CCZone, Licensing and Community levelpacks

[AdrenalinDragon]

The kerfuffle with Andrew at Chip's Portal bringing up claims of copyright over works submitted there made the issue of licensing a more pressing issue. I would not want to allow my levels to appear in a community levelset if the works that I produced would be used in commercial works.

So the question is, to what extent does the community think that explicit licensing is an issue? I'm sure it's not the intent of anyone to do anything unwanted with other people's works, but what constitutes "unwanted use" is contentious and requiring people to be specific on what they want to allow is a good way to avoid problems.

Submitting levelsets for inclusion in a community levelpack would at minimum involve allowing CC Zone to host it and the CCLP1 team to redistribute it in a "derived" form. I would hope something like Creative Commons licensing (without the no-derivative-works clause) would be compatible enough. Since CC Zone accepts .zip files for uploads, it'd be entirely possible to include a separate copyright notice on each set. Though, I would think that'd require distributing future community levelsets with an extensive copyright file attributing every contributor and his or her own specific license, which would get pretty onerous if contributors did not stick to common licenses and roll their own.

The honor system of public-domain-use-it-as-i-say-you-can licensing seems fine, but these questions are better addressed before a problem arises rather than after.

It gets difficult involving the CCLP level packs, as the team will have to decide what to do with them. This is not Chip's Portal, and Andrew won't be involved anymore. As I'm the current owner of CC Zone, I promise to treat the community well this time around, and I will not put copyright on any custom made levelsets. Not even if there was an official CC Zone Level Pack, I still would have no problem with it.