Using CC Attribution: a suggestion to homebrewers

Hi folks,

I'm a big fan of Dungeon World, and I'm also a big fan of open gaming. I was delighted when Sage and Adam licensed DW under Creative Commons Attribution.

I'd love to see the community use the Creative Commons Attribution licence as much as possible as well. I've put my own (small) contribution under it. The Take on Rules products (Establishments and Magic Items) and the Number Appearing backer supplement both use that licence as well.

The advantages of CC BY are:

• It creates a culture of sharing where everyone can build on the contributions of others.
• It fits so well with how homebrewing works: you take someone's rules, tweak them, rework them, add to them, and then share the result.
• It makes the legal situation very clear for people, making them more likely to engage with your stuff.
• It makes archiving possible. If these forums go down, there's no legal way for someone to store the material that people have created.
• It encourages small press, which is how the roleplaying community has to operate.
• It recognises the generosity of Adam and Sage in opening their game, and allows them to use the stuff we make, if they think it's worth it.

I'd love to discuss using CC Attribution further with people if you have any questions or concerns. I also thought I'd share these little snippets of text that you can use to license your work CC BY.

Put this in your post:

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

OR

All my posts in this thread are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

OR

Put in your signature:

All my posts (unless stated otherwise) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Fantastic idea.

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Pursuant to that: butts.

It makes the legal situation very clear for people, making them more likely to engage with your stuff.
[..]
Put this in your post:

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

I find that really creepy. Stuff you publish, fine, but otherwise it seems you're trying to impose an unnecessary legal framework on casual communication.

This post is copyright Slow Dog(tm). Reproduction of any of the words therein will result in the death of the poster at some future date(*)

(*) Do you want to live forever?

I find that really creepy. Stuff you publish, fine, but otherwise it seems you're trying to impose an unnecessary legal framework on casual communication.

Hey Slow Dog, thanks for responding.

The unnecessary legal framework is the global copyright regime, which applies automatically to all casual communication on the net. What the Creative Commons licences do is reduce copyright limitations to make it easier to engage in casual communications.

But what I anticipate happening is people adding the 'Put this in your posts' snippet to the posts they make with game content. Stuff that could be published, whether or not it currently is.

I will join the idea.

I have been wondering, why the unported license instead of the share-alike, if I am sharing I actually want people to do the same, it is why the SRD worked so well for the hobby, it required your work to be shareable.

I have been wondering, why the unported license instead of the share-alike, if I am sharing I actually want people to do the same, it is why the SRD worked so well for the hobby, it required your work to be shareable.

I'm a big fan of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, but I figured that since Adam and Sage chose CC Attribution for DW it made sense to encourage the same licence for the community.

CC Attribution and CC Attribution-ShareAlike do play nicely together though, so I don't think it would hurt for you to put something like this in your sig instead of what you have now:

All my posts (unless stated otherwise) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.