I was going to post this in the other thread but didn't want to be shunned for being off-topic and such, and as someone mentioned, here's a new thread for this...

If what was posted in the other thread is indeed true, if Aardwolf IS accepting money and IS giving in-game rewards, where's the shunning, blackballing, flaming, etc every time Aardwolf is mentioned, that other 'license breakers' get??  Call it sour grapes or tattletaling or what-have-you, but if Medievia is going to get crap EVERY TIME it's mentioned, I would think that another game doing the same thing should be treated the same.  

Where's KaVir asking for code audits?  Where's the removal from certain sites because of this issue?  Why isn't this game being treated the way they should be treated, as another 'bad part' of the MUD community?

Ok, that's that rant, here's another..

If, in fact, the DIKU people HAVE seen Aardwolf's code and has NOT cared the least bit about the license, it being a derivative, accepting money, etc., why the hell does this even all matter anymore??  According to KaVir, and the endless links he throws out, once a derivative, always a derivative.  So, no matter how much they changed their code, it will always be DIKU, no matter what the authors say.  If the DIKU author doesn't care, why the hell do the rest of you care? Why is this still an issue?

The "once a derivative, always a derivative" does not quite hold true. You can look for example, at the recent SCO versus the-rest-of-the-world litigation and the discussion that followed. As SCO claimed that the Linux sourcecode contained copyrighted works of SCO, both IBM and Opensource (and Linus Torvalds) requested SCO to identify the infringing pieces of code so that those could be rewritten.

Now, according to the "once a derivative, always a derivative" rule, obviously no such rewriting could occur, especially since the parts SCO claims they own the copyrights to, have been released in source format. Hence, if the "once a derivative, always a derivative" rule actually would hold up in source code development, a single code contribution could pollute the development of large projects (indefinetly, since those code contributions could not be replaced by non-infringing pieces of code), thus making the whole open source development model unviable.

I'd tend to say it's because the people who attack Medievia do so not out of principle, but out of personal dislike for the operators of Medievia.

Let's not go there though. The DIKU license holder is clearly aware of what Aardwolf is doing and the fact that he's not sued them, hasn't expressed any outrage over it, etc tells me that he doesn't view it as a violation of the DIKU license.

It's funny that the only people who get outraged about this are just observers rather than the people who are supposedly being hurt (the license holders).

And, as has been said before, the DIKU license prohibits profit, not revenue. Without financial statements, there is no way to determine whether a profit is being made or not.

--matt

They get it from time to time, but not as badly as you, because their crime isn't as bad as yours. They certainly violate the intent of the licence (they sell in-game benefits), and if it were up to me they would indeed be banned.

But if your mud - which has stripped out the credits, removed the copyright notices, and makes sufficient profit to live off - is allowed to remain in the listings, then I see little chance of getting Aardwolf banned.

I audited your code to prove that your claims of originality were false. Aardwolf admits that they are a Diku derivative, however, which would make such an audit pointless. If you'd simply admitted you were a Diku derivative, then I wouldn't have needed to audit Medievia either.

That is correct (). However according to the quote they're not "changing" their code over time, they're rewriting it completely from scratch in clean-room conditions, with one of the original Diku team monitoring the situation to verify the truth of their claims.

That is a point of contention. Were Aardwolf to strip out the Diku credits and claim to be original, however, with plenty of evidence proving otherwise, I strongly suspect they'd get exactly the same response as Medievia.

If they violate the intent of the license, why is Hans (one of the DIKU license holders) not objecting to them? He's working with them even as they violate what you claim is the intent of the license. And yes, they sell in-game benefits, but they are selling their content, not the DIKU license. The license doesn't say anything about selling your own content.


You don't know they make any profit. If they pay themselves salaries, that's simply an expense, no different from paying for bandwidth or a server.

I swear, I'm half-tempted to just buy the Diku license and remove all restrictions so that people can just stop having these pointless arguments and so more MUD operators have increased freedom to operate their MUDs as they wish.

