Thread: Aardwolf?
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Old 03-30-2006, 03:00 AM   #37
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
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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 However you'd have to change the messages before the licence was revoked - otherwise you'd lose the right to recompile with the new messages (it's been argued before about whether compiling creates a copy or a derivative work, but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.
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