Jake wrote:
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Thinking in terms of a solution is useless if you're trying to form a concrete system, though - you have to think through all the problems with your suggested solution to make sure you've solved or mitigated or accepted all of them. Otherwise your system will break very quickly when somebody decides to do something which is against the spirit but not against the rules. If you don't think through all the potential flaws, it will be hard to choose that 'right strategy'.
Ok, I get what your think. And yes, I don't have a good solution to all this problems - if I have one, I've stated it in the beginning of the discussion.
I thought about this a bit more, and here's my conclusion on the most practical way to make something like this work:
* Instead of trying to write a new license, use an existing one - for example, there are lots of pretty good Creative Commons licenses which are written exactly for this kind of thing.
Thats will be very good but probably not really possible for my initial target.
* License an explicit character design and maybe some example sprites, rather than trying to work out which bits are or aren't part of a particular character or trying to define a set of things that are needed for the licensed product. Like this, the same character design can trivially be used in any medium.
Well that's probably should be done anyway - even if we develop something usable in term of guidance for licenses usage.
And give up on:
* Commercial use (unless you want to use a license which doesn't require the user to give back any changes or extensions to the character design).
IMHO the franchise really should allow to creation of commercial derived works of some sort. So probably the doujinshi authors that invent some good plot twists, like pregnancy case you mentioned should bear with that somebody other get it and use in his own work.
IMHO for all this franchise thing to work growing media pile from all (commercial and non-commercial )sources is very important.
* Compelling anyone to keep 'in character' in any sense of the word (because it's impossible to license).
Yes, I think thats impossible to license , too
But actually this type of thing probably will be self-regulating. If someone create derivative character not really behave like the in the original, it would be different character. And if the target of derivative creator was "use original" he himself probably will change his character to more fit the original description. But , yes, that impossible to license.
* Expecting a thriving doujinshi-style community who loves and adores these characters (because frankly, that kind of thing cannot be manufactured).
Yes, but we can hope
Anyway, what I try to achieve for this content is a legalized doujinshi under the same license as original. And not stopping doujinshi authors from profiting on their works.In this topic there is IMHO some good suggestions plus some of mine, I try to summarize:
* I talk here about a VN especially and believe that it can be used for computer game in general. Other media should probably be researched specially.
* The key point : The same license shouldn't (IMHO) be used for all work. So for most content, author can use a well established license. For code - GPL/LGPL/MIT/Proprietary for example.
* The usage of original sprites/resources in derivative, is prohibited. Usage rights, if any, should be stated clear for any image. But using this images as reference for character is fine. I think that there probably exist a established terminology. If I get it right : derivative image's allowed, direct plagiarism disallowed. So something like - you can redraw it in your graphical style, but not digitally copy/manually copy( using glass table for example).
* The text is the most hard part. Suggest that the text seen as literature and licensed under something like CC shared alike with attribution with exeptions. But a text only, can be used for base of derivative work, not a original program in form of code, not based on text pictures of character's, but a scenary/text itself.
The absence of legally permission to use original images/code make the text itself not very usable for direct "pirating" and making profit from it. Yes, somebody can create a game with same text, with his own pics/code , but it is probably not very bad thing.
* The tradition of original authors(for works using in that project) to publish design documents under same combination of licenses should be established: If they like they characters to be used more correctly according to their design, the presence of design documents is helpful.
