"Managing" mod licensing

[slpwnd]

Thanks for bringing this topic up guys. We talked about this with kovarex and the solution you proposed of mandatory license specification with fallback to default license sounds good.

So to sum up:

• Every mod would be required to specify a license.
• Default license (if no license is specified) would be http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0.
• License information would be required to be present in info.json.

[Boogieman14]

Great news, thanks for picking it up so quickly

You may already have given this some thought, but just in case you haven't yet: how about existing mods? It's probably not fair toward mod authors (and possibly even illegal) to simply apply these rules to all existing mods. I would propose to apply these new rules to all mods released for 0.11 and beyond and consider all mods released for 0.10.x and before to be "All rights reserved" by default (unless otherwise stated, obviously). This is actually already the case, but it might avoid some confusion if it were clearly stated someplace.

[The Lone Wolfling]

Great solution.

One additional suggestion, if I may? I'm not sure how exactly to go about it, but some sort fallback to CC-BY-NC if the mod author has been MIA for, say, 6 months or something, would be something that would be appreciated.

Having played around with Minecraft mods for a while, I can say that there are far too many intriguing mods and concepts that have been abandoned that no-one is allowed to update or fix glaring bugs with.

Mind you, that being said, I'd think twice about actually doing this. It makes things friendlier for end users, but at the same time some devs may not like it. So... judgement call time. Are the people who would not make mods if they do not retain exclusive rights over them "forever" people that you wish making mods?

[Boogieman14]

Great solution.

One additional suggestion, if I may? I'm not sure how exactly to go about it, but some sort fallback to CC-BY-NC if the mod author has been MIA for, say, 6 months or something, would be something that would be appreciated.

I don't think it's legally possible to do that, at least not retroactively. I agree it's a pain, but strictly speaking, everything that has no explicit license declaration will be "All rights reserved" for many years.

Mind you, that being said, I'd think twice about actually doing this. It makes things friendlier for end users, but at the same time some devs may not like it. So... judgement call time. Are the people who would not make mods if they do not retain exclusive rights over them "forever" people that you wish making mods?

Well.. for existing mods it won't make a difference and for newly developed mods, the developer has the option of picking a restrictive or exclusive license if they so desire.

[The Lone Wolfling]

Great solution.

One additional suggestion, if I may? I'm not sure how exactly to go about it, but some sort fallback to CC-BY-NC if the mod author has been MIA for, say, 6 months or something, would be something that would be appreciated.

I don't think it's legally possible to do that, at least not retroactively. I agree it's a pain, but strictly speaking, everything that has no explicit license declaration will be "All rights reserved" for many years.

I was assuming for new mods. As you say, it's not legally possible to do retroactively, and I wasn't suggesting that.

Mind you, that being said, I'd think twice about actually doing this. It makes things friendlier for end users, but at the same time some devs may not like it. So... judgement call time. Are the people who would not make mods if they do not retain exclusive rights over them "forever" people that you wish making mods?

Well.. for existing mods it won't make a difference and for newly developed mods, the developer has the option of picking a restrictive or exclusive license if they so desire.

I meant for the fallback idea, not the license-by-default idea.

[ssilk]

I think about 50% of 6 month old mods won't work anymore. So I bet, that with the time this problem goes away, so or so.
And there is nothing against looking into the code, see how it works and rewrite it.

I don't see a problem with this. Live is change.

Edit: Life is change... and errors...

[bobingabout]

I'm an old modder from the Red Alert 2 modding community, well, the Command and Conquer modding community during the era when Red Alert 2 was the most prominant game to be modded.

although the game itself had no modding liscencing, the community had some basic ground rules, and if you didn't obay them, you were pretty much exiled from the community, this made it difficult to distribute any mod.


Some of the most basic ones were:
Modding a mod for personal use is fine, as long as you don't re-distribute the modded mod.
Using resources (graphics etc) made available for public use it okay, but using such from a mod is not, unless you get permission, and give credit.

The list goes on, but those are some basic rules we followed.

In short, if you want to use something someone else made in your own mod, ask.

Some of the big nonos included making compilation mods, making a mod by combining work from other peoples, or adding parts to your own. in that situation, you could only have 1 mod at a time, so it was a big deal to merge content from multiple sources, and was actually a viable reason to do so, but in a situation like this where 2 mods can happilly run along side each other, a better solution is to use both mods, and make a "glue" mod that fixes a few things to make them work better together.

Also, mods for RA2 didn't really need updating, so, I think we need to allow some leeway in situations where a modder goes MIA for long periods, and a mod they've made doesn't work anymore.

[slpwnd]

Thanks for the input. So I thought a bit about this. If we require mods to specify licenses then there will be an issue with material that mods "adapt" from the game itself. Our Terms and Conditions (http://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service) in the Intellectual Property section explain in plain (and hopefully clear) language the situation regarding the game and its assets itself.

