The Game Jam License
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Introducing: The Game Jam License Gorm Lai Kai Erenli Goldsmiths, University of London University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna New Cross, London, United Kingdom Vienna, Austria [email protected] [email protected] Foaad Khosmood William Latham Cal Poly Goldsmiths, University of London San Luis Obispo, California, USA New Cross, London, United Kingdom [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Since their inception at the Indie Game Jam1 in 2002, a signifi- Gorm Lai, Kai Erenli, Foaad Khosmood, and William Latham. 2019. Intro- cant part of game jams has been knowledge sharing and show- ducing: The Game Jam License. In The Fourteenth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’19), August 26–30, 2019, San Luis casing ideas and work to peers. While various licensing mecha- Obispo, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3337722.3341844 nisms have been used for game jams throughout the years, there has never been a licence uniquely designed for artifacts created 1 INTRODUCTION during a game jam. In this paper, we present to the community the Game Jam License (GJL) which is designed to facilitate that sharing On-site game jams have been about sharing since their inception at and knowledge transfer, while making sure the original creators re- the very first Indie Game Jam (2002), where game designers shared tain commercial rights. The Global Game Jam2, since 2009, strives ideas and showed off their creations to each other while gathered 4 to formalise sharing in a similar manner, by having jammers up- in a central place. The Nordic Game Jam built further on this load and license their creations under Creative Commons3 Non idea, and in the early years instructed jammers to upload and share Commercial Share Alike 3.0 free license. However, the CC family source code and assets from their jam creation. The Global Game of licenses is not well suited for software. CC is not compatible Jam has formalized this process by requiring jammers to upload a with most other licenses, and introduces a legal grey area with the Creative Commons (CC) Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 free li- division between commercial and non-commercial use. Moreover, cense [2] along with their jam creations, consisting of executable, open source licences like GPL are well suited for source code, but source code and assets. With this version of the CC licence, the not for art and design content. Instead the GJL presented in this original creators of the game retain all commercial rights, while paper, aims to uphold the original ideas of game jams (sharing and those who download the game from globalgamejam.org can share knowledge transfer), while still allowing the original team to hold and change the game, as long as they do not benefit commercially on to all rights to their creation, without any of the deficiencies of and remember to credit the original creators. the CC family of licenses. While game jams are still a relatively new phenomenon, the rapid increase in size and scope of these events gives rise to new legal CCS CONCEPTS questions in need for more formalization. Over 47,000 participants created 9000 games during Global Game Jam 2019 alone[10]. Some • Human-centered computing → Collaborative content cre- interesting legal questions unique to game jams include the follow- ation; • Applied computing → Law; • Software and its engi- ing: neering → Open source model. • Can I share my game and still own it? arXiv:1908.11459v1 [cs.CY] 29 Aug 2019 KEYWORDS • Does participating in a game jam mean I can’t commercial- ize my submissions? game jams, licenses, open source, creative commons, global game • Can I bundle source and assets that I do not own into my jam, copyright, sharing, law game submission? • 1see: http://indiegamejam.com/igj0/index.html Can I use closed-source commercial tools to build my game 2see: https://globalgamejam.org without compromising ownership of it? 3 see: https://creativecommons.org • Am I free to download and modify previous game jam sub- missions? Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed • Can a single license cover source code, assets and art? for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- Existing practices such as using the CC license used by Global tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re- Game Jam have never been considered a good fit for source code. publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission Moreover, open source licences are considered good fits for source and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. code, but not for other content. We examined other choices, but FDG ’19, August 26–30, 2019, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. no other license makes an effort to capture the interdisciplinary ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7217-6/19/08...$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3337722.3341844 4see https://www.nordicgamejam.com FDG ’19, August 26–30, 2019, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA Lai, et al. cooperative nature of game jams. Therefore, we investigate estab- to source code, but not to most other content e.g. images, sound, lishing a new licence that serves the global jamming community assets and models. Specifically, the CC FAQ page states: and addresses more of the relevant legal issues. Even this option We recommend against using Creative Commons li- has severe challenges: it must have fairly broad adoption to be use- censes for software. Instead, we strongly encourage ful. you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available [8]. 2 PREVIOUS WORK As is evident from the increased proliferation of online source As stated by [20] certain products, such as video games, which code repositories such as Github[11], GitLab [13] and BitBucket [4], have a strong software component but also integrate and create the use of open source software is becoming ever more widespread. artistic works with an original element, in the meaning of the Di- According to [12], Github reached 30 million developers in July rective 2001/29/EC (InfoSoc Directive)[16] and as interpreted by 2018, and it hosts more than a staggering 2,800,000,000 lines of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)[21] could pose code by December 2018. problems with the respect to the applicable law. Therefore, it was In [22], Guevara-Villalobos suggests that we are “witnessing the asked if video games should be considered solely under Directive configuration of communities of production as a means by which 2009/24/EC (Software Directive)[17], due to the originality of the developers seek to regain creative control over of their own labour”. underlying source code or should they be considered as hybrid Indie game developers form communities where they share ideas, works under the InfoSoc Directive due to their original nature in- learnings and resources. Game jams, such as the Global Game Jam, cluding artistic expressions and narratives. The CJEU stated in Nin- play an essential role as these creative spaces. tendo vs PC Box [18], that video games fall within the scope of application of the InfoSoc Directive because they 2.1 Commercial vs Non-Commercial constitute complex matter comprising not only a com- In order to provide jammers with some kind of legal framework, puter program but also graphic and sound elements, GGJ chose the CC, as it is a license that provides an explicit distinc- which, although encrypted in computer language, have tion between commercial and non-commercial use. Leaving aside a unique creative value which cannot be reduced to the concerns about CC compatibility with software, this distinc- that encryption. In so far as the parts of a video game, tion seems useful for the actual artifact created during the jam. in this case, the graphic and sound elements, are part However CC is still inadequate in addressing one of the biggest of its originality, they are protected, together with the concerns among game jammers: Are jammers allowed to monetize entire work, by copyright in the context of the system their projects after the jam is concluded? Unfortunately the answer established by Directive 2001/29. to this question cannot be a simple “yes” or “no” as there are many Keeping this in mind, it became apparent, that there is no li- aspects to be taken into (legal) consideration, e.g. is it considered cense publicly available, which addresses the hybrid factorofvideo “commercial” if a charity or non-profits sells the game jam pack- games in satisfactory way. age, or the package is used to get a grant or win a competition? GJL is a license that is idealistic in nature, as it is essentially an Or what if a modified version is worked on for money or in-kind attempt at reformulating the sharing spirit of the Global Game Jam compensation? What if the package is given away free as part of into legal language. However, GJL is not the first attempt at doing marketing campaign meant to promote a different product? The such a thing. Richard Stallman famously created the Gnu General answer of “it depends” seems to be the most accurate one for this Public License (GPL) in 1989 to ensure that “the users have the non-exhaustive list of example questions that demonstrates the le- freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the gal distinction between commercial and non-commercial, but it is software” [19].