Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/08/24/which-creative-commons-licence-for-my-spaceship-art/

CC BY logo

Today I was approached about my spaceship being used in a movie. It’s great that my spaceship model is getting noticed, but with people beginning to show an interest in actually using this 3D spaceship model and the renders generated from it, it looks like I’m going to have to give some serious thought to what licence I’m going to release this project under.

The model is intended primarily for inclusion in the Vega Strike game – and I have received lots of support, advice, coaching and encouragement from the community behind this cool Elite-like space simulation game – so whatever licence I chose, it must be compatible with the Vega Strike submissions guidelines.

On the Vega Strike Wiki licence page there is a list of licences that are accepted for inclusion in the game. GPL, LGPL, GPDL, PD, CC BY, CC SA or CC BY-SA. According to my research these are various different flavours of three different type of licence. GP is the first type and stands for General Public. It seems that these general public licenses are mostly intended for making software open source. PD (Public domain) is the second type (explained in more detail here at Wikipedia) and seems to cover work where there are no intellectual property rights at all, as in when they have expired after the authors death. Again this doesn’t quite seem to cover what I intend for my spaceship model. I do want to regain some control over how it is attributed.

This leaves the three types of Creative Commons licence that Vega Strike allows. The Creative Commons people have a great page giving a simple terms summary of each license here >

Licenses – Creative Commons.

and useful tips here > FAQ Crediting.

I’ve chosen the “BY” license for my spaceship. As the Creative Commons page says,

“This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.” Full licence here.

This licence will allow people to use the spaceship in games like Vega Strike, and in movies – both open source and commercial. It will also allow people to modify and develop the model and produce their own renders. I can according to the license stipulate the form of my credit, and so the credit that must be attached is;-

“3D VIP Spaceship Model” © 2010 Brett Fitzpatrick, available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence from:  http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/Franklin_3D_spaceship_for_Vega_Strike_game.html, licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hopefully this license will ensure that the most possible people get to see my work, and can modify it and use it in their creativity if they are so inclined, but also that my name and a link to my website will get out there along with it.