Taking Artists Into Consideration

[Jubei]

As things are currently, the creators of free art can not guarantee that all derivatives of their works will remain free. Most copyleft licenses designed for art fall flat when applied to multimedia works, particularly entertainment software like video games. Take the SCP Foundation, for example. It is a popular collaborative writing project licensed under CC BY-SA. A lot of games have been made based on it. Can you guess how many of those games are open source? Not a lot, and that is because CC BY-SA has no source sharing clause. If your CC BY-SA licensed story is adapted into a game, you can only hope that the developer shares the source code.

Now if copyleft licenses designed for art can not protect all derivatives, what about ones designed for software? Surely then all adaptions will have to be free, right? Not quite. The strongest copyleft license for software currently is the AGPL stewarded by the FSF. According to the FSF, "non-functional data" does not need to be under a free license to be distributed with free software. They specifically cite game art when explaining this. Presumably the same is true in reverse. A game with art licensed under the AGPL does not need have free code. If this is the opinion the license stewards hold, it is doubtful that a broader interpretation of the copyleft scope would hold up in court.

However, even if the AGPL also applied to art linked to the software and vice versa, would that even be desirable? Imagine trying to share AGPL licensed art on social media only for it to be immediately deleted because the site owners do not want to make their site AGPL too. If you take the AGPL as it is currently written and apply this maximalist interpretation, it would be nearly impossible to share art licensed under it. Regardless of how you view it, no copyleft license that currently exists can fully protect free art in a practical way.

This is where copyleft-next comes in. I think this project has the potential to finally give free art creators a copyleft license that they can be entirely confident in. This does not mean I think that copyleft-next should stop being a software license. Rather, I think a license that is equally applicable to art and code is the key here. Before getting into specifics on how this would be technically feasible, let me lay down the goals.

1. A game whose plot, characters, etc. are derived from copyleft-next licensed literature needs to share its source code under the same license.
2. A game that includes copyleft-next licensed art needs to share its source code under the same license.
3. A game whose code is licensed under copyleft-next can only include artwork that is under a compatible license.
4. Art licensed under copyleft-next can be included with other types of software without triggering the copyleft clause.
5. Other types of software licensed under copyleft-next can include proprietary art without triggering the copyleft clause.

Assume that by game I mean any software designed more for artistic expression or entertainment than for a practical purpose. Visual novels and other types of creative software apply here. Media sharing websites would not be included in this scope, as they are more so distributors of art rather than extensions of it.

Please let me know what you all think of this proposal for copyleft-next functionality. Remember that the above points are just goals and not clauses. Figuring out what needs to be done to achieve those goals has yet to be seen. Over a decade ago, Bart Kelsey came up with an interesting solution, though it is not entirely applicable to this project. https://freegamer.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-we-need-better-copyleft-for-artists.html