--matt

Thank god, someone listened to me on the forum!

But anyways, now that this is in the proper medium, I'm going to say one thing: I really don't care. The makers of DIKU rarely care, so why should I? The way I think of it, if the DIKU people don't feel the need to take action against Aardwolf, then there's no issue.

It's not like Aardwolf is some small-time MUD that can get away with this stuff because it's "under the radar". I think the DIKU people have heard of this, and really just don't care.

That's all I have to say.

I was not aware the license is for sale. Nonetheless, my personal view is that the DIKU license does much more harm than good to the DIKU community. And as previously mentioned, it has never been held up in a court (I doubt it would, and the DIKU authors would take a significant risk in actually trying it, since a failure to uphold it would open the door for countless of other DIKU-based MUD's to implement revenue models).

It is pretty simple imo... diku owners don't care because if they care, it would probably cost them more by taking any legal actions or whatever against people abusing their license than they would ever get from doing it. Its not worthwhile for them to care about it.

Now... if a game like everquest gets in the loop, they start to care (and I even recall they looking into that or something) because they would probably have something to win from it.

Why don't you ask him?

Not my claim - but that of Michael Seifert and Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt, the two members of the Diku team who are still active. I think it's fair to say that they know what the intent of their own licence is, don't you?

And nobody has said that Hans is "working" with them. Aardwolf have simply claimed that he looked at their new codebase and was satisfied that it is original. I also looked at the Medievia codebase, but I hope you're not suggesting I worked with them?

If the content is part of the game, then it falls under the licence. If you disagree with that, then by the same reasoning the other IRE muds would only have to pay you royalties for content that you had created - any new content they made could be sold and they could keep every last cent. Is that really your view? Because I'm sure the other IRE muds would be interested to hear about it.

You would have to find all the contributors first, which would rather unlikely to say the least.

Kavir wrote:
I think it's fair to say that they can say the intent is whatever they wish to say it is. On the other hand, a license is a legal document and it says what it says. In a contract (which is what a license is), one party's interpretation holds no more weight than the others. That's why the opinion that matters comes from the court, not from one side of a two-party contract.

The license only speaks about DikuMUD, not about the MUD you end up making. In fact, the license is quite specific in referring to DikuMUD and not products that might be made with DikuMUD. This is much like the license for most software. You can't resell MS Word, but you can certainly sell any document you make with it.

Look, if the Diku license spelled out that there are restrictions on charging for products made with Diku, that'd be one thing. It doesn't though.

This paragraph completely misses everything regarding how Iron Realms works. It's really strange for you to presume to comment on IRE's setup when I am quite positive you've never seen the operating agreements for any of the Iron Realms companies, nor any of the relevant contracts which you're commenting on.

--matt

I believe the original authors have explained themselves several times as to why why they never took any action. I've corresponded with Michael Seifert several times a few years ago. Mostly to simply say thank you and apologize for the actions of a few people that I disagree with and I was sure he did as well.

I honestly have no problems with muds that sell stuff to keep their mud running, or for that matter to make a living. But I definately have a problem with people yanking the credits and claiming it as their own. Ofcourse, I would never play one:-)
Each of us has to draw the line somewhere...

Our mud is one of the oldest Diku's in existance. Over the first few years, somehow the credits were removed. We were contacted by the diku website, made aware of our glitch and promptly added them back. Its just the right thing to do.

The differences between Aardwolf and nameless mud is quite obviously in how they carry themselves. A small example of this is Vyrce's denial that he is a Diku derivitive. While Aardwolf's owner seaks out the original authors thoughts, opinions, and most likely blessing. Huge difference. There are many more but they have been rehashed enough around here, especially when it seems to somehow enter every thread...

Shrugs...

