[tsc-devel] Licensing for your Secret Chronicles Theme Songs - We will have to remove them if we cannot reach you...

Chris Jacobsen | Sun, 15 Mar 2015 16:10:02 UTC

Johan,
Quintus emailed you on March 7th about licensing for the title and credits themes that you wrote for "The Secret Chronicles of Dr. M.".  He emailed you at a m4um.net account, so I'm not sure if you would have gotten it.  He outlined several possible license options - CC-BY 4.0, CC-BY-NC 4.0, a custom license, and sublicensing (I pasted his email below -- see that email for details on these options).
Currently the music falls under an exclusive license by default, which technically means it can't be used for forks of our game or be used in our own game when it is placed in application repositories.  Thus if we don't succeed in changing the license, we will be forced to remove these two songs from the game for the current release and would eventually have to seek out different theme songs in later releases.  We really do not want to do this because your music is very good, but we cannot release version 2.0 of the game until we have answered these questions.  We're running out of time for the release, unfortunately.

Let us know what you think might work for this.  We will be glad to answer any questions you have.  We really appreciate your giving these songs to the project and hope to work with you again.
-Chris (datahead)
---------------------------------------------
Hi jobromedia,

we have been discussing the licensing of assets in TSC (again), and
after we’ve sorted out a major problem with Bugsbane’s graphics[1] we’d
like to properly confirm licensing of the title (and credit) theme song
as well so that we can release the 2.0.0 final version without any
licensing problems remaining (hopefully). On the forum, you have granted
us permission to use these songs[2] “for Secret Chronicles”, but that
leaves open what happens further down the road, especially in the
following cases:

* People forking TSC and reusing the music
* People coding an entirely new game and copying the music from our repository
* Linux distributors packaging the game and distributing it on their own

There has been some discussion on how we want the title song to behave
in these cases, but not come to a final conclusion on it. Also you as
the author of the song should really be asked as well. So far, the
following has been suggested:

* A CC-BY 4.0 license. This is the most easy option which will not cause
  any further problems and is what we endorse for any new assets.
* A CC-BY-NC 4.0 license, forbidding commercial use of the song, but
  otherwise being equal to the other assets with regard to licensing.
* A custom, complicated, detailed license that allows Linux distributors to
  convey copies of the song when they don’t change the code, but does
  not allow forks of the game to use the song.

The last option is the one that requires most work, especially as it
probably requires to be able to grant use permission on a per-case
base. This is effectively a right to sublicense the song, and I don’t
think you want to grant us that (although we’d appreciate it of course).

This leaves us with the two CC options, unless you have some other
suggestion, which we’re of course open to. I’d personally prefer a CC-BY
4.0 license, though datahead has expressed a preference to CC-BY-NC
4.0. Ultimately, it is up to you as the author to decide.

Feel free to ask any questions.

Vale,
Quintus

[1]: https://github.com/Secretchronicles/TSC/issues/356
[2]: http://forum.secretchronicles.de/topics/122/posts/617