Licensing your characters what you created yourself under a Creative Commons license enable anyone to reuse your characters who were featured in your book. This is useful if you wanted to make your characters open-source, but not proprietary. I’ve been researching for these articles online, but no article has existed. But I had an option to write down my own tutorials to share with you.
Contents
- All You Need Is The Following
- Six Licenses To Choose
- Setting Up
- Preparing Your Character To Be Released For The General Public
- Tips
- Warnings
All you need is the following:
- Your own site what you host yourself, or a free-hosted website. Whenever if it’s a wiki, or something similar.
- A Creative Commons License code
- Your characters what you’re willing to license for anyone to reuse for their works
- A working website
Six Licenses To Choose From
The 6 Creative Commons Licenses enable you to choose if you want your character to be remixed, added to other works, monetized with other content, or restrict these features.
Attribution
This is a flexable license what creators use to enable other creators to reuse your fictional characters by modifying, build upon, and even monetize your fictional character via any content like ebooks.
It enables a remixer to reuse your character and use a different Creative Commons license of any kind. Non-commercial licenses and other licenses are possible.
It can work on ebooks with copyrights that are traditionally reserved altogether by a creator, but a creator must attribute your work via credits what you specify on your website. Most creators who reserve all rights to their work and add Creative Commons licensed content to add into their works. EFF uses this license for their content for anyone to reuse, and they have implemented this license to reduce costs of reusing their work.
Attribution Share-Alike
Like an open license above; it has a same functionality, but a remixer must apply a same license what you’ve specified to your work. This is useful if you wanted to regulate which license what you want your remixers can use. A Share-Alike license that supports commercial use is recommended because, if you allow non-commercial licenses… it will not work properly, and that can cause confusion when remixing your work.
If you license your fictional character with this license; you can be comfortable with other creators reusing him/her with your specified license.
No Dirivitives License
This is useful if you wanted to keep your fictional character as a same form; this is also useful if you don’t want modifications of your fictional character, you should only use this license if the following conditions are met:
- Prevent erotic features from being applied to your fictional characters… even commercially.
- Keep your form factor of your character intact. This is useful to prevent porn industries from commercially modifying your fictional character with dirty features like sexual poses, and other dirty junk.
- Your character is marketed to children via arcade games, or books.
- Keep original
However; people can still remix your character via non-commercial use.
Non-Commercial
This license restricts monetization and other commercial uses. For this instance; you have a fictional characters that are too sensitive to be modified by porn artists, and erotic website owners. However; they can still remix your character and build upon him/her, but monetization is restricted. This license is not recommended for creators because, this license is only intended for people who have commercial rights of their characters. Well, this license is useful for people who prefer to choose donations over relying on ad networks, selling their own products, and selling their own ebooks. Torrent Freek is a known website who use this license to license their content… but that applies to their content on the internet website.
Non-Commercial Share-Alike
This is a same functionality of a license above, but it requires remixed works to have a same license. This is useful for people who prefer to receive donations on their websites, or rely on alternatives to relying on ad networks like publishing ebooks.
People who don’t monetize content likes this license because, they don’t need to make a dime to support their websites. They usually have other contents what they create themselves, and monetize via ebook sales and affiliate links.
Non-Commercial No Dirivitives License
This is the most strict license available for some people who wanted to keep their characters as default, and restrict monetization via any projects. However; this fictional character can be shared like other works.
Useful for creators to restrict modifications of their fictional character, along with restricting commercial uses.
Setting Up
Whenever you’re writing a book, a movie, or any type of content. You can choose which character you want to make him/her available for the general public. For example; I created a fictional character library for my characters. And license them under a Creative Commons license. That means, my characters are open to the general public, the reason why I decided to do it because, it’s saves money, cuts conventional licensing costs, reduce restrictions, and more. Reserving all of my rights of my characters is expensive, and unreliable.!
When reviewing your content what you’ve created from scratch; be sure to be considerate before you license your character under a Creative Commons license. Your content must be relicensed with a Creative Commons License too. If your content is already online; be sure to replace your existing content, and let other viewers know about some changes when updating your project. Be sure to talk to your distributor to remove DRM from your media, or you can remove it yourself. You can notify viewers by posting an update via a website, text on a TV screen, your next movie release, your next book, or any prefered media.
It may take some time,–depending on how many characters what you’ve created yourself. Usually it may take some days to update your work. If you have thousands of fictional characters; be sure to keep track of your characters what you’ve working with. Never rush with your project, start off with your older characters as you launch articles. If you were creating as a group, be sure to tell your members about a change what you’ve implementing with your characters for your next project. Always let them know if you were leading the change. This is useful if your group has a business who is transitioning to Creative Commons over a licensing firm that is expensive to use.
Preparing your character to be open for the general public
If you were going to setup your website to display your fictional characters with Creative Commons licenses assigned to them, you need to rely on a paid hosting platform, this is necessary to reduce risk of having your content being removed by free platforms. You must create an account with a hosting company of choice. If you already use a paid hosting platform, you can just create a dedicated character library for people to reuse your fictional characters. You can create a subdirectory or subdomain to host your character library. To host your character library, follow these steps:
- Create a paid hosting account via any hosting service of choice. Be sure to choose your best hosting plan that fits for your hosting needs. If you were intentionally uploading your own video content to your servers; use a VPS server as an oppose to shared-hosting on your server. If you already have a paid hosting account on any of these hosting companies chosen by you, skip this step.
