Copyright

[Berg]

I have just placed a map on the forum and I was wondering, being that its my own work could it be awarded a licence automaticaly in some way that when you join the forum you agree to abide by a licence for work you produce.
I don't understand the licencing laws so I would prefer it to be open to modify and use but not for sale.
Its not a very good map but making money from what I give freely would be annoying.

[Zarel]

Most of the world (including the US, the EU, and Australia) operates on automatic copyright. So if you made it, you already have copyright of it. You don't have a "license" to it, since you have copyright on it; therefore you're the one who gives other people licenses.

So yes, you could indeed distribute your maps with a non-commercial license. If you insist on non-commercial, I recommend: CC-BY-NC-3.0.

Alternatively, use: http://creativecommons.org/choose/ which will guide you through the process of choosing a license.

That said, we would prefer if you used a freer license, such as CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Warzone itself is GPL, which means it's possible to sell Warzone. For your map to be used with Warzone in any official capacity, it must not have a non-commercial provision in its license.

[Berg]

So all your's and others work can be sold by a third party? and they make a profit from your hard work.
Not that my map is in any way up to the standard of most of the maps on this forum and in game its just a thought that came to me after I posted said map for dylandog to have a look at.
It seems wrong that it can be sold after all this work and the game is given freely ATM.

[Zarel]

So all your's and others work can be sold by a third party? and they make a profit from your hard work.

Yep. That's the thing about freedom: In order for you to let people do good things to what you make, you also have to let people do bad things to it.

"Freedom" could be described as the first reason. With a non-commercial provision, anyone who wanted to use Warzone for a remotely commercial purpose would have to worry about whether or not they violate the license. What if they link to Warzone from a commercial website? What if they want to play Warzone at their company? What if they want to review Warzone in their commercial magazine? It's easier to say "It's all legal" than to have people worry about whether or not what they're doing is legal.

And there are also legitimate commercial uses of free software. For instance, several distros of Linux are sold. RHEL comes to mind. They wouldn't be able to distribute Warzone with their OS, if Warzone had a non-commercial license.

[cybersphinx]

So all your's and others work can be sold by a third party?

As long as the third party honors the GPL, it's no problem. That means they have to keep the credits, have to provide the source, cannot forbid modification/redistribution. So there is not much of a market for selling single GPL programs, since buyers will soon know that they could have had the program for free. Being able to use GPL apps commercially mainly means inclusion in distributions that are sold on media.

Another case is selling the program with name changed, copyright notices removed etc., that would be a violation of the GPL and is not allowed. Occasionally some people try that anyway, search for "rebranded Blender" for example.