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Comment by raphman | Hacker News Reader

The license is pretty confusing: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The patterns can be used freely in both personal and commercial projects with no attribution required, but always appreciated.

Am I required to adhere to the CC-BY license or does the second part indeed cancel the BY requirement?

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That was my initial thought. I think as the CC-BY states that the attribution must be made in accordance with the wishes of the author then the second part effectively modifies the attribution to make it optional. I'd have thought that could be defended well in a court of law.

In this case, what is the point of the CC-BY license at all? Additionally, artists who submit their textures to the site only license it under CC-BY [1]. This means that the website's operator may not actually waive the Attribution requirement. I have contacted the website operator to clear this up.

[1] actually, the submission form says "You also agree to let me license the pattern as Creative Commons – in other words, give it away to the world for free. " This is quire ambiguous.

It looks to me that the Attribution is only conditionally waived. That is to say, if you're using it you don't have to add the attribution but if you're sharing it or a remix of it the attribution is still required.

If only someone would come up with a collection of standard licenses covering all the reasonable scenarios with both good legal language and an understandable summary.

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