Permissions and clearances for games and apps
We will list every part of your product that came from outside the studio, put a document against each one, and prepare the releases and the notice file that close the gaps.
Redistribution
Условий на раздачу
four conditions
четыре
Notice must travel
Уведомление едет
with every copy
с каждой копией
When you need permissions and clearances
A publisher asks for the clearances
The deal is close and someone wants the list: every asset, where it came from and on what document. Assembling it under a deadline is where deals slip.
Nobody can list what came from outside
Art, audio, fonts, models, plugins and code arrived over three years from people who have since left. The parts nobody wrote down are the parts you cannot defend.
A contractor was never signed up
The work was paid for by transfer and delivered by message. Payment on its own does not always move the rights, and the answer sits in a document that was never written.
A real person is in the game
A voice, a face, a motion capture session or a streamer’s likeness. Each of them needs a signed release that says where it may appear and for how long.
Open code shipped without notices
Libraries went into the build because they worked. Several of the licences behind them attach conditions to shipping, and the conditions are about text you have to carry.
A brand appears in a screenshot
A logo on a can, a car, a building, a shirt. Whether it can stay is a question you want answered before the trailer, and not after.
What you get
- A list of everything cleared
- Signed releases from people
- Licence records with dates
- A notice file for the build
What is required for clearances
Clearance work is an inventory before it is anything legal. A product is made of parts, most of them arrived from somewhere, and each part is either covered by a document or it is not. The job is to make that list exist, and then to close the lines that have nothing against them.
What a clearance list holds
- The part itself: the file, the library, the track, the typeface, the session.
- Where it came from, and who the person or company behind it is.
- The document that covers it, with its date and what it actually allows.
- What the document does not allow — the uses you have to ask for separately.
- Who on your side can find it again in a year.
Where permissions go missing
- A contractor paid without a signed assignment, so the work is delivered and the rights are not.
- An asset bought through a personal account that no longer belongs to anyone at the studio.
- A typeface licensed for documents and then used in the logo and inside the build.
- A library added during a game jam, under a licence nobody opened.
- A voice recorded on a friendly basis, with nothing signed, before the product had a publisher.
People need a signed release
A release is short and it has to answer five things: what was recorded, where it may appear, for how long, whether it may be edited, and what happens should the person change their mind. A message saying yes is evidence of a conversation; a release is evidence of permission.
Code that came with conditions
Permissive licences are not the absence of terms. One widely used licence requires that its copyright notice and permission notice be included in all copies or substantial portions of the software — the notice travels with every copy you ship.
Another attaches four conditions to redistribution: hand over the licence text, flag every file you altered, preserve the notices that arrived with the source, and forward the attributions from a notice file where the work has one. Where the code itself is the question — dependency trees, which conditions a licence triggers — that is an open source audit; here the deliverable is a notice file, generated from what the build contains.
What we hand over
- The clearance list, with a document or a gap against every line.
- The releases, signed, with the uses you asked for named in them.
- The notice file, matching the libraries in the shipped build.
- The gaps you chose not to close, written down as a decision.
Bargaining the terms with an outside owner is rights holder negotiations; the deal that hands the game to a publisher is a publishing agreement.
Sources: the MIT licence requires the copyright and permission notice in all copies or substantial portions of the software; section 4 of the Apache licence, version 2.0 sets four conditions on redistribution, including passing on the attributions of a notice file.
Stages of work
Taking the inventory — 3–5 working days.
The project becomes a list of parts, and every part that arrived from elsewhere gets marked. The build and the asset folders answer this better than anyone’s memory.
Matching documents to parts.
Each outside part gets the document that covers it, or a note that none exists. A licence written for a different use counts as a gap.
Closing the contractor lines.
Where work was paid for without a signed assignment, we will prepare the document that moves the rights and go after the signature while the person is still reachable.
Releases from people.
Voices, faces, motion capture and recognisable likenesses each get a release naming the uses you need, including the trailer and the store page.
The notice file for the code.
We will read the licences of what ships and produce the notice file the conditions ask for, built from the libraries that ship and not from those in the repository.
The list you keep.
You get the clearance list as a living document: one line per part, the document against it, and the gaps you decided to leave open.
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