[the_logos]

I'm going to make this thread sticky here because there's so much discussion about the license and it seems as if many people arguing about it haven't actually ever read it. I'm including the full license below. Incidentally, this isn't in the Legal forum because many people with opinions on the argument argue that it's not a legal matter but an ethical or moral one. Both those discussions can be encompassed here.

What's on-topic in this thread: An even-handed, flame-free discussion of the DIKU license and its applicability to various MUDs, including, but not limited to, Medievia.

What's off-topic on this thread: Any personal attacks, any strong invective, etc.

/* ************************************************** **********************
* Copyright © 1990, 1991 *
* All Rights Reserved *
************************************************** *********************** */

DikuMud License

Program & Concept created by


Sebastian Hammer
Prss. Maries Alle 15, 1
1908 Frb. C.
DENMARK
(email quinn@freja.diku.dk)

Michael Seifert
Nr. Soeg. 37C, 1, doer 3
1370 Copenhagen K.
DENMARK
(email seifert@freja.diku.dk)

Hans Henrik St{rfeldt
Langs} 19
3500 V{rl|se
DENMARK
(email bombman@freja.diku.dk)

Tom Madsen
R|de Mellemvej 94B, 64
2300 Copenhagen S.
DENMARK
(email noop@freja.diku.dk)

Katja Nyboe
Kildeg}rdsvej 2
2900 Hellerup
31 62 82 84
DENMARK
(email katz@freja.diku.dk)


This document contains the rules by which you can use, alter or publish
parts of DikuMud. DikuMud has been created by the above five listed persons
in their spare time, at DIKU (Computer Science Instutute at Copenhagen
University). You are legally bound to follow the rules described in this
document.

Rules:

!! DikuMud is NOT Public Domain, shareware, careware or the like !!

You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in
any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for
distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge
for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.
By breaking these rules you violate the agreement between us and the
University, and hence will be sued.

You may not remove any copyright notices from any of the documents or
sources given to you.

This license must *always* be included "as is" if you copy or give
away any part of DikuMud (which is to be done as described in this
document).

If you publish *any* part of dikumud, we as creators must appear in the
article, and the article must be clearly copyrighted subject to this
license. Before publishing you must first send us a message, by
snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us what, where and when you are
publishing (remember to include your address, name etc.)

If you wish to setup a version of DikuMud on any computer system, you
must send us a message , by snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us where
and when you are running the game. (remember to include
your address, name etc.)


Any running version of DikuMud must include our names in the login
sequence. Furthermore the "credits" command shall always cointain
our name, addresses, and a notice which states we have created DikuMud.

You are allowed to alter DikuMud, source and documentation as long as
you do not violate any of the above stated rules.


Regards,



The DikuMud Group


Note:

We hope you will enjoy DikuMud, and encourage you to send us any reports
on bugs (when you find 'it&#39. Remember that we are all using our spare
time to write and improve DikuMud, bugs, etc. - and changes will take their
time. We have so far put extremely many programming hours into this project.
If you make any major improvements on DikuMud we would be happy to
hear from you. As you will naturally honor the above rules, you will receive
new updates and improvements made to the game

[the_logos]

I'll get it started by replying to something Emil wrote in another thread. He wrote:

Originally Posted by To those that don't care a hoot about ethics and moral, it may be hard to grasp that other people still do. It's like trying to explain the concept of music to someone who is tone deaf, or the difference between red and blue to someone who is colour blind. To those of us that do care, it seems natural that most decent people share our belief, although they aren't usually very vocal about it. It's what's known as the silent majority.

Well, here's the thing. To me, it seems that your absolutist "I am right and anyone who disagrees is immoral and unethical" is fundamentally flawed insofar as your ethics are your own, and not universal, and your (and my, and everybody else's involved in the debate that I'm aware of) understanding of intellectual property, and thus the DIKU license generally and how it interacts with existing case law, is minimal. Nobody participating in this debate is an intellectual property expert, at all. IP law is incredibly complex, and when we've needed to use experts in it.

I've been advised, by an expert, that the DIKU license is so seriously flawed it won't hold up, but of course, one can find experts to put forth nearly any opinion. That's why we have the civil court system: Because there can be -legitimate- disagreement about issues like this. Both sides can legitimately and ethically believe they are correct. A judge then decides who will is correct under the eyes of the law, and, pending appeals of course, that's that.

