To be clear... the absence of an explicit license technically means that product is copyrighted in the strictest sense possible... meaning even downloading it to your computer from the author's patreon just to play it is a violation of copyright.
No, downloading, then playing, the game is in no case a violation of the author's rights.
In absence of all information regarding a license, you own all rights on any "work of the mind" (poor literal translation) you create. This mean games, but also scribbles on a napkin, and of course also what you wrote on the comment I answer to.
But those rights are updated by the common usage, depending of what you did with the "content" you produced. It's what permit me to quote you, despite not owning the rights over your text. It's the common usage on a forum that whatever is wrote can, and will, be quoted, partly or integrally, by other persons. Therefore in regard of Law, by validating your comment, you implicitly give us the authorization to do so.
The same happen when a game author put a link to download his game. By doing so he give, to anyone that can see the said link (in this case his patrons), the right to download, then play, his game. And, obviously, only those rights ; they still can't modify it, nor distribute it on their own.
Authors who wish to avoid the issue mentioned in the OP should explicitly license their games with an
You must be registered to see the links
. Such licenses make explicit provisions for the alteration and continuation of your work under a different or even the same name by a different author.
Or just say/write it in the game.
Licenses are just standardized way to explain the rights you give to the others, and in what limits those rights apply. It's better to use one, because they are wrote by professional, but legally the words of the author is enough.
At any time an author who can't continue to works on his game can just say on his Patreon page that he gave to anyone the rights to continue it, and it would be enough. He still own all rights over the original content, but also granted others the right to use it, under the conditions that he can possibly have stated.
And, strictly speaking, these licenses make it impossible to pirate your software by making "pirate" a meaningless term... decompiling and modifying any protections added to the code is allowed under these licenses.
Again, no.
You can perfectly put a commercial product under an open source license, if this license permit commercial use. It would grant you the right to distribute an effectively modified version of the product, but distributing an unmodified version would still be an act of piracy.
This is even more true for games since open source licenses are generally, voluntarily or not, worded in a way that technically limit them to the code of the game ; the story and all the arts are still full property of the original author.
The simplest solution is to chose a closed license to start with and then, if you are going to abandon your game, switch it to a permissive license like MIT or BSD first.
Which wouldn't works, especially for the BSD licenses.
Even in its historical version the BSD licenses are worded in a way that limit it to the sole code. It can be argued that the story is part of the code since the dialogs are directly included in it, but the arts fall outside of the license and are to be assumed as full property of the author. The MIT is worded in a less precise way, but it can still be assumed that its scope is limited to the sole wrote part, and so do not include the arts.
If really an author want to change the license at this time, it's a
You must be registered to see the links
that he should use, since they are explicitly worded to include every single part of the "product". Or he can put the code under an open source license and renounce to his rights over the art, as long as they are used as part of the extended game.
