> Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking

> Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking is a software developer, of course, their first reaction probably isn't going to be quite as "free" as the licenses we're used to around here, but plenty of artists are perfectly willing to grant informal licenses, especially if scoped to some project you have in mind. (This should go without saying, but this is an SV startup-centered community, so maybe it needs to be specified, but you should not abuse the informality of such terms if you want to convince people any further.) Then you probe to license their work to other people who aren't you but might be like you in wanting to prepare derivatives of the work, except that they might not have had the temerity to ask. You should realize that this is a much taller ask, especially outside software circles, because people have intuitions about the integrity of their work that public licenses are expressly designed to waive. At some point in the process you might consider offering to pay for the equivalent of retroactively commissioning the piece to relicense it! This frames what you want as a slightly-twisted variation on a relationship artists in particular are relatively well-equipped to deal with, and usually comes with an understanding of what the buyer can do with the output— "How much would you charge to commission a work to be used for any purpose with unlimited distribution?"