26 Feb, 2007, Omega wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
Please, won't someone think of the children!

I'm starting to get tired of this debate.

if its loaded into a diku-derived muds, it falls under the licence. there, i said it, you happy?

with that said, i'm sure i can find a way to nullify this statement completely, give me 10 lawyers
some scotch, and some money, and i'll figure this out.

Their wording is interesting in the license, which keeps making this issue pop up, and because
of their wording (and lack of wording) in some cases, ultimatly gives someone the power to
interpret parts of the licence the way they see fit, nomatter its intent, its all up to interpretation,
even if hans says, this is how it goes, it wouldn't matter.

Get a lawyer to look at that licence, and then ask these same questions to them, and see what
conclusions they draw up from it from it, and from the questions you ask them.

I'll bet that they give you answers you didn't expect.

I recommend everyone go visit your family lawyer, renew your will, and ask some carefuly placed
questions about copyright laws and interpretation of the diku licence.

until then, we ultimatly have to just use our best judgement on how it all works, and hope for the best.
26 Feb, 2007, Guest wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Darien, I'd pay a lawyer for a proper analysis but the second I post the results, 10 people will claim I'm arguing from authority and say I made the whole thing up. I don't necessarily agree with Matt's line blurring or word chopping or whatever it was, and I have no interest myself in commercializing my mud or selling virtual property, but honestly, it does get tiring to see the effort go to waste. No matter how much the man has offered in rebuttal, people keep raising the standard.

Even if I could find some way to generate an income from a mud, the chances of me having the next WoW or UO or EQ or even an IRE game are about 0 to -infinity. Barring that it wouldn't produce enough income to live on. So it's ultimately not worth the bother. Paying for all the ads, promotions, etc would make any potential profit margin pretty small.

I think Tyche has a valid point in that loading my area into the mud is an issue of performance vs derivity. The copyright on it never falls back to the Diku people. It *IS* a legitimate issue to raise and doesn't make you an abuser just because you mention it.
26 Feb, 2007, Omega wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
Samson, All i'm saying is that we've pretty much beaten this topic to death in the last i dunno, 10 years atleast.

The only way we are ever going to get past this is if one of 2 things happen, 1, we get lawyers to read it, and state what it is in a formal, written, document, attached with a nice phone number so that anyone can call if they think that its just mr.samson being mean again.

Or solution number 2, get diku to get lawyers to interpret it, and have them post on diku's official website their answers to our questions.

If neither of those should happen, this debate will constantly be discussed, and I for one, am tired of it.

I don't plan on commercializing my mud, and i know your not going to either, your the last person i'd ever expect todo that, however, i'm saying, this discussion needs to be validated at some point in time, by a level of authority that truly can state on the matters of the content of the diku licence.

now once that happens, i'm sure people will open fire on the lawyers whom happen to interpret it and answer the questions, but that'll be another bridge to cross when we come to it.

Honestly, mudbytes, mudconnect, tms mudmagic, every mudsite has this exact same question, some sites that go back further have them aswell. So the question is, do we continue to ask these questions, or do we act with what we currently interpret the license to mean, with all intent to follow the licence to our best.

Or do we keep asking the same questions phrased differently till we are blue in the face?

I dunno, we've all discussed this before, what seems like thousands of times, so now we need clarification, i for one, am not going to sit back and debate the meaning anymore, i'm going to interpret as i read it to mean, and if i'm wrong, correct me, i haven't broken the license yet, don't intend to, and i've followed it as i read it, which was completely based on my interpretation of what it meant.

So unless lawyers come along, and tell me what they mean, there is no point in debating the semantics of it, because 6 months later, someone will come around with another point of view on it, which will make equal sense to the one that we all agreed to was correct, and then we are back at ground 0 again.

Sorry that i sound bitter here, but its been discussed to death. Especialy when its always the same people discussing it.

I haven't come across a licence debate without kavir, and most recently without you or tyche.

and if you pay for the lawyer, scan his results (get him to write them out) and i'll post the results, i'll take the heat.

I don't mind that. But it has to be done, sooner or later someone will do it, because we keep going back over the same bases, much like my comments in this post.

Anyways.

Thats just my belief.
27 Feb, 2007, Cratylus wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I haven't come across a licence debate without kavir, and most recently without you or tyche.


Hay! Me too!

I respect licenses, as is my duty, and I respect people who feel it's more
than just a legal obligation, but also a moral one. Bully for them.

But in the mud world, it seems like just a tiresome waste of time to get
all fascist about them…

mark this next phrase well…

if you lack standing.

Imo it's time to lay off license violators if the license holders have failed to
make efforts to either to clarify their license or enforce it. And I think the
Evil M mud is a perfect example. AFAIK, the Diku team has failed to seek legal recourse.

