Copyright Issues - leemet16/game-design-toolkit GitHub Wiki

YouTube Copyright Basics ~5:41

You may have found the perfect asset (image, sound, etc.) to use for your game, but can you actually use it? Not necessarily. Copyright law protects original creative expressions that are written, drawn, or recorded in someway (Baycrest, 2017). We need to give credit to those who create that asset in the first place or else we are technically stealing their work. You cannot reproduce, translate, perform, adapt, or transform copyright protected materials without permission from their creator (Baycrest, 2017).

How do we navigate these issues? The good news is that when you go to a website to download assets, such as www.freesound.org, there are licenses applied to each download. Make sure you check the license of any materials you are downloading and understand what the license means. If you don't want to purchase assets, you want to look for assets licensed as "Creative Commons" or "Attribution-NonCommercial".

Creative Commons means that you can use the asset in any way you would like without asking permission because the creator has waved their copyright to the asset (Creative Commons, n.d.). Attribution-NonCommercial means that you can use the asset for noncommercial reasons (i.e. not making any money off of it) but you must credit the creator as the maker of the asset (Cretive Commons, n.d.). It is important to read and understand the license of the assets you are downloading as they may differ by website.

Click the links below to learn more about licenses.

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

References

Baycrest Health Sciences. (2017). Introduction to intellectual property rights[eLearning module]. Retrieved from http://elearning.baycrest.org/

Creative Commons. (n.d.). Attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported. Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Creative Commons. (n.d.). Public domain dedication. Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Youtube Help. (2013, July 1). YouTube Copyright Basics [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1Jn4Q0j6E

Youtube. (n.d.). Copyright on youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/copyright/#support-and-troubleshooting