What about a texture exchange server?

[diafero]

Well, you're right. But we could still use CC without the non-commercial flag. Just letting it fly around without any licence doesn't sound like a good idea to me... but I'm not a lawyer

[Trylon]

Well, I think it's at least easier in the long run to have it public domain.

Simply said, the CC license requires you to give credit for use of the texture.
While that is a very good idea in general, when you use a lot of textures, you can easily get a credit requirements list of 50 names, just for the textures.
Having to do all those credits is doable, but can be easily forgotten.

Now imagine someone downloading the textures, storing them on hard drive, and forgetting where exactly they got the textures from.
Now, getting all those credits you are formally required to give together is quite a bit harder. And if you forget someone, they might get a bit upset.

Now, by going the public domain route, you effectively say to all uploaders that they will not by default receive credit for their textures, so if it doesn't happen, no one gets (duly) upset, and you take a bit of strain off of the writers, who don't have to concern themselves with obligated credits.

That's my view on it, in any case.

[Nadnerb]

Once again, I agree with Trylon. While it may be nice to get credit for stuff, it's easily forgotten, and it's best not to raise expectations, or leave the door open for (however unlikely) legal action against writers. Public domain is the best sledgehammer for obliterating any pesky legal junk before it can trouble any less savvy writers.

[Dachannien]

Requiring public domain is a bad idea. Suppose I take a bunch of photographs of serene mountaintop horizons for use in crafting sky spheres or distant landscape spheres, and I post them into the public domain on the texture website. Later, I decide I want to build a portfolio of my work so that I can get hired as a freelance professional photographer. Someone sees that I'm using photos that were released into the public domain, so they download my photos, put them on their site, and claim that they're in their portfolio.

At that point, I have absolutely no recourse available to me. That other person can claim that they took the photos, sell the photos, and generally do as they please, because they were released into the public domain.

Such an arrangement would substantially discourage people from submitting their content to the effort. In fact, this has already come up in discussion elsewhere in terms of Cyan being allowed to redistribute user-created music to MORE players. My answer over there was to look at YouTube as an example: when you submit to YouTube, you keep the copyright of your work, but you grant a license to ensure that everyone's in the clear when it comes to downloading your stuff from them.

So, I recommend crafting a license agreement, running it by Cyan's legal eagles, and then requiring that all submitters agree to license the submitted work via that license agreement. If you want, give them the public domain option, but don't require it.

The license would have to include features such as (and I don't intend this to be a necessarily complete list):

• The submitter grants Cyan Worlds, Inc. a perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to store, copy, and redistribute the submitted content and to create, store, copy, and redistribute derivative works based upon said content for the purposes of delivering said content and said derivative works to users of their online computer game MORE.
• The submitter grants The Guild of Writers {or insert preferred entity controlling the texture site here} a perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to store, copy, and redistribute the submitted content and to store, copy, and redistribute derivative works based upon said content to any person who has accepted the terms of this license agreement, for the purpose of collaborative development of user-created game content for Cyan Worlds's online computer game MORE.
• The submitter grants any individual accepting the terms of the license a perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to store and copy the submitted content and to create, store, and copy derivative works based upon said content for the purposes of developing user-created game content for Cyan Worlds's online computer game MORE.
• The submitter grants any individual accepting the terms of the license a perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to redistribute the submitted content and to redistribute derivative works based upon said content to any other person who has accepted the terms of this license agreement, for the purpose of collaborative development of user-created game content for Cyan Worlds's online computer game MORE.
• The submitter grants any individual accepting the terms of the license a perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to redistribute the submitted content and to redistribute derivative works based upon said content to Cyan Worlds, Inc., for the purpose of delivering user-created game content for Cyan Worlds's online computer game MORE.
• An individual accepting the terms of this license agrees not to use the submitted content in any fashion outside the scope of the development of user-created game content for Cyan Worlds's online computer game MORE, publicity campaigns for said game, and private personal use. Said individual agrees not to use said content in any fashion outside the terms of the granted license and/or any rights granted by law.
• This agreement is not a transfer or assignment of copyright.

I think that covers it, but folks might want to see if I've left anything out. It would probably need some cleanup as well, as my legalese-fu isn't all that great (too many patents, not enough license agreements - plus, I'm not a lawyer!). The point here is to require people to license their work for free use within the scope of MORE, but to let them keep their rights substantially when it comes to other outside uses.

[Lontahv]

I think that it could be credited like this:

You upload your texture...
The texture website nominally "owns" your texture (so this is the "creator" of the tex in the CC license).
The texture gives you credit on their site.