In the case of your codebase the licence may well be a contract, but the same is not necessarily true for Diku:



"A software licence is not necessarily a contract. It can be, but that requires a couple of preconditions to be satisfied. One of those preconditions is the existence of consideration on both sides. Consideration is a legal concept that simply means a quid-pro-quo, or something of value given by each party in exchange for what the other party provides. In the case of open source software, there usually isn't anything provided by the licensee of the software (that is, the person who uses it) back to the licensor (usually, the person who wrote it). As a consequence of this lack of consideration there is no contract between the licensee and licensor."

However those muds are still Diku derivatives, and are bound by the same licence.

And you can sell areas you produce on a DikuMUD.  But you cannot sell your Diku derivative, any more than you could reverse engineer, modify and sell MS Word.

And the wording in that regard is certainly one of the main points of contention, as I mentioned earlier, and probably one of the reasons why Aardwolf doesn't get as much negative attention as Medievia.  I think you'll agree that the law is pretty clear about removing copyright notices, and that the licence is fairly clear in regard to credit notices?

Wouldn't this mean that nobody who ever worked on Aardwolf or saw their code could be a part of the coding team that created the "new" mudlib/game?

If there are any people who worked on both, doesn't that make it not a clean-room situation?

I want to make it very clear that we are not claiming to have the blessing of Hans Staerfeldt for using in-game items to fund the mud. We did discuss it, we agreed to disagree and not discuss the subject again and then moved on to discussing the new code base. He also did point out that if they (or more likely, the DIKU institution) decide to try to legalize their "intent" of the license we could become a target, but would clearly not be first on their list.

It has been quite some time since our last contact and I still have to send him a final version of our new code before it goes live for a final verification that it has not been "contaminated" (his words) with DIKU code.

(I would have added this via an edit, but someone posted after me and it is bad form to change a post that has posts after it):

Of course, all of this is pretty irrelevant since the DIKU license itself is relatively porous and the DIKU creators really don't seem to care. They seem to care more about the credits issue than the "profit" issue. I vaguely recall that the main reason for the "profit" stipulation was because they created it while at a University (from whence the name DIKU is derived) and the Uni required it.

A clean-room situation usually consists of copying someone else's functionality (which isn't a copyright infringement) while proving that you had no access to the original work.

It's a defence, basically. Documented proof that can stand up against the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test, by providing an evidence trail of independent creation.

If the original Aardwolf team also worked on the new mud, then they might unconsciously copy parts of it, which could cause problems during the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test were the case to go to court. It could weaken their defence, although they've made a very smart move by involving one of the Diku team.

Interesting. I didn't actually know that. I'm not sure it changes anything though, as regardless, one party in a lawsuit's interpretation of a license isn't going to hold more weight than another's, all other things being equal.

That's my opinion at least, and I think there's significant justification for it. In the end though, this is why the rule of law matters: It exists to resolve these disputes, and it's the only valid route for resolution of a legal dispute.


Oh, sure, they're definitely bound by the same license, but my point is that the license, which I've quoted below for people who aren't familiar with it, doesn't speak to works created with the DikuMUD software. It only speaks about DikuMUD itself and what you may charge for with it.

Right, you can't sell your Diku derivative to someone else, but that doesn't stop you from selling items, for instance. That's not selling DikuMUD. That's not selling anything actually. It's just licensing in virtually all cases except for Second Life (and even there, despite Linden Labs claims, that's pretty debatable).

Adding to DikuMUD doesn't make your mud part of DikuMUD, which is what most of the license talks about.

Yeah, I agree that the copyright bit is fairly clear, providing that the entire license wouldn't simply be thrown out of court, which isn't out of the realm of possibility by any means. It's very badly written regardless of what one believes its intent is.

(Incidentally, I want to make clear that I have zero problem with anything that Aardwolf does that I'm aware of.)

--matt

Diku license:

This document contains the rules by which you can use, alter or publish
parts of DikuMud. DikuMud has been created by the above five listed persons
in their spare time, at DIKU (Computer Science Instutute at Copenhagen
University). You are legally bound to follow the rules described in this
document.

