[Alastair]

While this isn't directly MUD-related, it may be of interest to note what happened on a "sibling" licensing battle recently.

For those who didn't catch the whole story, here's a short summary:

Mythic Entertainment is the company behind Dark Ages of Camelot, one of the more recent (and quite successful so far) MMORPGs.

Blacksnow Interactive (BSI) is (or was) a company formed by a bunch of people who basically did nothing but create accounts to farm for items or level up and then auctionning those accounts off e-Bay and similar sites.

DAOC's EULA forbids the sale of in-game equipments, characters and even accounts, hence they shut down a number of BSI accounts (according to similar stories linking BSI to Anarchy Online, another recent MMORPG, there was probably quite a lot of cheating involved to maximize power-levelling and farming too, but I don't remember this being publicized in the DAOC situation).

Earlier this year, BSI has sued Mythic, stating that the EULA was unenforceable and that the time BSI spent on growing characters was theirs only.

A California court has recently ruled Mythic's EULA as enforceable.

A good analysis of the good and bad about that can be found at Unknown Player, here.

There are ties from this into the MUD world, too, regarding various licenses: from codebase to builder and coder licenses. I will follow up with my thoughts on this next week, but for the time being, good reading (and thinking.)