- Create a subdomain, “characters” for your fictional character library if you were manually creating subdomains via CPanel or for multisite via WordPress, create a subdomain or subdirectory.
- Publish pages like TOS, Privacy Policy, and Disclaimers,–and Disclosures. If you already created these pages via your support subdomain/directory, skip this step.
- Implement a page layout for your fictional characters on your website, this is optional.
- Implement ads to monetize your fictional characters to enable creators to reuse your fictional characters free of charge, or rely on a membership model free of ads.
Publish Your Fictional Character Wiki First
Choose a plugin you wanted to use to generate a Creative Commons License. And set the defaults. You can choose to have a specified license to use for your characters. Be careful NOT to launder licenses.
A wiki for your characters is not enough; you must create a fictional characters library to sort your fictional characters like characters.example.com.
Preparing your character
Create a New post, and title it with your character’s name. It must correspond with your exact name of your character. If you have custom excerpts turned on; be sure to write down the summary of your character. Avoid writing vague summaries. Be sure to post a disambiguation link,–if necessary.
Type up your character’s description, and special powers, or anything what you’ve just setup earlier. You can also include videos. If you have images; include them. If you previously trademarked your characters be sure to talk with your patent and trademark office if you were preparing to opt out of trademarking your characters within your work,–it may take some time for an opt out session to fully take effect. If your trademarks expire, immediately remove all trademarks of your fictional characters as soon as possible! Never renew trademarks of your fictional characters.
Edit, and save your work often. If you were updating your character you’ve currently created for your new content, be sure to let others know; if you were doing this normally; always keep track of your edits, this also applies to updating your older work. Depending on how many characters you have; you might populate your wiki with 100 or more wiki pages.
Be sure to implement a table of contents for your article,–so users can jump to a section of your post. This is useful if you wanted to make extremely long posts to be navigated by anyone.
At the license selector,–after you’ve installed a plugin; Select A creative Commons license you want to use.
Save your post, and publish it. If you have multiple characters repeat the cycle.
Publish Your Fictional Characters To Your Fictional Characters Library On Your Server
A wiki for your fictional characters is NOT enough for anyone to reuse your fictional characters. You need a dedicated characters library for anyone to reuse your fictional characters licensed under a Creative Commons license. Your character needs to reside on each page of your library for your characters. Don’t publish posts, publish pages instead.
Optionally, implement a table of contents for your fictional character, this is useful if you want to add additional reference to your character like diet, likes and dislikes.
Use a plugin to choose a license to apply to your work. If you were just coding from scratch; go to creativecommons.org and choose a license.
Repeat each cycle per each character.
Tips
Keep your licenses intact. Don’t be ripped off by these common licensing brokerage firms who were trying to scam you. These firms are expensive, and unreliable. Some of these greedy firms have bad reputations. For example; they falsely advertised a deal for licensing your work what you’ve created. Avoid these corporate thugs!
Creative Commons licenses are not revocable. That applies to books, TV shows, short films, music, animation, movies, and other physical media. However; these licenses can be updated; or changed.
Don’t let greedy… money-hungry corporations steal your fictional characters, and claim them as their intellectual property; that constitutes copyfraud, and other intellectual property fraud-like issues what we’ve encountered. Someone can fraudulently trademark, copyright, patent, or apply any other fraudulent intellectual rights to your work without warning. Not even 1 corporation has been fined for these illegal schemes, that worths up to billions of dollars a month. If you were afraid of these trolls, and you wanted to implement further protection to keep these trolls out; you can draft and publish a TOS page, or AUP page to govern use of your reusable characters what you’ve created from scratch. Try these steps:
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Draft a readable summary of your terms for your wiki and character library. Start off with these general terms. If you had a support site for your content… you can publish your terms there. It’s necessary to have a support site to enable users to help themselves.
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Setup each TOS page for individuals, corporations, and big companies. If you wish you should only allow reputable individuals, and companies to reuse your work,–such as your fictional characters… you can place multiple paragraphs to strengthen your terms. You have an option to use more than one paragraph.
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Review what you’ve written, and publish your terms, you can be creative to keep trolls out!
Warnings
Never misrepresent any licensing information! Some individuals can launder licenses, causing copyright violations to occur. Always be on the lookout before you ever open your fictional characters to the general public. Be sure to plan as you go. Never rush what you’re doing. If someone has reported a problem with a license information for your character what he/she try to reuse; and it’s laundered, you’ll be liable for scamming the general public.
Be cautious when working together with other creators. You should only work with other creators what you’ve trust. Some people who were shelling in money to rip off court systems, and harm our creative ecosystem.
Always provide documentation for your fictional characters. You can create an ebook as a documentation, or setup a support site. This is helpful for some people who has trouble reusing your work. You can provide online manuals,–so they can get more information. This is useful if you wanted to provide self-help articles for your fans who supported your work.
Posting self-help articles can reduce high email volume. It can take lots of time to update some documents on your support site. You can offer email support, or premium support if you were a skilled writer who publish free content online.
Disclaimer:
This tutorial doesn’t constitute legal advice of licensing your characters for anyone to reuse them. This article is designed for informational/educational purposes only.