Rules:

!! DikuMud is NOT Public Domain, shareware, careware or the like !!

You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in
any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for
distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge
for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.
By breaking these rules you violate the agreement between us and the
University, and hence will be sued.

You may not remove any copyright notices from any of the documents or
sources given to you.

This license must *always* be included "as is" if you copy or give
away any part of DikuMud (which is to be done as described in this
document).

If you publish *any* part of dikumud, we as creators must appear in the
article, and the article must be clearly copyrighted subject to this
license. Before publishing you must first send us a message, by
snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us what, where and when you are
publishing (remember to include your address, name etc.)

If you wish to setup a version of DikuMud on any computer system, you
must send us a message , by snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us where
and when you are running the game. (remember to include
your address, name etc.)


Any running version of DikuMud must include our names in the login
sequence. Furthermore the "credits" command shall always cointain
our name, addresses, and a notice which states we have created DikuMud.

You are allowed to alter DikuMud, source and documentation as long as
you do not violate any of the above stated rules.

However (from my previous link) "A licence does not grant you a legal right to the property that is being licensed to you. All it does is to make something lawful that would otherwise be unlawful" and "Because there is no enforceable contract, if the licence conditions are breached, the licensor's action against the licensee is simply an action for breach of copyright."

No licence means no permission to copy, distribute, derive from or display the work, as these are all rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder.

Personally I can't wait for the day when the holders of the DIKU liscence takes it to court... but oh wait, that won't actually stop the bitching will it? No since MudX is hosted in country Y, the US court's decision isn't valid. Now only god know's how many licenses are not valid in our days (but if we're talking Europe, we're talking about alot of commercial licenses not being valid).

1. Give credits
2. Do whatever the hell you want (if the holders ever decide to take legal action: be sure you have your server&company in a "free" country).
3. Go buy yourself an icecream and some flowers for your girl.

I vote for some nifty jewelry instead! Can I do that?

There may be some legal stuff that one could argue, and whether things would stand up in court or not. I'm no lawyer. But it seems to me that their intent was clear; give them credit, and don't make money off their work.

Regardless of whether this will hold up in court or not, it seems like it should be up to our community to enforce it, namely by not supporting MUDs that break it. Aardwolf posted that they "agreed to disagree" with the DIKU people. Sounds like he's basically flaunting the fact that DIKU can't/won't spend the money to enforce it.

It's like saying "Hey, thanks for creating this stuff long ago. You don't agree with how we're using it? Well, thankfully you're toothless, so why don't we just ignore that part and move on."

In my opinion, that should make people who enjoy mudding fairly mad. I'll suffice this by saying I have no knowledge of this sitation beyond the posts in this thread, so I'm just offering my opinion from that.

That citation speaks about open source software. If DIKU were open source, this whole issue would be moot, because people could charge whatever they wanted for access to their DIKU mud.

It does not sound to me like that is their attitude at all. It sounds like they have tried to make the best out of the situation, while also trying to maintain the finacial viability of their enterprise.

One of the worst things that ever happened to the MUD community was the fact that it had its exploison BEFORE the open source movement. If MUDs came along now, instead of ~20 years ago, all of these mud engines would be open source and probably hosted somewhere like sourceforge.

The restrictive licenses put on so many MUD engines, drivers, source code, etc. has been nothing but a burden for the MUD community, as it provided a disincentive for a lot of commercial operations that could have really helped MUDding become more than a niche hobby.

It sounds to me more like the DIKU creators realize they are not actually being harmed in any material way. One doesn't sue to redress trivial harms typically.

--matt

The article concerns open source software, but the part I quoted regards contract law and copyright law, and is just as valid for Diku as it is for open source software.

