Ensuring submissions for competition entries are free culture (was: cooperative games?)

[Ben Finney <ben+yahoogroups@...>]

Jorge Arroyo <trozo@...> writes:

> Btw, I'd love to see a new competition. There are many solo games for
> the piecepack, but no cooperative ones that I know of, so it'd be
> excellent...

I'd love to see some more games submitted, and game design competitions
have demonstrated their effectiveness in getting some good Piecepack
games.

The submissions, though, tend to be under all sorts of license terms,
many of them non-free; and sometimes no clear license at all, hence no
explicit permission to do anything. So even when there's a crop of good
games coming in, it can be troublesome to know what permission
recipients have to take them further.

Could we stipulate some kind of acceptable license terms for submissions
to game design contests? Explicit license terms are needed, otherwise
default copyright rules allow no-one to do much of anything. Terms such
as GFDL or CC-NC are non-free, since they unnecessarily restrict many
legitimate activities <URL:http://freedomdefined.org/>.

I recommend that game design competitions make an exclusive, small, list
of acceptable license terms for game design submissions. That list
should contain licenses with terms no stricter than CC BY-SA
<URL:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>. CC-NC and CC-ND
are non-free, and GFDL has many needless restrictions that make works
non-free under many circumstances, so none of those should be on the
list.

CC0 (an effective declaration of public domain status for a work)
<URL:http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0> and CC-BY
<URL:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> are also good ways to
make the work free culture, and would be good on the list.

So the list of acceptable license terms I'd recommend for game design
competition rules would start with CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA, and would
exclude the ones argued against earlier.

Anyone may release their work under any terms they like, of course. But
for encouraging the growth of the Piecepack corpus, I think we should be
encouraging games that are free culture, meaning that anyone who
receives them already has explicit permission to copy, modify, and/or
redistribute them for any fee or no fee. Making that part of the rules
of game design competitions would be a positive way to encourage such
free works.

-- 
 &#92;             “I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we |
  `&#92;     understand this cosmos, in which we float like a mote of dust |
_o__)                 in the morning sky.” —Carl Sagan, _Cosmos_, 1980 |
Ben Finney