licensing patents creative-commons
CC Non commercial software licensing and selling exceptions
<p>(Originally posted to Open Source. I am  programmer, not very good with legal stuff)</p>
<p>I have created an app that I feel has potential and want to license it appropriately. It produces visual output that could cause epilepsy, so I want to explicitly make myself not liable for that as well as refusing liability in general. I have chosen to distribute it and its source code together as a single unit under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CC BY-NC-SA</a> license as I want users to be able to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Share</li>
<li>Use</li>
<li>Modify</li>
</ul>
<p>But only if they:</p>
<ul>
<li>Attribute</li>
<li>Don't use commercially, such as in a club/festival, either to sell the app/source code, the output, or show the output in a way that makes them money</li>
<li>Share-alike</li>
<li>Distribute the source with the app</li>
</ul>
<p>I also want to retain all patent rights, and to be able to sell exceptions for commercial use, which I expect companies will want. I have done a lot of research on how to accomplish this, and from what I could find, GPL doesn't fit as it allows commercial use, and CC BY-NC-SA is not designed for software. I am not a lawyer, and don't know anything about software licensing so I thought I would check if what I want to do is feasible legally. I would like to have a license somewhat along the lines of as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This software is provided without any warranties or liability, as detailed below. The author shall not be liable for any damages in general, especially as a result of epilepsy or other forms of photosensitivity.</p>
<p>The source code and binary are licensed as a single unit, to be distributed together, under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The binary shall not be distributed without the source code and vice versa.</p>
<p>The output of this app shall also be [distributed under/subject to] the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, unless an exception is purchased.</p>
<p>The author reserves all patent rights.</p>
<p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode" rel="nofollow noreferrer">[CC BY-NC-SA license follows]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I appreciate that I am effectively kludging together a license here, but what I want to know is whether I can actually do this, add terms to the top of an existing license as shown above, and if that means the software isn't licensed under CC BY-NC-SA anymore.</p>

<p>You may surely create your own license if you please, and use ideas from the Creative Commons license if you wish, but it would not then be a CC license, and you may not use the trademarked &quot;Creative Commons&quot; name for the license.</p>
<p>Also the actual license text is protected by copyright.</p>
<p>If you license the work under the CC &quot;-SA&quot; provision, or anything like it, you are permitting anyone to create a derivative work based on your work, which could include leaving out the source code. If you want to mandate that all redistributors include both source and object code, you would have to use the &quot;-ND&quot; element prohibiting modified works at all, or a very different license, one bearing little relationship to any CC license.</p>
<p>Disclaimers of liability are not always legally effective, depending on the jurisdiction. The law may impose liability no matter what disclaimer you include. If the harm is reasonably foreseeable, and the developer has not taken all reasonable and prudent steps to guard against it and warn of it, liability is likely, but this will depend greatly of the exact law of the place where a suit might be filed. In the US, this varies from state to state.</p>