They don't care.

If they did, they'd do something. Even if just to rephrase the license.

They haven't.

This, IMO, is in itself manifest evidence of their opinion of the matter.
Whether Joe Diku once said that M is the reason he doesn't contribute, blah
blah, is of little consequence. If he didn't do anything about it that involved
enforcing his license, why on earth should anyone else care more than him?

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not endorsing M. All I know of them is that they're
fairly obnoxious, when they do bother to discuss the issue.

But think about this. M is the most blatant, obvious, egregious case of not
only the Diku license being violated, but people making enough money off
it to pay bills.

And yet…aside from ex parte comments on how disappointing it is, there's no
actual enforcement action from the Diku people. AFAIK.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. But AFAIK, if the diku people actually cared…even
just one of them, it would take token effort on their part to get M shut down or
at the very least, substantially inconvenienced.

If it hasn't happened, then maybe it just isn't our business?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
27 Feb, 2007, Guest wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus,

I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment. All this time gone by and the Diku team has done little more than bitch about Vryce a couple of times here and there. No effort made to sue. No effort to pursue DMCA action that we know of. We don't even know if they ever sent a cease and desist order. Does that make it right to strip the credits out and deny you were ever a Diku? Not at all. But it surely demonstrates the people who need to care simply don't.

I've sent DMCA notices for violators of my own code. Doesn't happen much but the service providers are more than willing to avoid the risk of a lawsuit, even over something trivial like a MUD codebase.

The issue of virtual property will require court action to settle though. I don't expect this to ever happen.
27 Feb, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
Please correct me if I'm wrong. But AFAIK, if the diku people actually cared…even
just one of them, it would take token effort on their part to get M shut down or
at the very least, substantially inconvenienced.


No, Mercthievia would not in the slightest bit be at all inconvenienced by a DMCA request.
27 Feb, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
I don't believe in the "all or nothing" approach - I don't feel that, just because one mud has avoided legal action despite violating the licence, all mud licence violations should be ignored.

If you don't care about it then feel free to ignore the issue. But I do care about it, because it affects me both directly (people using M as an example of why they shouldn't have to follow my licences) and indirectly (people citing M as a example of why they refuse to release their code into the community).

It affects me, therefore it is my business, and I'm entitled to make my views on the matter known. And while I can't take legal action on the Diku team's behalf, I can certainly ensure that people know the truth about M, which in turn helps discourage others from violating my licences (they realise that such actions won't just be ignored).

I respect your right to not care; please respect my right to defend my views and my work.
27 Feb, 2007, Guest wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir,

I think it's pretty fair to say we're all on the same page more or less here. Clear cut violations like M disgust us all. They are in fact a detriment to the entire community because people use them as an example of how to get away with whatever they want. I wouldn't have a mirror page of their misdeeds up if I didn't feel that was the case. I've taken plenty of behind the scenes heat on that that I don't talk about. It would be easy to just give in and drop the whole thing.

However, I also think it's healthy to explore areas of the terms which are not clear cut examples of good vs evil. Sure, it's been done to death. Some people are sick to death of hearing about it. Others might be reading about these things for the first time. I have no interest in selling virtual swords, houses, castles, kingdoms or whatever. I don't even have any interest in selling shirts with our game log on them. That's not where my motivations lie. Frankly if commercial interests were what I was after I wouldn't be bothering at all since there's not enough real money to be made at it.

As far as I can tell, nobody here is disrespecting your view or your work by having this debate. It may come across that way but I think that's mainly because text can't relay the fact that we're not yelling our heads off at you for sticking to your guns :)
27 Feb, 2007, Cratylus wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I respect your right to not care; please respect my right to defend my views and my work.


KaVir,

I hope I've been civil and respectful of your opinion. It's been my intent to
respond with courtesy to courteous debate, and if I've failed, please
accept my apology.

One unfortunate side effect of your position is that you seem in the same
trench as someone who sometimes debates with a decided lack of courtesy.
If you get singed on occasion, it may be splash damage.

Course, on occasion I *have* direct-targetted you, but I like to think
I was pursuing a frank exchange of views in good faith, rather than
ad hominery.

I get the drift here that we all support fairness and author's rights, etc. Hooray
for us! Where I feel uncomfortable is the arbitrariness of the application of
mob justice I see.

For example, take this:

http://www.mudconnect.com/discuss/discus...

*I* wanted to do that. I'd already gone in the wayback machine and salvaged
the articles, and wanted to feature them on my site. But I reasoned that, as with
other things I make available for download, it's best to check first, and I just
don't have time to check with dozens of potentially vanished authors.