I think it's a combination of three factors:

1. The DIKU creators realize they aren't being financially harmed (as you said).
2. The DIKU creators realize that their "license" would have a slim chance to hold up in most courts.
3. The DIKU creators realize that if a court would rule against the "license", it would open up the door for countless of other DIKUs to introduce revenue models. At the moment, they can just hope that the ambiguity will scare off most such attempts.

Debatable - people who make money from Diku muds are unlikely to pay for the commercial DikuII licence, are they? And even if that weren't the case, they could still claim .

However as I've already pointed out, the Diku licence is not a contract. All it does is give you permission to do things which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright law.

No, it wouldn't - it would simply take away everyone's right to copy, modify, distribute, derived from and display works based upon DikuMUD. The licence is the only thing giving those rights, so if you removed it you would also remove those rights.

Not only are you assuming some universal contract law (which does not exist), but I think we may have misunderstood each other.

If a court decides that the DIKU license does indeed only apply to making profit by direct distribution or resale of the DIKU engine, it does not necessarily invalidate the rest of the license, including the provisions of setting up a DikuMud and altering the DikuMud sourcecode.

So one plausible scenario is that a court would find that the resale of the Diku Engine is against the license, whereas charging for content running on it isn't. The rest of the license wouldn't be void. Other provisions which weaken the case of upholding the license, is where the MUD operator is claimed to be violating agreements which he/she is not part of (between the DIKU team and the University) and which implies legal action.

No, I think you're missing the point - contract law doesn't apply. The Diku licence is not a contract.

Also note that (cited from the link I gave earlier) "Because the licensee hasn't given any consideration in exchange for the software, the licence can be revoked by the licensor at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee".

Well the link I provided was also written by a , and he was pretty clear on the fact that "Because the licensee hasn't given any consideration in exchange for the software, the licence can be revoked by the licensor at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee" (Wood v Leadbitter (1845) 13 M & W 838).

That you can't restrict their right to run the software or delete their copy, because those aren't rights under copyright law?

True. However you could prevent them making backups (copy), recompiling (copy/derivative), releasing it (distribution), allowing anyone to play (perform/display), etc. Without those rights they might as well not have the mud.

Regarding the "reasonable" software conditions thing, see further down:

Are these conditions enforceable? Although an authoritative answer cannot be given until the GPL is tested in court, all indications are that these are exactly the kind of conditions that can be successfully attached to a non-contractual software licence, since they only affect the distribution and modification of the software, which are within the right of the copyright owner to control.

Well, copyright also gives the right . And you're going to need those rights if you want anyone to play your mud.

Last I checked, neither Australia nor the US were part of the EU, and the person who wrote the article is looking at it from an Australian perspective, backing it up with legal cases from the US. There is no international standard according to which contract or copyright disputes is solidly enforced in every country.

That's questionable. First of all, the document you linked also lists some mitigating factors. Of particular interest is the Estoppel, which would likely apply to situations where the licensor (Diku) attempts to modify or revoke the license from a single licensee (MUD).

Second, I am not convinced that using the engine to run a MUD would legally constitute a display of the MUD engine (though I guess a DikuMUD might be an exception, given how much of the actual game logic is embedded in the driver), anymore than  running your own java application is displaying the Java platform or running anything on a Linux server constitutes diplaying the Linux platform. Largely, it would be a question of what do the users see -- is it the standard DikuMUD interface, or content created by the MUD?

If this truly were an issue, I doubt any company (with enough lawyers) would be developing anything commercial on non-commercial platforms (like java applications) -- to me as a layman, the article you are linking to, is a bit on the dramatic side to provide a punch at Australia's national Linux conference.

Again, you are quoting a US law (Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright act), where I was refering to the situation in the EU. But even if you go with the US laws, those rights are not absolute (as an example, section 107 describes the "fair use" if copyrighted works). As I stated above, it is questionable if running a MUD would constitute "performing the work (driver) publicly". What you are displaying is the content running on it (that is what the player sees, right?), which is usually copyrighted by the MUD owner and the MUD developers.

