Vehicle Mod Licenses
Creating a Vehicle Mod is often done by incorporating a 3D model from an external source, created by someone else. That means you have to deal with copyright licenses, because whenever you or someone creates anything, you automatically have a copyright applied to it. The author automatically becomes the owner of that work, but can define what other people are allowed to do with that work. That's where a copyright license comes into play.
Unless you create everything yourself, you must be aware that you need to have permission to use someone else's work in your Vehicle Mod.
Additionally, when you have created a Vehicle Mod you should consider whether other people are allowed to use your work to make a new model of their own, be it for use in LFS or another program. When you submit your LFS Vehicle Mod you will be asked this question and can in many cases select your own copyright license to inform others about your choice. If you grant others permission to use your model for their own purpose, they will also be able to download your original LFS Vehicle Mod archive with all original contents, including the raw PNG files which are not available in the mods downloaded by LFS itself.
License for usage of someone else's model
When using a car or object model obtained from an external source, the author must always provide a license granting you and others permission to use that model for your own purposes. If the original author did not provide a license, its usage permissions default to "no permission" and the model cannot be used. In this case you could ask the original author for permission, or to provide a license, but this may not always be granted.
You cannot use a model obtained from the web or elsewhere if it contains no license granting you the rights to use that model!
License to grant permission for others to use your model
Whenever you create an LFS Vehicle Mod you must always select a license to indicate whether other people are allowed to make a new model based on your Vehicle Mod.
In certain cases the type of grant license is automatically set and you have no choice. This depends on the type of usage license the original author has provided. For example, the "CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA)" license states anyone using your work must apply the same license to their derived work.
It is possible to provide no grant license, in which case you do not grant permission to anyone to use your Vehicle Mod contents for their own purposes.
Original work
If you have created the contents of a Vehicle mod all by yourself from scratch, you do not have to provide a usage license, of course. You are the owner of your own creation. In this case you only need to provide a grant license type to let other people know if they are allowed to use your work. It is possible to provide no grant license at all, in which case the permission defaults to "no permission" and no one else is allowed to use your mod.
License wizard
On our Vehicle Mod submission page we have provided a License Wizard to make selection of the appropriate license(s) and additional options for your Vehicle mod a bit easier.
License types
We have collected a number of popular licenses and incorporated them into our License Wizard. These different licenses may look alike, but are not all the same as they have slightly different purposes. Below we have listed these licenses and added a short description to them to help you learn the difference.
But be aware that our descriptions are not the official ones! We have included links to the full and official license contents for each license type. If you want to learn all about them, you must follow these links for all the details.
This page is in no way an official representation of all the licenses and is only created for your convenience, and to have them all in one page for a quick overview!
LFS Vehicle License
You may select this license for original work. It allows your mod to be used in Live for Speed, but not in other software. You are free to select whether other people are allowed to create their own mod based on your mod. If in the future you wish to allow your model to be used outside of LFS, you are free to change your chosen license.
You must use this license for:
- any Vehicle Mod based on an official LFS car.
- any Vehicle Mod based on another Vehicle Mod that is based on an official LFS car.
We try to keep things simple. The description of our LFS Vehicle License is the following:
The LFS Vehicle License allows a Vehicle Mod to be used within Live for Speed only. The creator is free to choose whether other people are permitted to make their own Vehicle Mods based on the original work. The creator of any derivative work must credit the original author and must also apply the LFS Vehicle License to their work.
CreativeCommons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
CreativeCommons Attribution (BY)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
CreativeCommons Attribution-NoDerivs (BY-ND)
This license does not allow models to be modified or adapted, therefore models with this license cannot be used in LFS.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND)
This license does not allow models to be modified or adapted, therefore models with this license cannot be used in LFS.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
3DLancer Royalty Free License (models from 3dlancer.net)
https://3dlancer.net/en/help/standard-royalty-free-license
CGTrader Royalty Free License (models from www.cgtrader.com)
https://www.cgtrader.com/pages/terms-and-conditions#general-terms-of-licensing
Free3D Royalty Free License (models from free3d.com)
https://free3d.com/royalty-free-license
3D CAD Browser License (models from www.3dcadbrowser.com)
https://www.3dcadbrowser.com/Terms-of-Use
GPLv3
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
MIT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
Other licenses
It is possible that you find a 3D model that has a copyright license applied which is not listed on this page, or available in the Vehicle Mod submission form. In this case, please contact the LFS developers so we can inspect the license and if applicable add it to our list of known licenses after which you can select it on the Vehicle Mod submission page.
