13 Sep, 2007, Kjwah wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I was just thinking about this while running some tests at work. What if I have a MUD based on some form of DIKU code and it's free to play. However, if you want the information to log into the game you have to pay me to access the site. Would that violate that license?

I'm in no way thinking of doing this, just something that I got to thinking about when reading a thread about Aardwolf or Aardvark whatever that MUD is..

Just curious I guess.

lol
13 Sep, 2007, Midboss wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Personally, I think that WOULD violate it. At that point, it really isn't free to play since you need to buy information one time to get in. Of course, I doubt anyone WOULD buy the information unless you blew the advertisement WAY out of proportion. Assuming someone did, the majority of any new players coming in would've gotten the information for free from others, so it probably wouldn't even accomplish what you (the hypothetical 'you') wanted.
13 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 3rd comment:
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That certainly raises an interesting grey area legally. You're not actually charging for the game, or for items within the game. You're charging for access to a portion of a website. But that portion of the website has one sole purpose - to provide the address+port to your game, which is based on Diku.
13 Sep, 2007, Cratylus wrote in the 4th comment:
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I don't see how it would work without violating the license.

If all the website has is the ip/name and port, that info will
get out swiftly enough, so that can't work.

If you get, say, a registered login code, or even a
character name enabled (or whatever kind of user
registration Diku does) for paying on that site, it's
still a modification to the game for money, regardless
of how obfuscated it is.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
13 Sep, 2007, Conner wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Midboss said:
Assuming someone did, the majority of any new players coming in would've gotten the information for free from others, so it probably wouldn't even accomplish what you (the hypothetical 'you') wanted.


Actually, the solution to that would be to set up your website to require a username/password combination that you assign upon reciept of funds and incorporate a custom java client to access the game that doesn't tell the player what port it's being directed to and set your firewall to only allow access to the game via incoming hits from that site's client. Problem solved in that regard. :tongue: Although then you might have restricted access enough to cross the line on your gray legal area…

Samson said:
That certainly raises an interesting grey area legally. You're not actually charging for the game, or for items within the game. You're charging for access to a portion of a website. But that portion of the website has one sole purpose - to provide the address+port to your game, which is based on Diku.


That's what I'm thinking, it's doable, and probably not really a direct violation of the license despite the fact that most of the mud community would relegate you to the same class as Medevia.
13 Sep, 2007, Conner wrote in the 6th comment:
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Cratylus said:
If you get, say, a registered login code, or even a
character name enabled (or whatever kind of user
registration Diku does) for paying on that site, it's
still a modification to the game for money, regardless
of how obfuscated it is.


Actually Crat, I have to wonder if it really would because all you've done is require payment for access to the game site itself, not actually made any changes to the game code that is impacted by the fee arrangement, at least doing it the way I suggested.
13 Sep, 2007, Asylumius wrote in the 7th comment:
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Even though you are facilitating it through a web interface, you're still charging people a fee to play. In the end, if a player CANT play your game without putting money in your pockets, its a no-no.

Consider this: What if I made a MUD and every time a player created a char I moved the pfile to a directory outside players/ and charged you 10 bucks to move it back?

That said, I don't think any of the access codes, registration systems, or passwords would work. If it's foolproof enough to work, it's probably too much hassle. If a MUD asked me to jump through the hoops of going through a website, giving up my email address, or anything like that, I would jump ship.
13 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I have to wonder if it really would because all you've done is require payment for access to the game site itself


This is why it's a grey area. Since you aren't using the game's own code to impose the access restriction, technically it should fall outside the scope of the license since the website isn't covered by it. But the entire goal of the operation is to charge people to play a game where this would be against its license.
13 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
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It pretty obviously violates the spirit of the license and probably the letter, depending on how broadly you interpret 'making money off of the game'. The real question is, in a sense, whether or not it was a legal contract for the license to enforce in the first place.
13 Sep, 2007, dforces wrote in the 10th comment:
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Its perfectly legal to profit off a website as long as its payment is not a requirement to play the mud.
13 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
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That's not what the license says:
Quote
You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in
any possible way.

So like I said, it's pretty clear that you'd be violating the license as it is stated by charging even optionally. But my point was that it's unclear that they can actually make that restriction: for instance, I'm not at all sure it'd be remotely legal for them to require that you not accept donations.
13 Sep, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 12th comment:
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Obviously the game has an access charge.
13 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 13th comment:
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The legality of the agreement hasn't been properly tested in court. Until the Diku team does so, we're left to interpret it as best we can as users. That ultimately means we're making moral judgments instead of legal ones.

In the model as explained by Kjwah the game doesn't require payment to play. Only to get the address and port information initially. Which is not stored in-game. A difficult legal argument to make that the license was violated, but certainly morally wrong to dodge it in this manner to rake in money.
13 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Actually, I think that model is a lot simpler than the donations case. It's like saying… "well you don't need to pay to drive the car, you just need to pay me to give you the keys" or "you don't need to pay to live in the house, you just need to buy it from me first". It could very easily be construed as a one-time sign-up fee. In fact, that's exactly what it is: I'm not sure why it's complicated to argue that it's a required fee to play the game.

