blindsaypatten wrote:This discussion does appear to be fruitless.
Yes, it is for various reasons. First of all, a license change isn't easy. Every contributor to MH has to agree with it. Some contributors are no longer part of MH. Might be difficult to even contact them. Just remember: The domain makehuman.org is still not controlled by any active member of the makehuman team. Joel wants to change this, but it's obviously not so easy. Now you can guess how much fun it will be to discuss a license change. Another reason: What makes you so sure, that a changed license doesn't contain other weaknesses than the actual one. There's no such thing as a crystal clear license that covers anything anyone could think of. If there were, a lot of lawyers would be out of business.
blindsaypatten wrote: I am merely trying to tell you that the current license is not as clear as you think it is,
The MH team is aware of this fact. A while back we had a discussion about MHX2. MHX2 is not part of official MH, Following the license terms, an MHX2 export doesn't give you the CC0 exception. This was never intended. Those devs who commented on this fact made perfectly clear, that they have no intention to go after people for using MHX2. I trust them. They use MHX2 themselves.
blindsaypatten wrote:My first point is that the idea that an asset can be CC0 if exported by an unmodified version of MH but AGPL if exported from a modified version of MH, is legally incorrect. Once CC0 is applied to a work you can no longer use copyright to enforce any other license on any copy of it. So, all that including the language about unmodified official versions does in confuse matters.
This might be true. Consequence would be that any exportable asset is governed by CC0. Bad luck for MH, not a problem for the user. On the other hand, is this important in any real life scenario? The main problem with the license is that it tries to provide absolute freedom for artists, on the other hand wants to protect the assets against people who just want to rip off MH. That doesn't work. Not for legal, but practical reasons. There's no way to tell whether I just copied an asset (AGPL) or used an export (CC0). If someone comes along and rips off MH, there's no way to prove that he acted in an illegal way. Every image, every target and, of course, the base mesh can be exported in a way that gives the CC0 exception. A bad guy would tell the judge that he acted exactly this way. No way to prove the contrary.
I can't think of any license that could solve this problem without limiting artists. In real life, AGPL is quite pointless for assets.
blindsaypatten wrote:Does "grants the option to use CC0" mean that MH will apply the CC0, or that the user will apply CC0? Which one makes a big difference. If MH applies the CC0 then all copies of the asset are covered and MH no longer has any copyright rights over the assets or any copies thereof. If you read it as "grants the option for the user to use CC0" then the user uses the option they have given up any copyright rights to the export but MH's copyright rights remain unaffected.
Sorry, but the second scenario doesn't make any sense. Not even in the world of lawyers. If MH retained rights I simply couldn't CC0 it. This is like selling a borrowed car. I simply don't have the right to sublicense stuff that is affected by third party rights.
If MH grants me a limited license and other hand the right to sublicense under CC0, it gets completely absurd. I would immediately benefit from the CC0 license I just granted.
blindsaypatten wrote:While I think it would be to MH's benefit to have clear license terms it is clear to me that there is no interest in fixing the license so that's about all that needs to be said here.
There is interest, but as said above, it's not easy to do.
BTW:
RobBaer wrote:Lindsay . [ a "he" I think]
Sorry, if I got this wrong. I wasn't aware of the fact that Lindsay is also a male name.