All I'm saying is that this is a very complicated issue, and to ignore all that we don't know about IP law is to really over-simplify.

Originally Posted by It's no coincidence that most fee muds still honour the Diku licence.

I guess I'd have to ask how you know that. I don't see how you can know that everyone who uses DIKU has sent the creators an email or snail mail.

--matt

[the_logos]

So, as for the so-called moral/ethical issue around the DIKU license, some claim that following it (which tends to mean following their personal interpretation of it rather than someone else's) is a moral imperative.

I'd suggest that it's pretty hard to claim some sort of universal moral or ethical obligation to follow IP laws generally. Now, I personally am as stringent as anyone you've ever met when it comes to IP law. I don't illegally download music, I don't pirate software, etc. Not doing those things is part of my moral system.

But who am I to tell some Chinese peasant that it is immoral for him to xerox a book and sell it? Intellectual property as currently instantiated in the West is a very modern, Western-centric notion, and I guess I fail to see why the West's take on IP is somehow morally superior to much of the East, where IP has no moral, ethical, or practical legal force. There's an extreme difference there, but the same logic is applicable to this discussion. Who are you to tell someone that your view of the morality regarding something as specific as 'derivative works' is the right one? The whole idea of derivative works really has no bearing or history outside of legal systems to begin with. Certainly, no religion or major school of ethical thought has, as a tenet, anything regarding use of derivative works that I'm aware of.

And you know, those who fall back to the ethical or moral argument when they feel that the legal argument may be shaky are engaging in a bit of fuzzy thinking, I feel. What's the basis for an ethical or moral judgement on intellectual property if not the law? I'm not really aware of any major school of ethical thought which recognizes the lack of intellectual property protection as being somehow 'wrong' or unethical. IP law exists for a practical purpose, not a moral or ethical one.

--matt

[Splork]

This shouldn't even be up for discussion. We all well know what the DIKU authors meant with their license. It has been stated time and time again by them. The fact that someone says it may be legally flawed, to most of us, is irrelevant.

Again, this is proven by the majority of DIKU mud owners honoring this "legally" flawed document. Call us idealists, call us idiots. I could care a less... Its simply the right thing to do.

I feel sorry for those of you who think otherwise.

Enjoy,
Splork

[DonathinFrye]

Originally Posted by What's the basis for an ethical or moral judgement on intellectual property if not the law?

One sociological basis for an ethical or moral judgement within a given society is whether or not a said action is considered socially acceptable. This is a basic concept of sociology.

Example; In Ancient Greek society, it was socially acceptable for a Master of a Given Craft to follow certain social guidelines. Firstly, he must be Male(obviously to suggest this in modern American society would be considered unethical by many and not socially acceptable). Also, he must have undergone an apprenticeship before being considered a Master. This means that he must have moved in with a Craft Master, and that part of his apprenticeship meant that he was often forced to have a homosexual relationship with his Master. In modern American society, this also would be considered unethical(and actually, illegal).

---

So the ethics of this issue could be re-stated this way; it would appear that the vast majority of vocal members of the online MUD social society have made the decision(whether actually backed up in court or not) that it is, indeed, not socially acceptable(within our community) to use even an altered DIKU codebase(like Medievia's, for example) as a method of capital gain. In this sense, the ethics of this topic seem to be related to sociology.

Arguing that it should not be considered unethical merely means that you are trying to change the social norm; the same would be true, in America, if I were to argue that sexual equality in the workplace should not be the rule-of-thumb. However, I would find social resistance to this suggestion, as is the case in the MUDing community any-time someone such as Matt tries to insinuate(or even outright state) that Medievia and such MUDs have not acted unethically.

[Spoke]

I have followed this thread over the years and as many here have heard all kind of arguments pro and anti DIKU license. Since those who breach the license have not been sued and it appears to be that there is no interest whatsoever on doing so from part of the authors or the school that seems to own the code we cannot posibly come to a final answer to the question posed by the_logos.

That said, here are my thoughts on the subject. There are two different standards that are followed in here when discussing this or similar topics.

One is the legal one, most frequently quoted by people who are in business and seem to be required to operate in the "what does the law say about it?" sphere. The main argument I have heard here is that the license is flawed, it does not forbid what the authors seemingly wanted to forbid (or claimed they wanted to after they were told it was poorly spelled out), a court would "probably not" rule in favor of the DIKU team or license holder because of this fact.