Doing this would mean you'd only have to give credit to the site, and then the site (when you go there) passes credit to you.

So it's like:

HMM, I really like this texture... I got it from that GoW texture site. Let me credit it as from that site. Ok, let me try to find the author of the texture so that I can find other textures by them. *Goes to site to look up that particular texture and look at the other textures that person made*


We need to think that: why would you need to upload things from CGTextures say onto this server? See, I just don't want this server to become jammed with google-image-search random "texture" pics.

I think that for the most part this should be a "Fresh" texture source.

Personally, I don't want to look on the BlenderTextureCD and then think "HMM nothing here, lemme try something different" and then go to the GoW and they have the same things.

We are not trying to be a mirror of commercial textures (or any other texture-server) that we don't have enough money to buy... why don't we call this server the "texturez" (like warez) server in that case.


Just some suggestions.

[tachzusamm]

So, would you guys feel okay with this? (That's the way I currently implemented it)



Or would it be sufficient to let members subscribe to the terms once when they register instead of showing this text each time?
Btw, would you write legal "disclaimer", "clause", "terms" or "information"? My english lacks of the fine differences.
And don't worry about the "Durchsuchen..." button, the browser shows it just in your local OS language settings.

Oh, and I made this draft before I read Dachanniens comments. That would be a lot of text then - nobody will read it each time.
Well, I for myself did not understand it completely.

EDIT:

2a) You will receive proper credits for the artwork you upload while it is listed on this site.

The texture gives you credit on their site.
Doing this would mean you'd only have to give credit to the site, and then the site (when you go there) passes credit to you.

By the way, what do you mean with this? Credit? Is this something financial? Or Trust? Honor?
Please help me with that (again I'm missing the fine differences)

[Lontahv]

Looks good!

I think what we mean with "Credit" as meaning having your names put in the credits of the age.

Also, I was thinking that maybe you could have a kind of membership to this place... maybe it could be based on the PHPBB members or something. This would make it a little easier to "have a chat" to the people who start putting up commercial textures.
This would also go a lot toward this being the "GoW texture server" (of course anyone would be able to download and use the textures).

[tachzusamm]

Looks good!

Thank you.

I think what we mean with "Credit" as meaning having your names put in the credits of the age.

Oh, well, now I understand. Thanks. Yes, good idea - nobody would work just for nothing, but just a few simple thankful words would feed the soul, or even getting to be mentioned somewhere.

Also, I was thinking that maybe you could have a kind of membership to this place... maybe it could be based on the PHPBB members or something. This would make it a little easier to "have a chat" to the people who start putting up commercial textures.
This would also go a lot toward this being the "GoW texture server" (of course anyone would be able to download and use the textures).

Hm, this raises two questions.
a) Do you mean using the phpBB database user entries of the GoW forum? I was thinking about integrating a small phpBB forum on the server for the stored stuff, e.g. asking for needed textures, giving "thankful words", discussing issues with textures and such. Not more. The main age writing discussion must take place still here.
And for the first start, there's an independent login and register procedere integrated, so it could work without a forum first (beta testing).
b) Do we need to let users of the TextURU server enter their full name when they want to register as members as it was mentioned in the first metadata concepts by Robert Kosten? http://cobbs.ca/bbs/showthread.php?t=597
Quote: "author.name - The full, real name of the author (for legal reasons I'd argue against anonymous submissions)"
I'm still unsure about that, because it could discourage users, although the name would not be public.
But IF we need to, the phpBB database does not store such information.
Additionally, "already registered" members of the GoW did not already accept the terms we are going to develop right now.

[Lontahv]

Na, I think just being signed up for the forum should be enough (this forum).

A) It's easy to contact the user(s)
B) You do have _some_ info on them (user-name and email)

I think that the PhpBB user tables would be fairly easy to use and then just have a login that requires that info (like was done with the wiki).

[teedyo]

I've been thinking somewhat along the lines of Dachanien; that not everyone who puts 100's of hours into creating their art would wish to give up copyright/credit. I was thinking about maybe 3 separate licenses:

1. Public domain
2. Unlimited license for any purpose.
3. License limited to use in any Cyan/URU related (fan)work. (Kind of like what Dachanien posted)

This would pretty much necessitate that the database consist of three distinct areas depending on license granted by the submitter. There would be checkboxes to select the license upon submission with a link to the detailed text of each. I know, more work for the database maintainers.

I would also suggest that people insert a "Created by Real Name" into the meta data area of their images. Perhaps a "Created by pseudonym" in images for the public domain. I would also suggest that third-party work be disallowed. For third party work; we can have a "Links to other sources" page: or just a wiki page linking to public domain repositories.