Putting fictional species in the Creative Commons

[malymin]

Original post by titleknown. This was crossposted with permission, original post is here.

...God, I will say, I wish people would put their Open Species under a proper Creative Commons license for broader use

Because, not enough people know about it but, you kinda need it to have one of those to have them legally above board.

Cause, Creative Commons licenses aren't really just "for show," they were created because the people behind it realized there was basically no real legal infrastructure for artists to enable people to do stuff with their work.

So, they made some really solid legalese to make it easy to do that, which is important because making it an unstated agreement can be a headache in the long-term.

Hell, even with pre-CC attempts at open licenses for art, those still had some huge holes, see also the clusterfuck with D&D's OGL.

The basic categories are:

• CC0: Basically public domain, people can do what they want with it.
• CC-BY: Basically public domain but you gotta give creator credit and link back if you can. This is the kind I use for most of my work, and I wish more creators would use.
• CC-BY-SA: Same as CC-BY, but with the extra caveat that people have to apply the license to all other extra content in the derivative work, which makes it a bit harder to make money off of derivative works of but not impossible. This is what the SCP Foundation uses, as one of the most successful CC-based works of art ever IMO.
• CC-BY-NC: Same as CC-BY, but you can't make money off of it. This is what Hatsune Miku is under, as are some of the other original Vocaloids.
• CC-BY-NC-SA: Combo of -SA and -NC, you have to apply the license to derivative works and can't make money off of it.

Note these are irrevocable and also don't include caveats for morality. The former is because it'd be legally meaningless if they weren't, the latter is because it's basically a nightmare to define those clauses in legal terms, hell even something seemingly simple as "can only be used by individuals and worker-owned organizations" hasn't been worked out yet!

But, those aside, I think with those worries it's worth it, because the public good of anyone being able to use it outweighs a few bad actors. Because if it belongs to everyone, nobody can take it away from you.

And bringing it full circle, I just wish people would use it for their Open Species more, because the use-cases are otherwise a confusing nightmare and the only one I've seen that does use it are the Synths and their luscious meaty thighs.

And, as much as I like the Synths, I would like more under that license...

Synths look pretty cool - I like how they're leaning into the more scaly end of furry, on top of being robots. Not exactly my thing (imo part of the classic/wolfaboo furry divide is whether you think it's sexy or blasphemy for dragons to have boobs), but it's neat that you have permission to use them for literally anything, even in a published for-profit work of fiction if you want. The available "stable" of public domain robots (whether individuals or "types") is pretty limited compared to dragons, vampires, and other creatures with roots in mythology and folklore. It's going to be a long time before a lot of the most influential and iconic robots of fiction become free for everyone to use...

(And if you didn't know that the six classic Crypton Vocaloids were under a Creative Common license... hey, now you know!)