Bad Gods Production Diary: Character Encoding
When I think about releasing my little animations under a Creative Commons license, only one thing troubles me. I'm not bothered by the idea of people redistributing my clips, heavens no. I'm not concerned about losing control of my artwork or my ideas; it seems like one of the lessons of the Internet is that such control is largely illusory.
The one thing that gives me a little twitch, however, is giving up stewardship of my characters. I've finished twelve clips, and now I'm working on one that's almost all hand-drawn. I like this clip enough that I'm putting some work into designing the main character, because I want to reuse him. So I'm drawing this guy, trying to decide on a hairstyle, kind of working out his personality in my mind, and I suddenly realize: anyone will be able to do anything with this character. In other people's hands he could be given a completely different personality and made to do horrible things.
Should I even be worried about this? I mean, it doesn't take much skill with Google Image Search to find cartoon characters doing horrible things that the creators never intended. But those are owned characters. If Calvin and Hobbes was part of the Creative Commons, then there wouldn't be such a thing as bootleg Calvin merchandise. Calvin peeing on a Chevy symbol would be as legitimate as "Revenge of the Baby-Sat."
Or maybe it wouldn't. The open source community recognizes official releases of things like Mozilla and the Linux kernel. It's possible that even if my as-yet unnamed character gets pulled into all sorts of bizarre offshoots, my clips will be considered the canonical incarnation.
At any rate, it's way too early to try and figure where this is headed. Qualms aside, I'm as keen as anyone -- and more than most -- to find out exactly what "Attribution-ShareAlike" means in practical terms. I'd rather throw stuff out there and see what happens to it than try and play some sort of "Well, you can use my characters but my version is real and your version takes place in a different dimension of alternate reality so there" game.
To facilitate this laid-back, loosey-goosey, hippie-dippy attitude, I'm going to withhold my previously-established characters. (All, what, six of them?) So no Lore Brand Lore, or Eisley, or Evil Overmom, or what have you. But hey, this gives me a chance to create some new characters, so that they can one day betray me.