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I am have some images which has following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Using these images I am going to make an Android app and sell it via Google play store.

Given the license terms, can i do it? I did go through the CC SA etc licenses, but they confused me a lot. Please help!

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    Can you give us some more information on what kind of app you are writing and how the images will feature in it?
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 12:27
  • Its a wallpaper app, i cropped these images for the same purpose and i am gonna display these imaged to user phone wallpaper periodically
    – Savaratkar
    Commented Nov 9, 2019 at 3:57

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Unless you go out of your way and convert the images to an array of numbers and include them in that way in your source code so that they become part of the built binary, your app is not a derived work of the images it shows. This means that the images and the app itself can be licensed independently.

As the original images are under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license, the cropped versions you created need to be under the same license.

The app itself can be under a completely different license, including a closed-source one.

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  • I agree with my colleague. We have more details about why the inclusion of CC BY-SA images is unlikely to make your work a derivative, and thus subject to BY-SA terms, here.
    – MadHatter ♦
    Commented Nov 9, 2019 at 8:00
  • Yes, I included those images in my source code and I will showing them on user's phone one by one.
    – Savaratkar
    Commented Nov 9, 2019 at 15:25
  • @Savaratkar, it is best if you arrange stuff such that your app reads the images from the phone's filesystem at runtime. You can still distribute the images along with the app in the same package.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Nov 9, 2019 at 18:19
  • @Bart van Ingen Schenau , yes yes those images will be part of phone file system. And at runtime app will read those images.
    – Savaratkar
    Commented Nov 10, 2019 at 5:54
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    It's also worth noting that CC BY-SA does NOT prohibit the selling of the work they cover. HOWEVER, if it was one of the non-commercial (NC) variants of the license, the app would likely be in violation, as it could be argued it's being used for a commercial purpose.
    – Tin Man
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 12:39

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