Is Darkgod a fan of Celestial Aeon Project?

[outolumo]

Oh, it probably is covered by copyright. I recall a lawyer who helps companies to comply with free software licenses once said that the order of parameters in a function call would likely fall under a copyright. In fact, when there's "a lot of work done" in a creative process, you can pretty much bet the result is covered by copyright.

So, here's the deal:

The music itself is CC-licensed: go ahead and use it as the license permits.

The selection of music used in ToME (the set of music used in the ToME project, as in "which ones" or "playlist" - not the music itself) is licensed by DarkGod, in GPL3, I assume.

Therefore the music itself is not put under any new licence. Only the "playlist" is licensed, and that was made by the ToME project, so no relicensing there.

And I really like the viral nature of GPL...

[XLambda]

Oh, it probably is covered by copyright. I recall a lawyer who helps companies to comply with free software licenses once said that the order of parameters in a function call would likely fall under a copyright. In fact, when there's "a lot of work done" in a creative process, you can pretty much bet the result is covered by copyright.

So, here's the deal:

The music itself is CC-licensed: go ahead and use it as the license permits.

The selection of music used in ToME (the set of music used in the ToME project, as in "which ones" or "playlist" - not the music itself) is licensed by DarkGod, in GPL3, I assume.

Therefore the music itself is not put under any new licence. Only the "playlist" is licensed, and that was made by the ToME project, so no relicensing there.

Are you sure? I'm not a lawyer, but that seems a bit... questionable to me. What you're essentially saying is that the music is freely useable according to the terms of the CC license, but if you choose a certain subset of tracks, you HAVE to put your entire project under GPLv3 because another project uses them already and is licensed under GPLv3.

So you say "we spent a lot of time selecting tracks and because it's a lot of work it's under copyright". But how would you decide then what constitutes copyrightable work? The number of tracks used? The number of tracks left out? If ToME used only two or three tracks, would this subset still fall under copyright?

[outolumo]

Are you sure? I'm not a lawyer, but that seems a bit... questionable to me. What you're essentially saying is that the music is freely useable according to the terms of the CC license, but if you choose a certain subset of tracks, you HAVE to put your entire project under GPLv3 because another project uses them already and is licensed under GPLv3.

It is of course possible that they would choose the same set by independently by accident, but other than that yes. It's called license compliance Proprietary programs have terms under which they are given at your disposal, and so does Free Software. In this case GPL3 is an example of a viral license.

Of course you could ask for a second license from the copyright holders.

So you say "we spent a lot of time selecting tracks and because it's a lot of work it's under copyright". But how would you decide then what constitutes copyrightable work? The number of tracks used? The number of tracks left out? If ToME used only two or three tracks, would this subset still fall under copyright?

It's not the amount of work. In general the limit for a copyright is very low. Tweets could be covered, for instance. And as I said, the order or parameters in a function call... Text in a postcard, a photograph, haiku... All covered by copyright. I guess that if ToME used just one track, it would be copyrighted, in context.

This is why there are copyleft licenses like GPL and CC, btw.

[XLambda]

It is of course possible that they would choose the same set by independently by accident, but other than that yes. [...]

Of course you could ask for a second license from the copyright holders.

Oh, okay. As long as the copyright holders have the possibility to grant people a CC license, I guess that's fine. What about subsets? If a project used only a part of the ToME4 soundtrack, a proper subset in mathematical terms, would that require the project to comply with GPLv3? Not that I plan to, I'm just intrigued by the juristic aspects of licenses.

[outolumo]

Copyright holders always have the right to license their work as they please For example, once one has licensed work as CC-SA-ND-NC, one can dual license it to someone else for example as CC-SA, to be used commercially, and made derivatives. Of course, for such more liberate license one could charge some extra...

As for subsets... Its a sort of gray area. But let's say that if you made a roguelike that has a subset of ToME soundtrack, I wouldn't bet for your odds in court. There is a reason why commercial players don't take chances with things like this.

[Grey]

Does it say anywhere that the music is under GPL3 with ToME? I thought only the code was GPL3.

[outolumo]

AFAIK, music itself isn't. The question is about the playlist, or which pieces are played during the game...

[Michikawa]

Sorry for resurrecting this old thread but just wanted to clarify a few things.

Celestial Aeon Project is a one-man music project of mine. I do not belong to any "rights organizations" so I have complete control over my music and how to licence the tunes. I have decided to publish all my works on the internet under non-commercial/attribute/derivate Creative Commons -licence. This allows people to download them for free, make CC -licenced projects with them for free without contacting me if the projects are non commercial and they give credits to me. This is the most simple way for me to allow (hopefully) large group of people to use and listen to the music with reasonable restrictions without having to spend much time to give permissions manually to everyone.

However, every once in a while I get contacted by people/projects that would like to use the music without being able to follow the strict Creative Commons -licence and it's requirements. In these cases I decide manually what my answer will be. In case of ToME, I gave permission to integrate and use the tunes without the strict CC limitations in any way the project saw fit. The project sounded good and I wanted to have my music to be part of something like this so the decision was easy to make.

As for the deal itself, Darkgod is kind enough to give part of the donation income to me as a compensation for using the music, so it definitely is a win win situation for both of us. Every once in a while I try to produce custom tunes for the project to use as well.

In my opinion, this is one of the best ways to produce music especially if your genre is not something that would be played on radio or sold as albums. Being only a hobbyist home musician/composer, this system and CC way of spreading the music has gained me so wide popularity that it has smashed my wildest dreams. Currently my Jamendo projects stats have millions of listens, hundreds of thousands of downloads and thousands of fans. I would never could have made it this far without giving it out for free and projects like ToME are playing a huge part in all of this.

So yes, everything is legal and nobody is being screwed

-Matti (Celestial Aeon Project guy)