non-commercial games and intellectual property

[Imperf3kt]

There's a nagging question that has been bugging me.
Let's assume I make a VN, it is completely my own work, and I distribute it as a non-commercial game.
Who owns the IP of said work? Can I then go and sell licensing rights to some company that wants to turn it into an animation, or perhaps I could hire such a company to do so. (heh, dreams)

Lets say somebody went and made a sequel of sorts, are they violating any of my rights?

I'm unable to find an answer in CC license terms and was hoping someone here could help clarify.

[SundownKid]

You still own the IP, and you can sell the rights to a company if they ever want to pick it up.

If someone made a sequel they'd still be violating your copyright whether you charged for it or not.

[Imperf3kt]

Thank you. I'll try to find the exact clauses just to be 100% sure, but I had assumed it was so.

I'm not the kind of guy who would file a lawsuit about this stuff though, I was mostly curious about whether I could legally sell something that I had already given away for free (talking about the IP, not the product, that would stay free)

If anything, a sequal made by other parties only serves to further bring attention to the original and subsequent works.

[SundownKid]

Yes for sure you can legally sell something that was previously given away for free. You still own the copyright to the IP.

[gas]

As a rule of thumb, "free" doesn't mean automatically "you can do whatever", it means just "The money price is 0".
If you release it without any license, you're stating "I don't care what you do with that, I left my ownership rights".
If you want to keep your owner rights, apply a license.
There are a lotta licenses out there, and once they were all costly. Now, thank to Creative Commons, you can attach a law valid license for free to any of your creations.
There are a number of CC licenses, where you state how much rights you concede. For example, it can be freely redistributable, but not quoted XD.

So, that's really depend on how you release your products.

[Sleepy]

One of the easiest ways of stating your ownership is to acknowledge something like, "This game is copyright of @2017 by Imperf3kt", which you can plunk into anything from the game's 'about' screen to readme doc to just in the credits.

If you're using CC, it just allows you a bit more freedom on the actions you're allowing with your game. Such as, free redistribution (so people don't have to get permission to upload, they can just do it wherever and however much they want) or if you allow people to use the game's assets for their own projects (which you can further clarify as 'you can only use this for noncommerical and I must be credited' or 'do whatever you want but I must be credited').