Oolite Bulletins

Im not a lawyer, I also may have missed this somewhere else, but I couldnt find it.

Is there some implicit copyright assignment or license given when an oxp is uploaded (or are they all under a license somehow anyway?).

I am really asking about use of text in the readme, is it ok to duplicate it on the wiki. For example, I was going to add the text about the All Stars Large Freighter from the readme in the oxp to its wiki page. I imagine that this should be ok, but this is not a good legal position.

Does anyone know where we stand?

Anything submitted to the Wiki is on the basis that anyone else may edit or fiddle with it. OXPs are submitted under the creative commons licence. The author (stickty speaking) owns the copyright, but licences users to use or distribute the OXP as long as they don't sell or charge for it. In practice virtually all OXP authors don't assert copyright and are pleased and flattered that somebody thinks their stuff is worth writing about or pinching to use in another OXP (its good manors to credit the orginal author in the readme though). I expect the author will be pleased if you want to add some background, but if you are in doubt, send him a PM asking him for permission. At the end of the day, Oolite is a fun project and everbody is doing stuff for it on that basis.

LittleBear wrote:

Anything submitted to the Wiki is on the basis that anyone else may edit or fiddle with it. OXPs are submitted under the creative commons licence. The author (stickty speaking) owns the copyright, but licences users to use or distribute the OXP as long as they don't sell or charge for it. In practice virtually all OXP authors don't assert copyright and are pleased and flattered that somebody thinks their stuff is worth writing about or pinching to use in another OXP (its good manors to credit the orginal author in the readme though). I expect the author will be pleased if you want to add some background, but if you are in doubt, send him a PM asking him for permission. At the end of the day, Oolite is a fun project and everbody is doing stuff for it on that basis.

A virtually definitive assessment, this should be a sticky and also included in the WIKI.

Some specifics:

• Text on the wiki is subject to the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2, as specified on the edit page on the wiki. (Licensing your text under this license is a condition for editing it.)
• That license isn’t really applicable to uploaded OXPs, so their status isn’t strictly defined.
• Any OXP containing content taken or adapted from Oolite is subject to Oolite’s licensing terms – that is, it must be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, the GNU General Public License version 2, or both.
• My understanding is that the copyright and licensing terms of an OXP can’t stop you from describing it in your own words, unless you’ve signed a separate contract such as a non-disclosure agreement. (Describing the storyline of a story-oriented OXP in depth might be considered a derivative work, but the substantive content of OXPs tends to lie in ships, scripts etc.)

TGHC wrote:

LittleBear wrote:

Anything submitted to the Wiki is on the basis that anyone else may edit or fiddle with it. OXPs are submitted under the creative commons licence. The author (stickty speaking) owns the copyright, but licences users to use or distribute the OXP as long as they don't sell or charge for it. In practice virtually all OXP authors don't assert copyright and are pleased and flattered that somebody thinks their stuff is worth writing about or pinching to use in another OXP (its good manors to credit the orginal author in the readme though). I expect the author will be pleased if you want to add some background, but if you are in doubt, send him a PM asking him for permission. At the end of the day, Oolite is a fun project and everbody is doing stuff for it on that basis.

A virtually definitive assessment....included in the WIKI.

Done.

Captain Hesperus
....Your friendly neighbourhood Wiki updater and spam assassin (semi-retired)