you for clearing that out for me.