Just a point: This is NOT the place to go for legal experts. If you're serious about being commercially viable, contact an experienced intellectual property attorney. I'd be glad to refer you to an excellent one in the US, if that's where you are based.

Having said that, I've had to deal with these sorts of issues a fair bit in the course of building Iron Realms into what it is today.

Yes, it would absolutely be under the Merc license. You're using the Merc codebase to make the game/mini-game.

You can't copyright the fundamentals of a game. You can copyright or trademark/servicemark specifics, but the game design is beyond that protection.

--matt

That is absolutely true - however if he's created the minigame from scratch, completely independantly of the mud, then the minigame itself would only fall under the licence once integrated. He could later take a (prior to being integrated with Merc) copy of the minigame and use it commercially if he so desired (eg, by installing it into a commercialling-usable codebase).

He might be able to patent parts of the minigame, if he's got a few thousand dollars to blow.

To be safe, I would recommend you develop it completely separately, and only integrate it once you've completed it.

Well you can't officially patent software in Europe, so you can ignore that point then.

Ideas aren't protected by copyright law - so there's nothing stopping someone from creating their own version of your game. That's a "good thing" IMO though - if people could protect game ideas, then you probably wouldn't have been allowed to have created your mud in the first place.

They've bought a license to use the Settlers of Catan trademarks (the names, logos, etc) and copyrighted material. Without that licence they could still create the same style of game, but they would have to call it something else, and would have to phrase the rules differently, use different graphics/images, and so on.

You may find this of interest:

Yep, very interesting.

I think I get it now (finally).

It doesn't really matter if I make it in my mud, as the game idea will never be protected. So if I want to create a flash version of it for the website, then I'd just be using the idea of the game and implement it in another way and therefor don't violate the merc license even if I would charge for that version.

Therefor the first question doesn't really matter anymore as implementing it within the code of the mud will still keep the game idea open for everyone else. However I can't use the mud version to make money (which wasn't the intent anyway).

Thank you!

If you program a concept into a merc base, debug/enhance it with player feedback, no law stops you from programming the same thing (except merc specific utility functions) into a different base.

You should only apply the strict implementation rules Kavir mentioned when you code something based (even partial) on the ideas and implementations of someone else.

It should be obvious you don't lose your copyrights the moment you implement something into a merc base. So I don't think you need to worry, unless this mini game involves killing computer simulated players for experience, etc.