Can work licensed under a Creative Commons license WITHOUT ShareAlike attribute be republished UNADAPTED without the CC license? If I license a work under Creative Commons and do not apply the ShareAlike (SA) attribute, can someone else re-publish the UNADAPTED work without the license or with another license? All I find about the ShareAlike (SA) attribute is about adaptations. But what about re-publishing a work unadapted? For instance if I publish a work on my site (site 'A') under CC BY license -(only 'attribution') - without ShareAlike (SA) attribute, someone who re-publishes the work on a site 'B' should credit me and notify that the original work (on site 'A') is under CC BY license, but he or she need not share it alike. That gives the impression that the re-publisher could apply any license to the copy of the work on site 'B', e.g. open domain, or a copyright under own name. Then, what is the value of the original CC license?
The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (and all versions) is explicitly &quot;non-sublicensable&quot;. If you receive a copy of the work under that license, you cannot place the work under a new license. The license grants you only the rights to A. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and B. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material. When you give copies of someone else's CC-licensed work to downstream recipients, they do not receive a license grant for the original work from you; they receive it from the original author/licensor: Downstream recipients. A. Offer from the Licensor – Licensed Material. Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License. When you include someone else's CC-licensed work in an adaptation, you may license the adaptation under other terms, but the underlying CC-licensed work remains under its CC license. From the CC FAQ: If I derive or adapt material offered under a Creative Commons license, which CC license(s) can I use? If you make adaptations of material under a CC license (i.e. &quot;remix&quot;), the original CC license always applies to the material you are adapting even once adapted. The license you may choose for your own contribution (called your &quot;adapter's license&quot;) depends on which license applies to the original material. Recipients of the adaptation must comply with both the CC license on the original and your adapter’s license. When sharing someone else's work, the original CC-licensed work always remains under its original license. By contrast, the &quot;ShareAlike&quot; condition means that your own work used in an adaptation of a CC-BY-SA work must be placed under CC-BY-SA terms as well. ShakeAlike does not refer to the requirement to preserve the license on existing CC-licensed material (which is always present), but rather it refers to the requirement to include it on new material.
united-states The license won't let you sell the .stl file. Probably you have created a derivative work, which means you can't sell it without a copyright license (and the CC-A-NC won't do). If it were licensed under CC-A you could sell it without problems (you'd have to give attribution, of course). You could also sell it under the CC-A-SA, but once you do you have no control over the result -- anyone you sold it to could give it to someone else under the terms of the license. This could work, though, if it were (say) a commission and you only expected to sell one copy. I don't know what the situation would be with the physical objects printed under any of these licenses.
The Apache 2.0 license purports to be irrevocable, but it also presupposes that the supposed licensor has the right to grant permission to copy. In this case, that is untrue, so there never was a proper license and nothing to revoke (the copyright owner grants permission in the form of "a license" which is a legal abstraction, that normally is specified in the license document). An end-user snared by this illegal license might attempt to sue the author because of the legal screw-up but paragraph 9 says that the supposed licensor cannot be held liable. In this case, though, "licensor" is defined not as the person who hands you the license document, but as the copyright owner. So it's the employer who would be not liable under the terms of the document (but since the employer had nothing to do with the license, it's as though the license never existed). The end-user is a secondary infringer (the employee is the primary infringer, in illegally distributing the material). Under US law, that doesn't matter, the user is still liable. Under UK law, secondary infringement includes the element that you have to have reason to know that the copy is infringing, which in the scenario that you describe is not the case.
I know that some of this may be covered by either the Creative Commons license or the OGL it was published under, but it's not clear to me how far those freedoms extend. It was all published as materials under copyright to the original authors, TSR, WotC, &amp;c. and if things had been left like that hszmv's answer would've been completely correct: stay vague and allow users to enter those names and descriptions, talk to WotC's lawyers and sales department about license fees, or just keep it to yourself and your friends. You're right, though: WotC went whole-hog, dumped their partial OGL idea, and relicensed some things as Creative Commons. There are different Creative Commons licenses, though, some restricting commercial use that would still keep your app to yourself and friends without a specific licensing agreement. Go find out exactly what WotC put under CC. If it's only the Player's Handbook, then you can only use names and descriptions that are from the Player's Handbook and you're still facing a cease-&amp;-desist if you start adding in Monster Manual info.If it's everything, it's everything they have but still won't include any older modules that they don't have the right to change the copyright status of. It'll still be under copyright, usually until 70 years after the death of the original creator. For Gary Gygax, that'll be 2078. Expect that length to extend during your lifetime though. US copyright usually extends every time Mickey &amp; friends come close to entering the public domain. [Edit: The comments below suggest it might only have been the Systems Reference Document (I assume for 5e). It's 403 pages of not nothing but it's not much given the universe we're talking about. The spell and monster lists are generic. Bigby is nowhere to be found and the only mention of a beholder is a reminder not to use the name beholder without their written approval.] Go find out exactly which CC WotC used. The article above says &quot;all use&quot; but you need to find out the exact number of the Creative Commons license for each thing you're using and make sure all of your uses fall within its terms. Some are basically free use but still insist you mention the copyright holder prominently or in every use. Go ahead and do that if you have to. [Edit: The comments below say it is probably CC 4.0. The SRD download page says you can use CC 4.0 or their own OGL. In both cases, yes, you must acknowledge WotC by name in a way prominent enough to satisfy the license you choose.] And of course, Don't trust legal advice from internet randos or ChatGPT. If this is a serious thing you're going to be spending a good chunk of your life working on or expect to make significant money from, go talk to an actual lawyer. Bonus points for one specialized in IP with a knowledge of roleplaying and the way it's been (partially) opening up lately.If you start off just by talking to WotC's lawyers, just do that somewhere where you get their explanations and permissions in writing. Then keep that somewhere safe in electronic and hard copy. Then still take that with you when you go talk to your own lawyer.