I didn't necessarily fear getting jumped, but I did feel the need to stay squeaky-clean,
given that I maintain a distribution myself. So instead, I provided links to the
wayback archive. The folks in that thread decided "never mind copyright, we know
we're in violation, but it's in the public good."

Nobody has said word one against them, that I know of.

Why?

This bothers me. Not that they're getting away with anything, but that as a community
we seem to be saying we have a zero tolerance policy on copyright infringement…
unless it's done by *nice* people. Or unless it's *convenient* to us.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not militating against Tharsis. But it seems we're more interested
in hassling jerks than protecting copyright. It seems like licensing thing is a bludgeon
of amusement, in general.

Here's my proposal. I'd do it myself, but I'm not subject matter expert. I make
here a call to action:

Someone with deep knowledge please…PLEASE, I implore you, make a standard FAQ.
The FAQ will explain the basics of IP (see my DS IP page http://dead-souls.net/articles/copyright... ).
It will go on to explain how this affects Dikus and derivatives, perhaps
with specific examples of do's and don'ts.

Why should this be necessary? After all, it's not your job to educate the clueless.

I think it's the right thing to do, given my experience. My introduction to licensing
compliance came from shrieking flamery. If someone had simply explained things
to me in a non-confrontational way, my compliance would have been arrived
at much much sooner. Instead, I spent a long time assuming I was being
hassled out of bad faith.

Rather than jump all over people's heads going cock-a-doodle-doo, why not have
a nice, neutral approach that lets people feel like partners in license compliance?
If prompt compliance is the goal, it just makes sense not to be dicks about it. Assuming
we care at all about a positive, collegial atmosphere.

Why hasn't it been done? I fear it's because license gotchery is at least as
much about making sport of the clueless as it is about supporting one's genuine
belief. Maybe this is not the case for you, KaVir. I'm not trying to tar you with
the brush of malice. But the trend I see from the usual suspects in the denouncement
camp is one that makes me think the conflict and flames are a *welcome*
diversion from the humdrum.

If so, well, so be it I guess. But how tiresome, and how sad there's nothing
more interesting to debate.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
27 Feb, 2007, Guest wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Someone with deep knowledge please…PLEASE, I implore you, make a standard FAQ.
The FAQ will explain the basics of IP (see my DS IP page http://dead-souls.net/articles/copyright... ).
It will go on to explain how this affects Dikus and derivatives, perhaps
with specific examples of do's and don'ts.


Off on a tangent here, but, this sort of thing is exactly what the articles section of the site is for. We would have no problem with someone starting such a document, even if they don't consider themselves an expert on the issue. Others can add to the information. Clarify it. Correct it. Whichever.
27 Feb, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Don't get me wrong. I'm not militating against Tharsis. But it seems we're more interested in hassling jerks than protecting copyright.


I think it has much more to do with the attitude of the people in question. If someone makes an honest mistake regarding licensing, its rare for them to be attacked outright - it's usually only when they try to argue the case, or refuse to correct the issue, that people start getting nasty.

The Imaginary Realities situation is really a different scenario altogether. There is no licence that Tharsis can follow, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that if someone went to the effort of writing an article, they would probably rather it was posted elsewhere than for it to vanish entirely from the internet. Tharsis are not going against any known wishes of the authors (in fact they've specifically asked the authors to contact them), they're just trying to salvage those authors works and continue presenting them in the way they were originally intended.

My stance has always been to defend the known wishes of the author, but never to try and guess what those wishes might be. This is the same reason why I don't criticise people who base their muds on novels unless the author of the novel has made their wishes clear. I know I've had run-ins with Samson in the past where I've defended the intent and he's defended the wording (the MWI licence for example).

One of my articles from Imaginary Realities is also listed on the Tharsis site, and I already emailed them saying that they're welcome to use it (for what it's worth - it's not much of an article). The Imaginary Realities site was a fantastic resource, and I was sad to see those 233 articles vanish from the internet. While I wouldn't have reposted the articles myself, I'm not going to criticise someone else for doing so, unless they refuse to remove an article when requested to do so.
05 Mar, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
A bit late, I know but here's how I see it. Selling Kavir's Sword of Doom is definitely illegal, for the following reasons.

Quote
Your argument about the item being covered by the license because you used the code to generate it doesn't wash. Otherwise Microsoft owns the copyright on every document Word users have ever written simply because they used their tools to do it with. Diku's license does not give the authors the right to say KaVir's Sword of Doom belongs to them just because you used DikuMUD to create it with.


That's not the same scenario at all in my eyes Samson, a closer analogy would be if you edited the sourcecode of Ms Word, and then sold it as an unique product. You are not so much creating a document in a DIKU MUD, you are editing the source code even if it is only in the lib/world files. With MS Word, you'd be using it for its intended purpose, with DIKU you'd be editing what was originally sent to you, not creating something with what was sent to you.

