Taking Artists Into Consideration

[Jason Self]

There seems to be a number of things conflated.

> 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.

This framing makes it sound like CC BY-SA is uniquely deficient, when
in reality the limitation is tied to copyright itself. While it's true
CC BY-SA doesn't have a source-sharing clause, the absence of SCP games
with source code isn't solely explained by that. A license can only
"bite" as far as copyright itself goes. For CC BY-SA to apply to the
game, the game software itself would need to be treated as a derivative
of the written material - and that’s a legally nuanced question.
Pinning the outcome on CC BY-SA's source code sharing required for CC
BY-SA not applying to the game oversimplifies the situation, and isn't
specific to CC BY-SA either.

> 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.

I think there's some conflation happening here. That statement comes
from the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (FSDG), which are
about what’s acceptable for inclusion in a fully free GNU/Linux
distribution. It's a policy matter, not a statement about how copyleft
licensing operates legally.

The FSDG's position that non-functional data (like game art) may not
need to be under a free license for the system as a whole to count as
"free" doesn’t mean that applying a strong copyleft license to that art
itself wouldn't trigger any obligations under copyleft. Copyright and
license enforcement is a separate question from FSF distribution
policy. Mixing the two leads to a misleading conclusion - the FSDG is
about what counts as "free enough" for a distro, not about what a
copyleft license can or can't require in court.

> However, even if the AGPL also applied to art linked to the software
> and vice versa, would that even be desirable?

But earlier, you lamented that CC BY-SA doesn't do this - that it
doesn’t pull in software derived from art under a copyleft obligation
and also didn't have a source code sharing clause. Then, when
considering a license that might actually do that (because the GPL
family of licenses would - at a minimum - inolve sharing the source
code of the art), you seem to suddenly pivot to why that scenario would
be undesirable. This feels inconsistent.

> 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.

That strikes me as an overstatement. Simply posting a picture image
doesn't inherently mean that the entire site is now a derived work of
that image. I encourage you to read the GPL FAQ on that topic:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

> 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.

Looking at those goals, #2 and #4 feel like they're in tension. In #2
you propose that if copyleft-next art is included in a game, the game's
source must be shared under the same license. But in #4 you say that
art licensed under copyleft-next can be included with other software
without triggering copyleft. That inconsistency makes it hard to see
what the actual principle is.

Even putting that aside, many of the goals you've listed could already
be achieved under existing licenses - at least to the extent copyright
law itself allows. For example, if a court considers the game software
to be a derivative of the story/art, then CC BY-SA or the (A)GPL
already impose copyleft obligations. If you want copyleft-next to reach
beyond those scenarios - to apply cases where copyright wouldn't
otherwise reach - then that would be an expansion of scope beyond
copyright's usual boundaries. If that's what you mean, it would be
useful to say so directly, because that's a much larger and more
controversial topic than just "current licenses aren't strong enough."