It is my opinion that from a practical point of view this is true and will remain true until the license holder sues the first company or individual and wins.

The other standard is the so-called moral standard, and it consists on reading and understanding the license according to the spirit of what was being written, not dwelling too long on exact definitions of particular words the authors chose to word their license document. The main view here, as I perceive it, is that the license forbids any form of personal gain from the game, which basically means, if you make money out of the game that would buy your weekend party nights you are violating the license. Furthermore, some people interpret it to mean that you should not hold comercial exchange or trade (or whatever the appropriate term is) with the code and virtual objects created with the code. This later part is a bit more confusing, since it is a particular way to interpret

Originally Posted by You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.

basically assuming that a virtual item or good is part of dikumud.

This is the most voiced standard, mostly by admins or developers for non-comercial MUDs who work or have worked with DIKU derivative code, and who fully feel they have followed the license according to this interpretation. I believe one reason why there are more people with this point of view than with the so-called legal one is that there are more people who run their MUDs non-comercially-spirited (money comming in is used for upkeep, bandwidth, machine, etc.) than people who run MUDs as a business.

I personally believe it is healthy to have comunity standards that are above the minimum legal standards, this means I agree that the spirit of the license should be followed up to the reasonable extent and that if someone wishes to be an active part of "this" comunity (ie. TMS forum members) it would be expected of them to adhere to this view or at least be reasonably close to adhering (notice the unfortune of having to "pick" words that can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, as "reasonably"). I think this is appropriate since, even if nobody has ever been found "guilty of DIKU license breaking" by a judge anywhere that I am aware of, the forum may police itself (through the site owner) to whatever standards the owner wishes to declare minimum.

To summarise, there are two standards, a so-called legal one and a so-called moral one. Each of these standards is practically applied on different grounds, a court of law or everyday internet trade for the first, within a comunity sharing the moral standard for the second. It is my opinion that both views are quite correct, within their own ground and that the problem occurs when one tries to apply a standard outside of its ground of validity. Even if one tried to increase the reach of one of the standards to include the others ground, people would still reject the outcome; people will not stop considering Medievia is using DIKU derivative work without aknowledging it even if they won in a civil court after being sued by the DIKU team or school; people will not stop their comercial practices if the site owner and every single suscriber here declares it immoral to breach the DIKU license's spirit, this will not happen until they get sued and forced to stop by a court of law.

[Spoke]

I have a question for those of you with more time to do google searches or with more factual knowledge of cases like this:

Is there any precedent of a weak or seemingly flawed license being upheld in court based on the intent of the author rather than the actual exact wording?

If yes, could you please provide us with some links where we could review the case? (if it is a public record)


Other thing I wanted to ask,

Is the case of banning certain interpretation of the DIKU license within this comunity that much different from a specific organized religion forbidding specific sexual practices that are otherwise socially accepted?

(In my opinion the two cases are very similar, and this is what makes me think that IF the forum owner decided to enforce certain particular interpretation as condition for membership, he would be in his right to do so)

Edited to fix a typo

[Iblis]

I'm fairly new to this discussion, I'd just like to know why Medivia do not wish to credit the Diku authors?

Is it because they claim their work is not of Diku origin?

If so, has it been proven that their claim is wrong?

Sorry, just trying to catch up with what everyone's talking about. I'm sure these questions have been answered somewhere else.

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (Spoke @ April 29 2006,00:39) basically assuming that a virtual item or good is part of dikumud. This is the most voiced standard, mostly by admins or developers for non-comercial MUDs who work or have worked with DIKU derivative code, and who fully feel they have followed the license according to this interpretation.

It is also the interpretation given by the Diku team, which is probably the main reason why it is the most voiced.

Originally Posted by I have a question for those of you with more time to do google searches or with more factual knowledge of cases like this: Is there any precedent of a weak or seemingly flawed license being upheld in court based on the intent of the author rather than the actual exact wording?

See here (court case at the end of my quote): http://www.ilaw.com.au/public/licencearticle.html

"A software licence is not necessarily a contract. It can be, but that requires a couple of preconditions to be satisfied. One of those preconditions is the existence of consideration on both sides. Consideration is a legal concept that simply means a quid-pro-quo, or something of value given by each party in exchange for what the other party provides. In the case of open source software, there usually isn't anything provided by the licensee of the software (that is, the person who uses it) back to the licensor (usually, the person who wrote it). As a consequence of this lack of consideration there is no contract between the licensee and licensor."

