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Old 03-28-2006, 03:20 PM   #33
nhl
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This is totally offtopic to this post, but nonetheless.

To my understanding, the DIKU license has never been held up in a court. I am no expert on US contractual laws, but I do know that in many other parts of the world (including many EU countries), the license as such would not hold up in a case versus a MUD operator who charges for the game.

One of the stepping stones is the very first clause of the rules section which states that "[the MUD operator] may under no circumstance make profit on any part of DikuMUD in any possible way", at which point the MUD operator has an easy claim that it is not the DikuMUD that is being paid for, but the content running on it. Furthermore, the Diku authors weaken their own license by giving explicit examples ("you may not charge $5 for sending a copy of DikuMUD") which indicates that the license has been written to cover only the DikuMUD engine, not the content running on it.

There are other pitfalls in the Diku license too, but the bottom line is that just because it's a fancy document, does not mean that it is legally binding (most EULA's for example, are not legally binding in many EU nations). Whether it is ethical to disobey the license, is an entirely other matter.
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