NHL wrote:
I've been told the same thing by IP specialists here in the US.

There's a bit of a difference there. A layman reading general legal principles is far different from receiving directed advice on a specific situation from an expert in that area of law. When you want quality legal advice you don't, with all due respect, just google up general legal principles on the web. You hire someone qualified to provide you with an expert opinion on your specific issue, because chances are, as a layman, you (the generic you) are missing many things that someone with expertise will not.

--matt

There "may be scope" - if the licencee could prove they'd been mislead into "relying on the continuance of the existing terms". The Diku team could clarify the wording of the licence, but if that failed to hold up, they could simply revoke it for everyone.

If you removed all of the stock areas, stock messages, help files, etc, so that nothing stock (or derived) was displayed to the users, then perhaps that would work (assuming the Diku-derived code wasn't considered part of the public "performance"). However you'd have to change the messages before the licence was revoked - otherwise you'd lose the right to recompile with the new messages (it's been argued before about whether compiling creates a copy or a derivative work, but both are rights protected by copyright law, so in this case the point is moot). The mud would also be an evolutionary dead-end, as you'd no longer be allowed to change it, or even make backups.

The copyright law is very similar, as the US and EU both follow the Berne Convention.

Yeah, great. You could quote small sections of the Diku code "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research". It was a good way for me to post sections of the Medievia source code in order to prove it was Diku derived. It won't simply let you use the codebase for anything you wish!

We're talking about Diku here, not LP. LP breaks the mud down into a separate driver and mudlib - but in a Diku, they are both the same thing (the entire game is hardcoded). And yes, the mud developers (not necessarily the owner) would own the copyright to their changes, but the mud itself would be a derivative work.

However "The United States has copyright relations with most countries throughout the world, and as a result of these agreements, we honor each other's citizens' copyrights." ()

It doesn't cover every country, but the points mentioned here are going to apply to the vast majority of muds currently in operation. Aardwolf and Medievia are both located in the US, for example - and DikuMUD is registered with the US Copyright Office.

Oh I've heard plenty of people claim they've spoken to lawyers, on all sides of the debate, and the only thing they really have in common is that they all back up what that person wants to hear. The Medievia 'lawyers', for example, supposedly claim that Medievia no longer has to follow any part of the licence. Other lawyers apparently claim that only the 'profit' clause is unenforcable. Other lawyers claim that Diku team have good grounds for legal action should they wish to take it.

The EverQuest situation indicates two important points to me, however: (1) The Diku team are prepared to take action if they feel the situation is worthwhile, and (2) the licence holds sufficient strength that it cannot be simply ignored (like Medievia does) - otherwise the EverQuest people wouldn't have responded the way they did.

There are nonetheless big differences in the copyright legislation of different countries. For example, in Finland it is considered "fair use" to make copies of musical works (not software) for your own personal use (for example, someone lends you an original cd, from which you are then legally allowed to make a copy for personal use), something which to my understanding the US copyright laws do not recognize.

I have no reason to believe that any of the lawyers I have spoken to, would sweettalk me about their view of the DIKU license, given that neither I nor they have any financial interest in it (nor am I paying them to prepare legal statements on the matter). Thus far we've presented claims from lawyers who think the DIKU license is unenforcable (which seems to be a common claim from both my side, IR and Medievia) -- I would love to hear which lawyers have actually claimed that specifically the DIKU team has a good ground for legal action. Maybe you can provide some reference on that (and not a link to documentation about copyrights in general)?

However it very much depends on how the question is phrased and what information they are given.

There have been around 4 or 5 people over the years who have claimed they've spoken to lawyers who said the Diku licence was enforcable, although obviously that's no more verifiable than any of the counter-claims (i.e., on all sides there's no more proof than "I spoke to a lawyer and he said..."). I've also spoken to a lawyer myself, although I was told that his response didn't constitute legal advice and that I couldn't pass it on, which made the exercise somewhat pointless.