"Because the licensee hasn't given any consideration in exchange for the software, the licence can be revoked by the licensor at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee."

(Wood v Leadbitter (1845) 13 M & W 838)

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (Iblis @ April 29 2006,01:02) I'm fairly new to this discussion, I'd just like to know why Medivia do not wish to credit the Diku authors? Is it because they claim their work is not of Diku origin?

Back in 1995 they started selling in-game equipment. When it was pointed out to them that this violated the Diku licence, they stripped out the credits, renamed themselves as "Medievia IV", and claimed that they'd rewritten the mud from scratch and that the Diku licence therefore no longer applied to them.

Originally Posted by If so, has it been proven that their claim is wrong?

Yes, it was proven that their mud contained large amounts of stock code. They've responded by renaming themselves as "Medievia V" and claiming that they've rewritten the mud from scratch (again).

[Soleil]

Medievia's stance on the subject: The History of Medievia. I just want to state that Vryce wrote that page, not me. Any problems with it should go straight to him

As that link states, we do not deny our DIKU origin. Our claim is that our code is rewritten. Kavir reviewed our Medievia IV code in 1996 and made comparisons to DIKU and found DIKU code. However, since that time, 10 years ago now, we have totally rewritten our code. KaVir will respond to this thread soon with a lot of links I'm sure. He will also go on about 'once a derivative, always a derivative'.

As for the license, it IS flawed and our lawyers have told us that it could never hold up in court. But, according to spoke, that is only the 'legal' take on the matter. We pretty much agree with matt's interpretation and he did such a wonderful job of summing it up, I don't need to add anything else.

[KaVir]

Regarding the whole "The Diku licence won't hold up in court" thing, this link provides some interesting points:

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic....31214210634851

It's in regard to the GPL, but the situation is very much the same, as both the GPL and diku licence are licences and not contracts.

The following is quoted from Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's attorney:

"The GPL, however, is a true copyright license: a unilateral permission, in which no obligations are reciprocally required by the licensor. Copyright holders of computer programs are given, by the Copyright Act, exclusive right to copy, modify and redistribute their programs. The GPL, reduced to its essence, says: 'You may copy, modify and redistribute this software, whether modified or unmodified, freely. But if you redistribute it, in modified or unmodified form, your permission extends only to distribution under the terms of this license. If you violate the terms of this license, all permission is withdrawn.'"

"Because the GPL does not require any promises in return from licensees, it does not need contract enforcement in order to work. A GPL licensor doesn't say in the event of trouble "But, judge, the licensee promised me he wouldn't do what he's doing now." The licensor plaintiff says 'Judge, the defendant is redistributing my copyrighted work without permission.' The defendant can then either agree that he has no permission, in which case he loses, or assert that his permission is the GPL, in which case he must show that he is obeying its terms. A defendant cannot simultaneously assert that the GPL is valid permission for his distribution and also assert that it is not a valid copyright license, which is why defendants do not 'challenge' the GPL."

In summary: The Diku licence is the only thing giving permission to use DikuMUD. If the Diku licence were proven invalid, then you wouldn't have permission to use DikuMUD, and the mud would therefore be a copyright infingement. You can't use the usual contract law defences, because the lack of consideration means that the Diku licence is not a contract.

[Shane]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ April 28 2006,16:44)   You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in   any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for   distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge   for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.   By breaking these rules you violate the agreement between us and the   University, and hence will be sued.

If I were to take a wild stab in the dark, I would say that this part right here is the part that makes the license itself unenforceable. You simply may not hand someone something with one hand and remove from them the right to ever make a dime from it in any possible way with the other. What if they were playing the game and wrote a book about it? Most of you would quite rightly feel that that is not an infringement, but the point is, somewhere between that and using the unaltered code for a pay to play game, there is a grey area.

Part of that grey area probably has to do with whether the code has been changed such that it is a new program. Hard core ehtusiasts often say to me, well, if you used it even as a framework, you violated the license. This is actually why I opened the thread I did down in the legal section of the forums. I have a problem with the intersection of copyright and patent law as it pertains to software. The copyright would seem to only apply to making copies of the source code, and the rub is that all code, ALL CODE, looks the same, or roughly so, in bits and pieces. So, while an author or song writer might point out a riff or a series of lyrics or a chapter that is obviously derived from their work, computer programs are pieced together largely with only a handful of basic comparisons and decision making algorithms. Remember your early computer science courses? Remember how everyone's programs looked EXACTLY the same except for variable names?