Now, if we would like to do this properly, we should start by putting together a license for the game content itself (namely the images and sounds). The Factorio code itself is proprietary and it will stay like that for now. However the content of the base mod is not. We tolerate and even encourage people to make mods using assets from the game (tinting, combining assets, etc.). That is completely ok. However we don't want the assets to be used outside of "the free mods domain area" obviously. So we would need to put this formally into the license and then require any work that uses this content (i.e. sprites) to include this license. Because if we just make creative commons the default license, then mods that just tint or include sprites from the game "relicense" these for use outside of Factorio domain.

[SHiRKiT]

How the this default license could be used to incorporate a possible future mod into the game if the license doesn't allow commercial usage?

[ssilk]

The choosen creative commons doesn't allow this. If you want to allow it as modder, you need to choose another license.

[bobingabout]

Most of my mods are technically illegal with the current liscence, because they're derivitive works of the base mod, I like it!

Yeah... you need to define your own Liscence in the EULA, from what I understand, as long as you write it in the EULA, it is enforcable by law.


My sugestion is that ALL mods, including base and core from the game, default to a liscence that says you can do whatever you want with them, as long as the original auther retains credit, and it remains for use with the factorio game product only.

Though, if you're going to do that, you might need to change a few images, since, to name but a few, Iron Plate, Petroleum Gas, and Sulfuric Acid use icons taken from elsewhere, Iron Plate from final Fantasy XV (I found the original image by accident while looking for images for metal plates), and the other 2 from Wikipedia. (Though the guy who made those chemical icons did so for public use, using a free to use program)

[prg]

So, if I were to distribute a mod containing modified base game images... sounds like it would be tolerated, but the Terms of Service clearly state "Don't sell, copy, transfer or distribute the game, its hacked / altered version, any of its parts or any of our paid content." They further say it's encouraged to create your own content for the game, but don't explicitly allow the use of existing assets for this purpose. This is only mentioned in passing in the middle of this forum thread, not sure how legally binding that is.
Could you clarify the ToS and provide a proper license for the base game content?

[Aprillion]

May I assume the base mod can be distributed according to CC BY-NC 4.0 please? https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Licensing as well as a post in this thread suggest that "Every mod requires a license since Factorio v0.11. If a mod has no license, it is assumed to have a Creative Commons license — Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)."

Thanks for bringing this topic up guys. We talked about this with kovarex and the solution you proposed of mandatory license specification with fallback to default license sounds good.

So to sum up:

• Every mod would be required to specify a license.
• Default license (if no license is specified) would be http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0.
• License information would be required to be present in info.json.

And the base mod is a mod without any non-default license information in it's info.json as of 0.16.9

I would like to create a mod and use icons from the base mod + from wiki.factorio.com in my github repo (and publish via github pages), but still not 100% sure if that is explicitly allowed or not. e.g.:

[orzelek]

You do not copy icons from base mod.
You can just reference them in your mod and use as they are.

[Aprillion]

You do not copy icons from base mod.
You can just reference them in your mod and use as they are.

...icons for display on the web page related to a mod.

[Bilka]

The base mod falls under: https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service . I'd advise you to not attempt to make money off of what you are doing, then you should be mostly fine as long as you dont redistribute the base mod or a modified version of it. The wiki itself will be licensed properly in the future (under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/, except for things from the base game, such as icons and screenshots which are licensed by the terms of service I linked).

[Aprillion]

The base mod falls under: https://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service . I'd advise you to not attempt to make money off of what you are doing, then you should be mostly fine as long as you dont redistribute the base mod or a modified version of it. The wiki itself will be licensed properly in the future (under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/, except for things from the base game, such as icons and screenshots which are licensed by the terms of service I linked).

thanks for clarification. unfortunately few points were not clear to me, so I hoped to clarify following:
* You may use Factorio and other paid content for your own personal use.
* Don't sell, copy, transfer or distribute the game, its hacked / altered version, any of its parts or any of our paid content.
* Ask us for approval to use the game, any of its parts or any materials on our website for any commercial purpose.

I would like to publish parts (icons, recipes data) of the Paid Content on github for non-commercial purpose and need to find out a clear yes/no advice whether this is already allowed by the terms of service => I will write to support@factorio.com when my webpage will be ready to ask about it.

edit: reply I got (only regarding Factorio base mod content, since player mods have their own licenses as discussed earlier in this topic), might be useful to others:

We have a simple policy for these sort of projects,
I hope you will find it acceptable

- The license is that, the icons belong to us, and the website is only non-commercial
- You will have to clearly state that the icons are our copyright, and they are not for redistribution
- We reserve the right to ask you to remove the icons

Other than this we are happy to let you use the icons,
And data such as recipes, there is no problem to use it

Kind regards,
Scott