Soliciting donations on the other hand is murkier because you are technically making a profit off of the game (in the sense that people want to donate to you because they like your game) but it would seem absurd that the license would be able to prevent you from accepting donations. I mean that they cannot strip you of your right to accept general donations from the general public. So 'murkier' is a funny term, because I still think it's a pretty clear situation.
13 Sep, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Soliciting donations on the other hand is murkier because you are technically making a profit off of the game (in the sense that people want to donate to you because they like your game) but it would seem absurd that the license would be able to prevent you from accepting donations. I mean that they cannot strip you of your right to accept general donations from the general public.


As far as I know, nobody objects to DikuMUD owners accepting donations, or even selling merchandice such as mugs and t-shirts on their website - in fact the Diku team have even recommended the latter as a way of recovering hosting costs.

The objections occur when players receive some form of in-game benefit in return for their donations, as this effectively becomes a commercialisation - the sale of a Diku-derived service. While some people disagree on the legal interpretation of the licence, and others feel they should no longer have to follow it at all, it is clear that this form of transaction goes against the spirit of the licence (the Diku team have made their intent more than clear).
13 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 16th comment:
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Oh, then they are quite reasonable about the donations, then. That is good. A donation is indeed rather different from some kind of in-game compensation due to payment made.
13 Sep, 2007, Asylumius wrote in the 17th comment:
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On another tangent:

If you're questioning the legality, or more specifically you're wondering how far you can push the Diku license before the law (or in most cases the community) pushes back, the answer is probably to write your own codebase or use one with a completely free/open license.

We all know that if someone does completely disregard the Diku license the MUD community will oppose it with all of the flame, threats, and diff analysis it can muster.

Illegal or not, woe is the fool who violates the Diku license and gets caught by Us.
13 Sep, 2007, Kjwah wrote in the 18th comment:
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Some pretty interesting comments. I know morally it would be wrong to do such a thing, I was just curious if there was a more definite answer. As stated originally, I'm in no way thinking about doing this. Just something I've never actually seen discussed the thirteen or so years I've been MUDding. lol

Quote
If you're questioning the legality, or more specifically you're wondering how far you can push the Diku license before the law (or in most cases the community) pushes back, the answer is probably to write your own codebase or use one with a completely free/open license.


I'm not interested in writing my own codebase or anything like that. I'm not worried about making a commercial MUD, I've never made a MUD for money or even the players but for the enjoyment of writing code. lol
20 Oct, 2007, Noplex wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
This is something I have always had a problem with about the license, then again, maybe the foresight wasn't there to see that this issue would be so big in the future. Because this hasn't been tested in court, what are we considering profit? If you spend all the money received on the game (or game related activities) then technically you aren't making a profit (but, as soon as you buy something for yourself unrelated to the game you break that). It does not state that you must take a loss on the game. More so, if you take donations for an event outside of the game (but still related to the game) you are making money off the game?

The key here it specifically says profit. I see no problem in accepting money for out of game activities and hosting services (new servers, website, etc). If I had a DikuMUD that was huge enough that hosting was becoming a problem, I would also not see any problem charging my player-base $0.50 per month to play the game simply to cover hosting costs. Because the way that I see it, if it wasn't for changing them a monthly fee the alternative would be taking the game down because I can't personally afford the hosting costs of the game.

Now, if you use the hosting that the donations are being paid for other for-profit ventures, then I see a problem there.

And, call me an asshole, because I know what the quotes have said from the original authors of Diku (as per the intent of the license), but I honestly don't care. I'm not going to use the game for-profit, but if the game gets popular I will most definitely accept donations for servers and hosting costs. Why would I not honor their quotes? Because its not what the license says, and until they are knocking on my door because I am accepting donations they can blow steam all they want.
21 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Noplex said:
It does not state that you must take a loss on the game.

They state that you must take a loss in distributing the game, at least as far as the cost of the medium on which you send it is concerned. Whether or not they're actually allowed to do that is another question.

My position is that it's unclear what exactly the license is allowed to demand of you. There are some things that are not legal to put into contracts. Various informal discussions with lawyers have confirmed this, but they also say that in the end of the day it doesn't matter until it ends up in court (and in fact it's not really "legal" or "illegal" until that point, anyhow).

For instance, I find it very dubious that they could require you to not accept donations. I'm not sure they can even prevent you from making money selling the time you spent building the game.

Think about it: if a company could do that, why wouldn't they say that nobody could service the stuff they sell except for themselves? You'd make a killing on consulting fees, in any case. This isn't that different: I'm not selling you the source code. I'm selling you the service I render by spending all this time administrating the game, maintaining the servers, keeping things running etc.

Nonetheless, it strikes me that the easiest thing to do is to just write your own codebase. If you were aiming to do something similar to SMAUG's functionality and design, that would be pretty easy in the scheme of things. It gets complicated when you want to design your own codebase with different features and architecture…
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