Gilles Tran wrote:
> Given the largely non-commercial nature of POV-Ray materials such as models
> and SDL scripts, little attention has been given so far regarding the sort
> of licences that would best protect the use and diffusion of such materials
> (though I know that similar threads exist somewhere in the 50000 messages in
> p.general...). However, with mesh modelers becoming more mainstream in the
> POV-Ray community, it is becoming obvious that some POV-Ray material could
> start to attain a true commercial value once converted to another format, so
> the question is becoming a little more acute than before.

The GPL is not very suited for licensing something else than software 
because of its distinction between use of the program (which is 
completely free and unrestricted) and creation of derived works (which 
are bound to being licensed under GPL as well).  For a mesh or other 
kind of data this difference is not that clear, do you create a derived 
work if you use a mesh in an image? If you use an altered version of the 
mesh somewhere do you have to publish the changed variant?

When licensing data you usually focus on regulations what kind of uses 
are allowed and most often the focus is on how much the author gets 
credited/payed for this use.  For GPL like licenses for this purpose 
have a look at:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses

In the past there have been attempts in these newsgroups to introduce 
something like a default license for POV-SDL works, including proposals 
to automatically put all things posted on this server under such a 
license.  I would not recommend something like this because if people 
feel forced to a certain license scheme this will result in less people 
actually posting code which would be very bad IMO.

Coming back to the original question - if you want to license data and 
neither want to give it away completely free nor require everyone to pay 
for use the obvious middle ways are 'free for non-commercial use' 
(however you define that) or 'free for a limited time' (like shareware).

> What sort of licence would best cover the most basic needs of the people who
> would like to share freely what they create for POV-Ray while having some
> minimal legal protection from potential abuse?

I am not sure what you mean by abuse.  Using the data in a 
politically/ethically/... questionable context or using it to make a lot 
of $$$ without giving anything to you?

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 01 May. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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