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nhl · 03-30-2006, 12:32 AM

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.

03-30-2006, 12:32 AM	#35
nhl Member Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 37	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.