Introducing: The Game Jam License

Since their inception at the Indie Game Jam1 in 2002, a significant
part of game jams has been knowledge sharing and showcasing
ideas and work to peers. While various licensing mechanisms have
been used for game jams throughout the years, there has never been
a licence uniquely designed for artifacts created during a game jam.
In this paper, we present to the community the Game Jam License
(GJL) which is designed to facilitate that sharing and knowledge
transfer, while making sure the original creators retain commercial
rights. The Global Game Jam2, since 2009, strives to formalise sharing
in a similar manner, by having jammers upload and license their
creations under Creative Commons3 Non Commercial Share Alike
3.0 free license. However, the CC family of licenses is not well suited
for software. CC is not compatible with most other licenses, and
introduces a legal grey area with the division between commercial
and non-commercial use. Moreover, open source licences like GPL
are well suited for source code, but not for art and design content.
Instead the GJL presented in this paper, aims to uphold the original
ideas of game jams (sharing and knowledge transfer), while still
allowing the original team to hold on to all rights to their creation,
without any of the deficiencies of the CC family of licenses.