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This thread has been interesting, and one of the more interesting things is, that after how many? - 16? – pages, there still isn’t any consensus about what is and isn’t ‘legal’. Different persons have their own layman’s interpretations of the law. Even different lawyers have different interpretations; that’s what they make their living from. It seems nowadays you can even get away with murder one, if you have the money to pay for a skilled enough lawyer.
Which brings me to my reason for jumping in at this late stage. It seems, given the fact that none of us are trained lawyers, the discussion has more or less turned into a circle, where the same arguments are hashed over and over again.
Personally I believe, that in cases like this it’s better to use the viewpoints of ethics and moral, rather than the Law. You generally don’t need a legal training to tell right from wrong - in fact most of us actually have a sort of built-in sense for this. There may be some people who actually CHOOSE to act unethically, for profit, power or other selfish reasons. But deep in their hearts even those people usually can tell ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ . Still, some cases may be tricky borderline, but is this case really one of those?
Just ask yourselves:
From an ethical point of view; Did Vryce do anything wrong when he ripped off the Diku code and claimed it to be his own invention?
I think most of us would answer YES to that question.
From an ethical point of view; did Thraithe do anything wrong when he opened Shadows of Isildur?
I don’t know about the rest of you guys, my own opinion is clear: No he didn’t
Which brings me to my last question:
From an ethical point of view; Was it right to single Thraithe out from all the other mudowners running Tolkien based muds, compare him to Vryce and publicly call him a thief in the same sentence?
I’ll leave that one to your judgement.
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