Lately, I’ve had a lot of people asking me for permission to use my floursack and blocky guy characters for their demo reels, classwork, practicing, etc. I’ve been reluctant to give them out freely, mostly because I’m concerned about misuse as well as having to field support questions. However, they are usable rigs – the students in my last Character Animation workshop at the University of Oregon used them for their projects – and I made them mainly for my own learning purposes. Why shouldn’t I share them with others who are interested in learning from them?
To help me figure out how to release the files without too much headache, I’ve been digging a little more into the Creative Commons licenses.
Here’s a quick blurb from their site:
“Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright – all rights reserved – and the public domain – no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work – a “some rights reserved” copyright.”
I like the “some rights reserved” part of the spectrum. Releasing the characters under a CC license would allow people to use the characters for non-commercial works (like demo reels, class assignments, personal practice, etc.), and I could still maintain ownership of the work and have final say in how and where the files are used/displayed/distributed. I think I can find a nice balance between keeping control and credit for my work and giving people the freedom to use my stuff in their work.
I’ll need to think through this some more and figure out how I will release the characters. In the meantime, I’ve started using a CC license for this blog. There is a link to the Creative Commons Deed in the sidebar on the left side of this page. It’s a pretty open license, but it does outline what you can and cannot do with the content in this blog. It’s nice not having to write all that stuff on my own.
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