"Managing" mod licensing

[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