Creative Commons?
BloodSpell is released under a "Creative Commons Attribution, No Commercial Use" License. It means that you probably don't have to worry about what you can do with BloodSpell.
It's what you'd expect by common sense, if fifty years of copyright fights hadn't left everyone paranoid about "piracy", "filesharing", "intellectual property theft", and similar bollocks.
In short:
- You can watch, download, stream, or whatever you want to call it. You don't have to pay.
- If you like it, you can tell your friends about it. You can send them copies. You can remix your favourite bits and put them up as a music video. You can set up a fan site and use images from the film.
- If you want to put it up on your website, you can do that. (We'd really like it if you told us how many downloads you get, too)
- If you'd like to see BloodSpell translated into Ukrainian, and you happen to speak Ukrainian, you can do that, and you can put that up so that everyone can download it. In fact, please do.
- If you want to put it on DVD and sell it for ten bucks, you can't do that without talking to us first.
- If you want to write stories set in the BloodSpell universe, provided they're not for cash, you can do that, but unfortunately we can't, and hence won't, watch them for legal reasons. We're working on that, because it's a major bummer, but right now feel free to write fanfic, but don't ask us to read it!
- If you want to put it up on your website and claim you made it, you can't do that. You need to give us credit.
- If you want to remake it as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and Kiera Knightly, you can't do that without talking to us either. Although we'll probably say yes. Or "gubluyouwantodowhat?"
Basically, don't be evil, and we won't be either.
(If you want a bit more detail than that, the Creative Commons Site has all the legal info you could ever want.)
Why are you doing this?
Hugh sez -
"We make movies. When we've made our movies, we'd kinda like people to see them.
There's no evidence to show that non-commercial "piracy" hurts artists' incomes.
(And don't get me started on the term "piracy". Piracy is finding some innocent family or trawler crew, threatening them with guns, forcibly boarding their boat, terrorising them, stealing their goods, and murdering them. It's not copying a f---ing CD.).
I'm more interested in people being able to watch our movies than in making scads of money off them. But people like my friend Charlie Stross have shown that it's perfectly possible to put work out under Creative Commons and still make - a lot of - money.
I want people to be able to show my movie to their friends. I want them to be able to make music videos from it, or fan-fiction, or whatever. If they're doing that, they're talking about our work, they're getting their friends involved in it, they're spending time in our universe.
I don't know what kind of crack you have to be on to regard that as "abuse" rather than, say, "people liking our stuff", or indeed "free advertising". Whatever it is, they don't sell it round here.
Hence, Creative Commons."
