At Games for Music we will try to make the contents as open as possible, with respect to rights and preferences of all authors whose work is included.
Texts and other content
The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License is default and the most common, it allows anyone to copy and change the content but requires that the derivative work is published with the same license. Bear in mind that this applies to text, other types of content, e.g. media from platforms like Flickr, YouTube, Soundcloud etc. are included according to individual licensing (mentioned most often at the bottom of the text) or by the terms of the external platform.
The text of the Glossary is the safe area to take advantage of a CC license (it shouldn't be altered in this section). In articles and book reviews notice that you may find longer quotations, these are under fair use and cannot be treated as openly licensed. We consider adding a cover of a reviewed work also to be fair use. In general, the proper default attribution for the text of the wiki is to treat it as a collective work. Annotation: "[from] Games for Music, http://musicgames.wikidot.com" will suffice.
The Games Library section calls for a special attention of all those planning to repurpose the work. The situation there is diverse, as game creators individually decide what to allow, and sometimes the agreement covers only a specific usage. You should also check the editing history (bottom links) to make sure that a re-use information was not removed as a result of vandalism (it happens rarely, records are corrected during 24 hours after the breach). As a minimum, everything is available to play as a print-to-play game, which by default won't include public performance in a musical sense (although that is often possible too).
Games and permissions
We will thoroughly attribute all rulesets and even ideas (less formally protected), but feel encouraged to get to know, how the legal system of your country treats games. Exceptions occur in this matter, and what you are allowed to do with the game outside of the license and fair use liberties vary from country to country. For more on this theme you may check:
- Subject Matter of Copyright (U.S. legal code fragment),
- About Plagiarism (an article regarding board games more generally).
Operating at the intersection of art-forms, there are difficulties of managing vastly different cultures regarding proper "levels of inspiration", work identity, and related expectations. If you're not confident to edit wiki yourself, please contact us in any way, if you feel that something is improper. To borrow an expression from another field, we'd like to be "as open as possible, as closed as necessary", to let every creative person build upon the work collected, and let music games reach their fantastic potential.
