A legal question for y'all...

[capi3101]

Let me preface this post by saying this is one of those deals where I said I would ask, so I'm asking.

Among the other things I've got going on at the moment, I'm the current project coordinator for the ongoing Starflight III project. We're getting ready to get started with coding in earnest, and a question has come up regarding licensing of certain materials (the big thing is artwork). We're going to have some material (starship designs, species, etc.) that will be derived from what was in the original games and were looking into how to go about writing the license for those derived materials.

I know that this is an issue y'all might've had to deal with when you were building Standoff (seeing as how it's a Wing Commander game that includes craft from previous "official" products), so I'll ask: do y'all know of a standardized release that says in legalese "I release all my rights - but only my rights - to this intellectual property"? What kind of license do you have in place?

Going to carbon-copy this question and ask the Saga folks too; same situation.

 

[Quarto]

Well... generally, we never gave much thought to legalities. I think we might have said something about Wing Commander being copyrighted by EA on the website, and we also always included the credits to Secret Ops at the end of Standoff's own credits. That's as far as we went, though. I don't think we ever considered whether there should be a license - and I'm pretty sure that if someone would have suggested it, we would have laughed. How could we possibly include any kind of license when nothing that we created could have existed without us violating someone else's copyrights?

My advice - the less you think about it, the better. No license you include could possibly be legal anyway - you can't just violate someone's copyright and make it "all right" by stating that it still belongs to him. So, just don't bother, unless the copyright owner specifically asks you to - and in that case, they'll tell you exactly what they want in there.

 

[Mace]

A friend of mine is a model, and she was posing at a game exhibition today, I sent the know picture of the Kilrathi emperor with demanding to know who it was, guys, i did my part...