If I lock you in a room without access to anything and tell you &quot;Write a novel&quot; and you write a novel with characters, you have copyright in the work. But it's not absolute: If you use your own characters, you own all the copyright in the work, but not in the idea, as ideas are not copyrightable, see Feist v Rural. If you use someone else's characters extensively (as in more than a short hommage/cameo), you very likely make a derivate. You own a copyright in your part, as in the expression of the story or pictures you created, but you do not gain property interest in the existing characters' expression. Since the copyright to the characters lies with the owner of their IP, you need their OK to release (and also to even make) your work - as with the owner of a copyright is the sole right to decide on distribution and creation of derivates under 17 USC § 106 (2). Also remember that making an unlicensed derivate work risks having nothing you can sue for in case the original copyright owner lifts your ideas and scenes-a-faire parts and adapts them for their own derivate, see Anderson v Stallone The strange case of fanfiction chains... Now, there is a strange situation when a work is based on a work which is based on a work... Then, publishers and editors start with red ink and the result is, that what people know as Twilight now has nothing to do with the fanfiction it started as (It wasn't Vampires in the original draft), and 50 Shades of Grey ended up striking any and all supernatural from it, despite it having been a Twilight fanfiction originally. By making own characters and own expression of the world, there could be no copyright infringement. US law vs Egypt law? Both Egypt and the US have signed the Berne convention, meaning that copyright is very very similar in the broad strokes that the right to allow or disallow derivates is with the copyright holder. Also, since Ben10's copyright owners are to the best of my knowledge in the US (Cartoon Network Studios &amp; Men of Action Studios), they will sue in a US federal court.
By the terms of the CC license, you cannot &quot;cancel&quot; or &quot;revoke&quot; it. But as the copyright owner, you may separately release under a different license: a less restrictive CC license, or a completely different license such as the GPL or the MIT license. You could even release under a more restrictive CC license, going say from a CC-BY to a CC-BY-ND or a CC-BY-SA. You could remove all mention of the earlier license from any website or app you control. Anyone who had obtained (or later obtains) a copy under the earlier release could use it or give it to others under the terms of that license, but anyone who did not so receive it, but instead gets it from you under the different terms it could only use it under the terms of the later release. By the way, although the CC license describe themselves as irrevocable, there is under US law, a five-year period during which any license grant may be canceled, provided the proper procedures are followed. This is under 17 USC 203, and the period starts 35 years after the license was granted, or 35 years after the work was published.
You are not &quot;citing&quot; the image - a citation is a reference to a (scholarly) work from another work, you are attributing a work that you have directly copied. The licence tells you what you must do: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. I highlighted the important point: they tell you what you must do, the how is up to you so long as it is reasonable.
In the US, the original author still owns the copyright, unless the original work was out of copyright (in which case no one owns the copyright): copyright is not granted for just pressing a "scan" button, and mechanical reproductions are not eligible for copyright (copyright protects creativity, and a scan involves zero creativity). To quote 313.4(A) ("Mere Copies") of the Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition: A work that is a mere copy of another work of authorship is not copyrightable. The Office cannot register a work that has been merely copied from another work of authorship without any additional authorship. [...] Examples: [...] Photocopying, scanning, or digitizing a literary work. That doesn't necessarily mean the repository can't put any restriction on your use of the copy; the repository may have a terms of service. Terms of service are rooted in contract law, not copyright; just because the work is in the public domain, doesn't force the repository to show it to anyone who asks, and they can force you to agree to a contract first. The enforceability of that contract is fact-dependent.