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Applying Creative Commons license to FvL comics
14 years ago
I've added a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License icon to the template I use for the Ferrets Vs Lemmings comics. This should start appearing in the next comic.
With all the recent talk about heavy-handed copyright protection and stuff, I figure it's a good time to go with a more lax copyright protection. I was already fine with people spreading Kenny Chronicles and Ferrets Vs Lemmings comics(with attribution), and wouldn't mind if a comic was modified into something equally or more awesome(with credit), but I never applied a license that went into detail about that. Now I'm making it clear.
Back when I was developing the comic, I seriously considered putting it in the public domain because it's set in an anarchy(although later I decided that individual boats would have laws anyway), but that would provide no protection from outright theft & a big-budget movie where I get nothing(or a crappy non-faithful movie adaptation where I get credit). That's why the attribution and non-commercial stipulations are there.
The way I see it, people riff off of Disney, Hasbro, Dreamworks, etc properties all the time and it's great, even if those copyrights are heavily protected. If people are going to do it anyway, and it produces great stuff such as Trololo Legacy, then I might as well make it legal for my stuff.
The main purpose of this is to lay out the rules regarding sharing the comic. I don't expect remixes(aside from the occasional avatar), but I do actively encourage sharing. In fact, I've had embed code displayed below both the Kenny Chronicles and FvL comics on their respective websites right from the start.
I'll have the symbol right after "©2012 Garrett Williams". I tried to find out if that was compatible, and I only found one person addressing this. The person's explanation makes sense. Basically, Creative Commons is not a copyright, but is instead a license on top of the copyright that you have already. In that case, my usage of the copyright symbol in conjunction with Creative Commons sounds optimal. I really didn't want to use the wordy language CC offers; "This work by Garrett Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License." If I put any license info directly on the comic, it has to be simple and not distract from the comic. I'll put the full wording in the footer of the site, though. I first checked two Creative Commons licensed comics(xkcd and Sandra & Woo) to see how they did it, but neither use the copyright symbol. In fact, xkcd doesn't have any attribution at all! I normally recommend that people include attribution directly in their comics, because people copy comics across sites & don't provide attribution themselves. Thankfully, xkcd is known by everybody online.
With all the recent talk about heavy-handed copyright protection and stuff, I figure it's a good time to go with a more lax copyright protection. I was already fine with people spreading Kenny Chronicles and Ferrets Vs Lemmings comics(with attribution), and wouldn't mind if a comic was modified into something equally or more awesome(with credit), but I never applied a license that went into detail about that. Now I'm making it clear.
Back when I was developing the comic, I seriously considered putting it in the public domain because it's set in an anarchy(although later I decided that individual boats would have laws anyway), but that would provide no protection from outright theft & a big-budget movie where I get nothing(or a crappy non-faithful movie adaptation where I get credit). That's why the attribution and non-commercial stipulations are there.
The way I see it, people riff off of Disney, Hasbro, Dreamworks, etc properties all the time and it's great, even if those copyrights are heavily protected. If people are going to do it anyway, and it produces great stuff such as Trololo Legacy, then I might as well make it legal for my stuff.
The main purpose of this is to lay out the rules regarding sharing the comic. I don't expect remixes(aside from the occasional avatar), but I do actively encourage sharing. In fact, I've had embed code displayed below both the Kenny Chronicles and FvL comics on their respective websites right from the start.
I'll have the symbol right after "©2012 Garrett Williams". I tried to find out if that was compatible, and I only found one person addressing this. The person's explanation makes sense. Basically, Creative Commons is not a copyright, but is instead a license on top of the copyright that you have already. In that case, my usage of the copyright symbol in conjunction with Creative Commons sounds optimal. I really didn't want to use the wordy language CC offers; "This work by Garrett Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License." If I put any license info directly on the comic, it has to be simple and not distract from the comic. I'll put the full wording in the footer of the site, though. I first checked two Creative Commons licensed comics(xkcd and Sandra & Woo) to see how they did it, but neither use the copyright symbol. In fact, xkcd doesn't have any attribution at all! I normally recommend that people include attribution directly in their comics, because people copy comics across sites & don't provide attribution themselves. Thankfully, xkcd is known by everybody online.
