Apparently the guy who founded the MUD I code for registered "Legends of the Darkstone" as a trademark… not sure how much it cost or why, but there's that for what it's worth. (And also, apparently, when whoever-it-was came out with the game Darkstone after us, he talked to them about it and came to some sort of agreement. Not sure of the details… I think I might try to find out more at some point.)

No, I am not. For the third time, this is covered by the Copyright Office Basics: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.htm...

"Copyright protects "original works of authorship" that are fixed in a tangible form of expression"

I find it bewildering that someone could continue to misunderstand such basic points of copyright law, even after having those points explained repeatedly - with links provided!



No. Yet again this is covered by links I've provided: "Once a court has sifted out all elements of the allegedly infringed program which are “ideas” or are dictated by efficiency or external factors, or taken from the public domain, there may remain a core of protectable expression. In terms of a work’s copyright value, this is the golden nugget. At this point, the court’s substantial similarity inquiry focuses on whether the defendant copied any aspect of this protected expression, as well as an assessment of the copied portion’s relative importance with respect to the plaintiff’s overall program."



No, it's a legal case based on a test adopted by the second Circuit.



I cited a legal case which backs up my argument. If you don't believe the case is real, read up on it yourself: http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyr...
Or here: http://digital-law-online.info/cases/23P...



The basis of copyright law is protecting the authors rights to original works of authorship. It doesn't "pick and choose" between authors, only between different types of work. And no, I don't find that odd - we have patents and trademarks for protecting other types of intellectual property.



Yet an appropriate response to the absurd claim that "Copyright law and patent/trademark law are identical with respect to derivation".

Mine is an xePeen as its constructed from extended bits.

I didn't say copyrights, patents, and trademarks themselves were the same; nor did I claim anything other than copyright law applied to code. Where are you getting that from?

I find it bewildering that you keep throwing the same quotes at me without understanding the concept of tangibility.



Once you sift out ideas, code dictated by efficiency and external factors, taken from the public domain, blah blah blah… exactly what do you have left that's even possible to infringe upon? That list pretty much touches on every aspect of a program outside of what most code rippers change anyway.



Legal case or not, it's logical speculation. I don't know why you're arguing this so adamantly; legal cases are decided based (at least partially, if not wholly) on logical speculation every day (see: probable cause, motive, intent, et al). This is an indisputable fact.



I've forgotten what this point was about, so I'm going to assume it was the clean room topic. The concept of a truly clean room approach is a fallacy, and you can throw all the URLs at me that you want, but it doesn't change the fact that there will never be a situation that can be fully controlled without possibility of error. In the cases you're pasting me, there's no guarantee that the clean room employees weren't coerced. They would have (quite literally) had to have lived under a rock for the entirety of their lives before that point in time to be truly guaranteed ignorant and that just didn't happen.



You completely missed the point here. I'm talking about discrepancies within the same medium.



Appropriate if you have no idea what you're talking about or completely misunderstand what I'm talking about, perhaps…



Edit: Stop nesting quotes please… it's annoyingly hard to respond to.

I understand it just fine; it's you who doesn't seem to understand that concepts aren't eligible for copyright protection, even after having sections of the Copyright Office FAQ quoted for you.

You seem to disagree with legal articles, with the Copyright Office, and even with cases that have been tested in court. You can lead a horse to water…



For the fifth time? Non-literal elements. That's what the abstraction-filtration-comparison test was adopted for. http://www.ladas.com/Patents/Computer/So...



As I said a couple of pages back, "There's no clear line, so it's something that has to be taken on a case by case basis - and while a clean room implementation is certainly a strong defence, it's only one extreme". There is no "perfect" defence, but clean room procedures have been successfully used and tested in court; the fact that you personally disagree with the courts decisions doesn't make clean room techniques a fallacy.



Quoting is for context. When your reply doesn't contain sufficient information for context, it is considered good netiquette to quote enough that other posters can understand without having to scroll back through previous posts.

You know, I just realized something, For a German, KaVir writes better english then a lot of Americans I know. XD

Actually I'm English :wink:

Hmm. Someone told me you were German. My mistake. :D

I already told you that it depends entirely on two different definitions of "concept". I understand completely that concepts, as defined by copyright law, are not protected. What I originally claimed (and what seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way) is that while code may not fall under what copyright law considers a concept, it is unmistakably intangible, and as such, a concept by traditional definition. Likewise, the fact that the U.S. calls football "soccer" doesn't change the fact that in actuality, it's still football.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem



…and for the fifth time, which non-literal elements of a program are you referring to? Any game that isn't just stock code with credits ripped out has basically replaced all of the game-specific concepts. Every non-game-specific algorithm in any MUD is public domain. Your source defines literal elements as "source code and object code". So exactly what is there left to infringe upon? Please give me an example, and stop saying "non-literal elements", because it's starting to make me think that you're blindly quoting a source that you don't understand.



I don't disagree with the courts' decisions (that would be stupid, since I don't anything about them). The techniques that they use are certainly valid, and it's futile to argue against the fact that it makes it less likely for the project to be contaminated. I was simply pointing out that it's still very open to error, and in certain situations, it can even be useless - hence, a truly (read: perfect) clean room approach is a fallacy, and as such, the approach is never concrete.

From the fact that you keep arguing that concepts are protected by copyright - they are not. Concepts are protected by patent assuming you apply for and are granted one. It's not a simple thing to get, and is quite expensive as a process.

I think you're not quite understanding that once code is written in a file somewhere it becomes "fixed in a tangible form" which is what copyright explicitly protects. A work in a fixed, tangible medium. As I have obtained US copyright registrations on computer code 3 times now, I figure I'm at least qualified to know that much.

