Skywind assets license?

[halbe]

I heard on the OpenMW Discord that all Skywind assets have only been licensed for use in Skywind, does this mean that we can't liberate them and use them in real Morrowind? If that's true then this is pretty unfortunate as all those man-hours will have gone to waste.

Spoiler: Show

Hopefully noone would do something as morally abhorrent as to violate the license and make a Morrowind mod that contains said copyrighted assets as that would be deeply shameful and I would never advocate such an unwholesome action. Anyone who would violate the Holy© American™ IP† Law‡ in all of its divine perfection should be jailed for life because copying = stealing under any and all circumstances. The following smiley indicates nothing but my utmost sincerity because I truly do want to reinforce how strongly I feel about this subject and I do not intend for anyone to misinterpret anything I have said as sarcasm.
:^)

[DestinedToDie]

When you submit content to TESrenewal.com you simultaneously grant TESrenewal.com an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free license to publish, display, modify, distribute and syndicate your content worldwide. You confirm and warrant that you have the required authority to grant the above license to TESrenewal.com.

What I'm reading is - TESrenewal project has a license to use these assets. But me and you don't. Only TESrenewal may bring Skywind assets to Morrowind.

I asked them in Discord and they said that they cannot use their assets in any other project aside from Skywind because of their license. This kind of goes against what the license above seems to indicate, because they should have the liberty to do anything they want with the assets, it's us who are not allowed to touch Skywind assets.

In order to liberate the Skywind project, you would have to contact each and every member (active and inactive) and get their agreement. This would be similar to contacting each and every person who has ever contributed to OpenMW and get their agreement to relicense it as something else other than GNU GPL 3. But that's just unrealistic, because there'll always be 7 people who are never going to respond and 1 single person can veto the whole thing.

You can go speaking to individual developers about releasing their personal work under a license of their choosing.

[psi29a]

From how I read it, TESrenewal required everyone who submitted assets to grant TESrenewal the following rights:

When you submit content to TESrenewal.com you simultaneously grant TESrenewal.com an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free license to publish, display, modify, distribute and syndicate your content worldwide. You confirm and warrant that you have the required authority to grant the above license to TESrenewal.com.

This allows the TESrenewal to license their adaptations/work however they seem fit, but they have no right to sub or re-license the assets granted to them. If you use the asset from TESrenewal, then you are bound by their license.

However the original copyright is still held by the original author. They can grant licenses to their work to whoever they feel like, at any time, regardless of what TESrenewal does. The original author do not 'give-up' their work just because they granted a license to TESrenewal.

This means that you can always contact the original author of the asset to ask them for a copy of their work and they can grant it under a license of their choice.

If you want to 'liberate' the assets (some or all), then you have two choices:
1) Ask TESrenewal team to re-license the work under a CC (or other open) license.
2) Go to all the individual authors/artists and ask them to grant you a CC (or other open) license for their work.


Number 2 is what I did for UIX:R, which has been time consuming but I've met a lot of nice people as a result. Not all assets are as 'free' as I would like, but it is better than nothing.

[Updated] No sub-licensing expressly granted.

[DestinedToDie]

Btw I'd like to post the source for that small snippet. http://tesrenewal.com/morroblivion-faq#disclaimer

It seems it was written when they were doing MorroBlivion.

[halbe]

From how I read it, TESrenewal required everyone who submitted assets to grant TESrenewal the following rights:

When you submit content to TESrenewal.com you simultaneously grant TESrenewal.com an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free license to publish, display, modify, distribute and syndicate your content worldwide. You confirm and warrant that you have the required authority to grant the above license to TESrenewal.com.

This allows the TESrenewal ti re-license everything they receive as they seem fit. If you use the asset from TESrenewal, then you are bound by their license unless they re-license it themselves.

However the original copyright is still held by the original author. They can grant licenses to their work to whoever they feel like, at any time, regardless of what TESrenewal does. The original author do not 'give-up' their work just because they granted a license to TESrenewal.

This means that you can always contact the original author of the asset to ask them for a copy of their work and they can grant it under a license of their choice.

If you want to 'liberate' the assets (some or all), then you have two choices:
1) Ask TESrenewal team to re-license the work under a CC (or other open) license.
2) Go to all the individual authors/artists and ask them to grant you a CC (or other open) license for their work.


Number 2 is what I did for UIX:R, which has been time consuming but I've met a lot of nice people as a result. Not all assets are as 'free' as I would like, but it is better than nothing.

This seems pretty viable then, is there a way to figure out who made what though?

[psi29a]

That's the trick. Ask questions, email, look for other mods online to see if they match.

In other words, it is a lot of work.

[TechNoirMK]

>muh artistic vision
Apart from some textures and clutter models, I don't see a reason to use any Skywind assets unless something like the spoiler in the OP happens.

[Biboran]

>muh artistic vision
Apart from some textures and clutter models, I don't see a reason to use any Skywind assets unless something like the spoiler in the OP happens.

Actually, this. Only model I probably kile in skywid is dreugh model, other is meh and actually morrowind modders can do better

[K0kt409P]

From how I read it, TESrenewal required everyone who submitted assets to grant TESrenewal the following rights:

When you submit content to TESrenewal.com you simultaneously grant TESrenewal.com an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free license to publish, display, modify, distribute and syndicate your content worldwide. You confirm and warrant that you have the required authority to grant the above license to TESrenewal.com.

This allows the TESrenewal ti re-license everything they receive as they seem fit.

I don't think that's correct. For TESrenewal to be able to re-license work submitted to them by others they must, in addition to the above list, also have the right to sublicense the work. Since that right is missing, they cannot change the license of all assets at once without the original authors' say-so.

[psi29a]

You're quite right and my apologies. TESrenewal does not have the right to re-license the assists since that right was not expressly granted.

For example, CC licenses also do not allow sub-licensing.

By definition, an adaptation constitutes the new contributions by the person adapting the work and does not extend to the preexisting material. This is a complexity of copyright law, not the CC licenses themselves. Thus, when an adaptation of a CC-licensed work is created and licensed, the new license only applies to the adapter’s new contributions and not the original content. The original work is licensed to the downstream user directly from the original author. A user of an adaptation licensed under a CC license is receiving and must comply with (at least) two licenses -- one from the creator of the original work, and a second from the adapter (the person creating and licensing the adaptation) for use of the new content and modifications contributed by the adapter. This is because CC licenses do not allow sublicensing.