Quote
So, as the conversation from imc actually included, if the mud owner set up a web site to act as a clearing house for those player transactions and accepted a commission from each sale.. this would be a case of extending the example into less clear scenarios?


This doesn't seem grey to me either, to me what would be the website had a clearing house of sorts set up for players to sell items to each other with staff supervision to make sure everyone got what was agreed to, but the staff got NO commission whatsoever.

Quote
Doesn't the sword count as a derivative work?

I would think it to be subject to the Diku license for this reason,
specifically the prohibition of making money, in the same way a
stock sword would.


This is very much in line with my personal belief on the matter. I wouldn't call the sword itself to be derived from DIKU, but I would call it to be part of a derivative work when it is running on a DIKU MUD, or DIKU derived work, and would cause the owner of a DIKU MUD to directly make money from the MUD, which is clearly stated as being illegal.

Quote
For that matter, what if you've redone the tools in your game to make objects in-game and you're not even using Diku's tools anymore? Everything in-game is not automatically part and parcel of their license just because it's in-game running under code that contains some of their original coding. Let's consider this another way, do you give credit and legal IP rights to a builder who makes an entirely original area for you, or does it arbitrarily get credited to The Diku Team because it was made on a mud that's running as a Diku derivative?


The builder in question would get credit for creating the zone no matter what codebase it was created on, as does all custom code. ie. If I work on a DIKU MUD for multiple years, and heavily modify it, I can at a later point make a custom MUD and still use the custom code I had previously added to the DIKU MUD without making my new work a derivative. Basically the DIKU Team gets credit for what they added, not what you added, but what you added is still held accountable to their license as long as it is running on a MUD that has any of their code in it, or was derived from their code, NOT from code added by specific users to their code.

Quote
The website in general is outside the scope licence, but certain activities may still fall under the Diku licence, even if they're done via the website. For example, you cannot charge people $10 to download copies of DikuMUD from your website, or sell t-shirts with the Diku source code printed on them. Nor can you sell in-game benefits.


I agree, in that you cannot sell in-game items through the website either, but I'd actually call selling T-shirts with the DIKU source code on them as a grey area and even go so far as to say I do believe that it is probably legal, as the t-shirt is what is being sold, not the text on the t-shirt. Also the t-shirt offers no in game bonus to those buying it.

That was a rather longwinded rant, yes I know…
05 Mar, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
Unfortunately I created the post above while reading this thread, not afterwards, so I may have commented on things that were already solved later in the thread. I just edited the post repeatedly as I read further so that I didn't forget sections of the post when I was done, and becaise it was easier to quote multiple posts as you can not switch pages when you are posting (by switch pages I mean where at the bottom it shows previous posts on that page of the thread, and actually is there some way for it to show all previous pages, or to have an option such as a framed concept to switch which page in a thread is displayed underneath your post.)
05 Mar, 2007, Guest wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
Fizban said:
A bit late, I know but here's how I see it. Selling Kavir's Sword of Doom is definitely illegal, for the following reasons.


Certainty in a legal issue is a pretty bold statement. Nobody has settled this issue in court, much less here. It's arguable that if the sword is a stock component that profiting from its sale is illegal, per the license. But simply selling it is not, also per the license, as long as you don't profit from it.

I'm also not convinced the license can speak to extensions to the code and/or world files and what you do with them. Of course, we also need to keep in mind that most people are using something which has been derived from Diku, and possibly derived from an intermediate branch, and those may well impose additional restrictions which make this entire argument a moot point.
05 Mar, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
Of course the license can't speak as of the world files, but it can speak for the data they represent when running on a compiled MUD. As stated above you could sell the actual world files all day, you just can't sell (at least the best of my understanding) the actual in-game objects themselves.
05 Mar, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
Also as far as certainty being a bold statement, I didn't state that it was certainly illegal so much as that I certainly interpreted it that way.
05 Mar, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
A further wrinkle is the notion that data (tables, lists, statistics) cannot be copyrighted, only creative works. The common example is phone books which are lists of names, addresses and phone numbers. In the example sword KaVir posted, only the descriptions of that sword are copyrightable, not the stats of said sword. It doesn't have a bearing really on the question, but is something to remember when you are creating a mud based on a pre-existing game system.
05 Mar, 2007, Fizban wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
So basically what this comes to is that I could take someone's .mob files, make the exact same mobs with identical stats, but with different descriptions I would not be guilty of copyright infringement?
06 Mar, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
Exactly.
06 Mar, 2007, Omega wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
why are people continuing to discuss this, i though i was quite mean and forthcoming when i said that this topic is silly :P

oi, thats it, i'm going to sell dariens mightly sword of bling finding on ebay, fux u guyz :P
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