It's not possible to copyright your code if it's all still swimming around in your head. It may not even be possible to patent your algorithms and ideas if there's nothing to show the PTO in some kind of meaningful way, which would cause the documenting of the material itself to be copyrightable since that too is fixed in a tangible form once it's on paper.

Nobody ever said IP law was easy :)



I think perhaps you've also botched the definition of public domain as well.

A file is not tangible, any more than a story is. They're both concepts. Now, if you're really trying to get technical, the pages of the book in which the story is written are tangible, in the same way the hard disk/flash drive/whatever that your files are stored on is tangible. However, because it would make no sense to only protect the book and not the concept it represents (OK, so I won't cut/paste the pages, but I'll rewrite it into my own book and claim authorship), copyright law protect the concept of a story. In the same way, it would make no sense to protect the media on which files are written, but it does make sense to protect the concept of that program you just wrote.

Oh, and basically anything not protected by law qualifies as being in the public domain (although, if you want to get technical, this varies from country to country). The algorithms I spoke of fall into that category, so I don't think I botched anything.

That's called plagiarism.

I'm sorry but your well and truly wrong. Copyright law does not protect concepts, it protects the expression of a concept. In our case, the expression of the concept of a mud server, lies in its source code, object code and binary executables. Furthermore, the expression needs to be original in scope. Porting Diku Mud from C to COBOL, would be a re-expression of Diku muds concept as much as taking Tolkin and translating him to Portuguese would be a re-expression of his original concept, neither are original ideas, only a change in the language expressing those ideas. These are the basic principles of copyright in reference to literary and artistic works, which most countries as signatories of the Berne convention have as their own law.

This is a funny one. For starters, everything published is copyrighted automatically even if you don't say so. The problem here is that there is a difference between the concept of an algorithm and the implementation of an algorithm. You can copyright a given implementation of, say, binary search, but what you are really copyrighting is a sequence of characters, not a binary search algorithm. The fact that it happens to be a binary search algorithm is, almost, incidental. That's where things like patents come in.

But unless code is explicitly stated to be in the public domain, it isn't, because by default it is protected by copyright. Again note the importance of differentiating the literal code text and the ideas it is implementing.

(For instance, you have copyright over the text of a game's rulebook but you cannot copyright the gameplay ideas.)


EDITED: to fix bad quote tag.

What you said was "you're wrong about concepts (etc.) not being protected by copyright law". Now you're just backtracking.



Expressions of idea, as opposed to the idea itself. This is all explained in the sites and legal cases I've cited, and the easy-to-understand example I gave earlier in the thread (a translation) is a common type of non-literal copying. The situation is more complicated for software, as I've explained already, which is why the abstraction-filtration-comparison test was introduced.

"The court started its analysis by pointing out that since the statute provided that computer programs are to be protected as literary works then, non-literal structures of computer programs must be covered analogously with the position in other literary works. After noting with approval Judge Learned Hand’s decision in the Nichols case mentioned above, and pointing out that “nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary [between an idea and a expression] and nobody ever can” the court went on to propose a three step analysis which has become to be known as the abstraction-filtration-comparison test. In doing this, the court should first try to determine the level of generality at which it can be said that expression of an idea differs from the idea itself"

Also:

"The court noted that:

At the lowest level of abstraction, a computer program may be thought of in its entirety as a set of individual instructions organized into a hierarchy of modules. As a higher level of abstraction, the instructions in the lowest-level modules may be replaced conceptually by the functions of those modules. At progressively higher levels of abstraction, the functions of higher level modules conceptually replace the implantation of those modules … until finally one is left with nothing but the ultimate function of the program.

The court did not indicate at which of these levels it felt the idea-expression boundary was being crossed. However, from the general tenor of the decision as a whole there is an implication that the highest level at which expression might be found is in the organization and structure of hierarchy of modules"


Samson, Darwin, Tommi and DavidHaley have done a good job of debunking your other claims, and it's becoming more than apparant that you have some huge misconceptions about copyright law. The fact that Samson, Tommi, DavidHaley and I are actually in full agreement on a legal issue speaks volumes.

It is in fact amazing that even just two people agree, let alone even more. :grinning: In honor of this momentous occasion, here's a proposal for a new law describing MUD forum behavior:

As the number of people agreeing on license questions exceeds one, the probability that the universe will implode tends towards one.

Yeah i know, there are a few big egos in that list, that might have nightmares tonight if they actually realized that they were in agreement.

And now im off to bed for a restless nights sleep.

There must have been some kind of cosmic convergence. Oh, and no wonder I had nightmares last night… :)

cast 'sarcasm detection' darwin



Yeah, minus the part where the concept of a literary work (including code) maintains protection beyond the point where the last tangible copy of it is destroyed/lost/etc. The concept is protected, as well as the expression(s) of it.



I made no mention of the implementation of an algorithm being public domain, or any actual code at all, for that matter. I was referring to "non-literal elements" of a program, and quite clearly pointed out to KaVir that his source claimed "literal elements" to be, in fact, the actual code. Sometimes I wonder if you people actually read the posts you reply to, or if it's enough to just conjure up points to argue against out of thin air.



I've said from the beginning that what copyright law considers a concept is not in agreement with the definition of concept. When I claimed that you were wrong about concepts not being protected, I also made it abundantly clear that I was referring to the actual definition, and not "concept as defined by copyright law".



I specifically asked for an example of a "non-literal element" within the context of a MUD program.