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Data Licensing Question #98

Closed jtarbox closed 3 years ago

jtarbox commented 5 years ago

I'm considering making a free website (w/ minimal ads to pay for hosting) for Warhammer 40k to be able to quickly search and filter units by keywords, features, and wargear, with some baseline data showing and maybe a bit "mathhammer" as well. I would want to keep this updated using the data generated by your team for 40k, but would like permission to use this data before I attempt any such endeavor. The entirety of it is still just thoughts in my head, so I have nothing concrete to demo in this regard. In the past I've done a character analyzer for the Everquest 2 MMO, but the data and math in this case is a much less guesswork.

r4dh4l commented 5 years ago

Well, maybe you point on the fact that there are no license information in the repos?

I just noticed this as well. CC-BY-SA license would be a very good choice. For those who are not yet familiar with Creatice Commons (CC): CC-BY-SA would allow reusing the data without asking the author if

  1. the org. author(s) is/are mentioned in any modifications (BY)
  2. any modifications are licensed under CC-BY-SA as well (SA for "Share Alike")

It is possible to prohibit commercial use as well (with "NC" for "Non Commercial") but this is not a smart choice on long term because something like "CC-BY-SA-NC" could not be used by any non-commercial project (so even not by private blogs that use any kind of affiliate advertising to finance their website as far as I know).

The https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html would do similar and would be the better choice if there is any kind of code involved (not only text information - Creative Commons is more for human readable texts). A free license would also assure to any contributors that the provided data will be free. Everything in https://wikipedia.org/ for example is CC-BY-SA which keeps all the provided knowledge free forever.

jtarbox commented 5 years ago

Granted, I did not find any licensing when I was looking around.

I could easily follow the CC licensing requirements. I don't think I'll be copying any code, so I don't know how useful AGPL would be.

r4dh4l commented 5 years ago

Well, maybe it would be better to rename the issue title from "Data Usage Question" to "Data license clarification" or "License information missing"?

amis92 commented 5 years ago

The license is missing because there legally can't be any given by us. This is an open-source project but since it contains copyrighted material (copyrighted by game publishers) without any licensing for us from the publishers, it's essentially non-licenseable from us as well. Some call it legal grey area. Unfortunately, there's not much we can give you.

The only thing I'd imagine to be fully legal from your prespective is obtaining the license to process and publish on non-income-oriented website such a webapp with GW's data. You could use GitHub repos for that as a source-intermediary or digitalizer, that should be legal then. Kinda like watching a pirate copy of a film that you have on DVD, e.g. to skip ads. xD

r4dh4l commented 5 years ago

The license is missing because there legally can't be any given by us. This is an open-source project but since it contains copyrighted material (copyrighted by game publishers) without any licensing for us from the publishers, it's essentially non-licenseable from us as well.

Really? Well, if I write a thesis and it contains non-free material (quoted texts from other authors) - this would mean I can not publish my thesis under CC-BY-SA, but I can, of course. I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understood the concept the CC license would only affect the parts you wrote, not the parts you quoted (as long as you quote in the right way by mentioning your source). And if I would break the law if I write down name and skills of a unit GamesWorkshop developed (for example) I wouldn't be able to play any GW tabletop game: Is there a difference if you write down the skills of units on a piece of paper or in a digital document (especially in context of a non commercial project)?

amis92 commented 5 years ago

@r4dh4l I've read up a bit on database licensing with CC. It may indeed be applicable, if the rights to content will be correctly specified (e.g. no rights). I'm not a lawyer as well, and I will try to contact someone (if you have any reference to share please do so). This may very well be the solution we all are happy with and it'll also make this whole organization's work more "legal".

r4dh4l commented 5 years ago

@amis92: Happy to hear that. What about just asking GW how they think about this?

amis92 commented 4 years ago

I've come up with a draft of what we might do, without any legal advice. This is a draft:

Licensor

BSData is the BSData GitHub organization.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

BSData datafiles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by BSData contributors with the Notice below.

Notice

BSData has copyright on all datafiles which are considered databases, with the exception of data: including but not limited to names, costs, rules, profiles and their included characteristics. Those are considered citations of the published material which the publication reference describes, and BSData cites these publications without explicit permission, unless otherwise noted. References are provided on best-effort basis. Elements with no publication reference are considered to possibly be taken from any of the publications defined in the datafile, its parent datafile, or in other places of the repository.

TL;DR BSData has copyright on datafiles (as databases) but not their content/data (unless otherwise noted), and we don't license any part to which we don't have rights to.

DrTobogganMD commented 3 years ago

This issue has had no activity for 8 months and can safely be closed.