  Since their inception at the Indie Game Jam in 2002, a significant part of
game jams has been knowledge sharing and showcasing ideas and work to peers.
While various licensing mechanisms have been used for game jams throughout the
years, there has never been a licence uniquely designed for artifacts created
during a game jam. In this paper, we present to the community the Game Jam
License (GJL) which is designed to facilitate that sharing and knowledge
transfer, while making sure the original creators retain commercial rights. The
Global Game Jam, since 2009, strives to formalise sharing in a similar manner,
by having jammers upload and license their creations under Creative Commons Non
Commercial Share Alike 3.0 free license. However, the CC family of licenses is
not well suited for software. CC is not compatible with most other licenses,
and introduces a legal grey area with the division between commercial and
non-commercial use. Moreover, open source licences like GPL are well suited for
source code, but not for art and design content. Instead the GJL presented in
this paper, aims to uphold the original ideas of game jams (sharing and
knowledge transfer), while still allowing the original team to hold on to all
rights to their creation, without any of the deficiencies of the CC family of
licenses.
