Hi Virginia,
Thanks for your interest--your visual novel sounds very interesting!
I should start by saying that I'm not a lawyer and can't offer legal
advice. You may want to consult a lawyer for your own peace of mind.
Secondly, having written this email, it's turned out to be a bit lengthy,
so permit me to sum up here:
1. The Project Aon License is probably not suitable for your work.
2. Existing "play aid" projects generally load in the book data as an
external resource. This may not work for your visual novel, though.
3. You may want to go "over our heads" and seek permission from the
copyright holders yourself.
4. It might be okay as a private project, but that's a question of
copyright law, completely separate from the Project Aon License.
In more detail...
The Project Aon License is probably not suitable for your work for two
reasons. Firstly, it's not a general-purpose licence: it applies only to
"Internet Editions" of specific works (section 1.4). Secondly, it only
allows these to be distributed by the Project Aon website (section 2.1),
and does not allow redistribution (section 2.2). It's not comparable to,
say, the GNU GPL, or Creative Commons Share-Alike licences.
However, this does not mean that your work cannot go ahead in any form. For
example, play aids made by various people working with Project Aon have
managed to operate within the constraints of the Project Aon License.
Generally this is achieved by:
- Separating book data from code. Code is written in as generic a manner
as possible so as to avoid being a derivative work of the books. The
program then loads in the book data as an external resource.
- Only distributing book data via Project Aon. This can mean that the
program loads in (say) the HTML files that we already distribute, or it can
mean putting the book data into another format that suits your needs, but
which is again only available from Project Aon.
(For Project Aon to host files related to your work, we would ask that the
code be licensed under a free/open source licence, but as you're already
hosting it in a Github repository and asking us about licensing, I would
guess that this isn't an issue?)
I recognise that a visual novel would make this kind of separation
difficult to achieve--for instance, I'd guess you would be introducing some
entirely new graphics that are nonetheless derived from the books, unless
you used (or created) generic assets that happened to fit the scenes and
characters "close enough".
Would it be possible for your visual novel to be treated as another
"Internet Edition"? I don't know, but I would guess no. Frankly, the bounds
of what we (Project Aon) can do in terms of "Internet Editions" have never
been clearly tested. The License spells it out as "electronic transcription
of certain text and illustrations" (section 1.4). As part of this, we have
corrected textual errors, made editorial changes in more difficult cases,
added footnotes, retouched images, and even supplied the occasional piece
of new work--as a substitute for unavailable illustrations, say, or as a
necessary element of the online layout.
However, a visual novel would, I think, be hard to consider a
"transcription". The best thing would then be to contact the copyright
holders yourself and ask whether they're okay with it. And if you have
their permission, then you may not even need us at Project Aon at all!
A final note: You mentioned the possibility of making the repo private. Do
be careful with this, and be sure you know your copyright law! Our License
doesn't take away your ability to deal with the books in ways that
copyright law allows ("fair use", "fair dealing", those sorts of things).
It may be that something private that you never distribute is not a
copyright violation. However, I would guess that a Github private
repository *would* count as distributing it, because you sent it to Github
to put on their servers.
I honestly do hope that there's a way to work out these matters and go
ahead with your visual novel, because as I said at the start of this
overly-long reply, it sounds very interesting.
All the best,
--
Tim Pederick
On behalf of Project Aon
On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 02:24, <pamail.cgi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The following was sent from the Project Aon contact form
From: Virginia Willett wolvie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 18:24:35 on Monday, January 28, 2019
Subject: Lone Wolf Visual Novel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Good morning,
I'm working on a visual novel interpretation of Lone Wolf: Flight from the
Dark, which is a personal project of mine to learn Python and Ren'Py. I
grew up with the books, and I cherish having them available for others to
enjoy.
I'm curious as to what the LICENSE should be for the work; do I use the
Project Aon license, or is there a derivative that I should use for this
work? I didn't want to get too far down development if there's a licensing
issue. If there's no license that fits this work, I can either pull the
repo or make it private.
The project is currently a work-in-progress, and the current code is here:
https://github.com/wolvzor/Flight-From-The-Dark
Thanks,
Virginia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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