As things get more advanced, you could probably make some arguments regarding overall form and organization of code that might hold up in copyright, but as has been pointed out, that is a complex task.

The point is, anyone who has ever downloaded Diku or a derivitive now has been exposed to "their" code, and if they see anything at all in there useful to a computer program they might concieve of to make money, chances are that it is merely a variant of something that occurs in dozens if not hundreds of programs all over the earth.

As far as the ethics go, I am afraid I have to come down squarely on the side of Diku enthusiasts. Whatever else happens, it is quite clear that the program Medievia uses developed stepwise and piecemeal from Diku, and I find that but lazy and ungrateful behavior on the part of whatever people involved themselves in that activity. Some years ago I wandered around pondering my options in making a mud of my own, and it was not so much that I planned to build a for profit mud as it was that I did not want to put all that effort into a mud that would be forbidden from being a profitable enterprise should I manage to make it good enough. Because of the license problems with LP, I decided against it. I searched and prodded for years now, and there are other options now, including Coffeemud, which I believe would have suited me at the time, but since then I have moved on and am pretty solidly a player and not an admin at heart as far as the hobby is concerned now.

I will say this in support of those who, like Vryce, skirted the ethical issues and made their life's dream of making money doing something they really love come true. Given that neither the Diku nor LP teams cared enough about this hobby to stick around and make their own careers based on these games, it annoys me that they have nevertheless kept their fingers in the pie just enough to basically create the miasma of bad feelings that we see here now over this subject.

I wish those guys would either do their business and start slinging lawsuits or get off the pot and let it go. It is a GAME! It's supposed to be for FUN!



Well over 2 cents...

[DonathinFrye]

Originally Posted by I will say this in support of those who, like Vryce, skirted the ethical issues and made their life's dream of making money doing something they really love come true. Given that neither the Diku nor LP teams cared enough about this hobby to stick around and make their own careers based on these games, it annoys me that they have nevertheless kept their fingers in the pie just enough to basically create the miasma of bad feelings that we see here now over this subject. I wish those guys would either do their business and start slinging lawsuits or get off the pot and let it go. It is a GAME! It's supposed to be for FUN!

The DIKU team, whether or not they have been extremely active in the community in the past few years, have provided a source codebase that has allowed for the creation of hundreds of online games. Some of the best online text rpgs were created using their work, which they charge nothing for(unlike engines like Rapture, that charge thousands and thousands to use). Their only request, in providing a free game-making codebase, is that MUDs do not use their work in order to turn a profit of their own.

The DIKU team has given a great resource to this community, and has helped this community arguably more than any other single, small team. They have allowed thousands and thousands of players free fun.

The community, as a whole, has therefor embraced their wishes and vehemetly defended the DIKU license. It is for these reasons that it is deemed socially unacceptable or unethical, within our text-rpg community, to do what games like Medievia has done.

It is simple. DIKU is a gift - they ask for next-to-nothing in return for its use. Those of us who appreciate this gift become very defensive when it is abused; hence why any suggestion that the DIKU license is unimportant is strongly resisted here.

---

Beyond that, KaVir summed up my sentiments to the law-based arguments against the license; the DIKU license is the only thing that gives permission for its use. If the license is invalid, so is every MUD that uses it.

[Spoke]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ April 28 2006,18:53) In summary: The Diku licence is the only thing giving permission to use DikuMUD. If the Diku licence were proven invalid, then you wouldn't have permission to use DikuMUD, and the mud would therefore be a copyright infingement. You can't use the usual contract law defences, because the lack of consideration means that the Diku licence is not a contract.

Since you have probably reviewed this subject much more than I will ever do, how would this portion, found in the original link you posted, apply if DIKU changed the wording of the license? (which they attempted to do later on when they realiced their original license was badly worded)

Originally Posted by So what kind of licence conditions can we legally impose on the use of open source software, in the absence of a contract? In general, we can impose conditions that restrict the right to copy the software, because this is one of the exclusive rights that copyright grants to the licensor. We can also impose conditions that restrict the licensee's ability to modify the software. But we probably cannot restrict their right to run the software, nor require them to destroy their copy of the software if the licence is revoked, or require them to allow the licensor into their premises to perform a software audit, because these are not rights that the licensor possesses under copyright law.