The Diku team put a lot of work into their game as well - don't you think they at least deserve the recognition for that work?

No, because the hammer and chisels are just tools. But if someone were to make copies of your statue, claim it as their own work, and make a living by selling those copies, how would you feel?

But it's not just about the theft - it's also about the repercussions. The Diku team have cited Medievia as one of the main reasons they stopped working on muds. What do you think the mud community would be like today if there'd never been a Diku mud? And what do you think it might have been like if they'd released Diku II to the public?

And it goes beyond that. I've had to deal with numerous people over the years who have cited Medievia as an example of why they shouldn't have to follow the licence either (including people using my codebases) - and I know I'm not the only one. Quite a few other mud developers have publically mentioned Medievia as the reason why they've decided not to release their code - they don't see why they should bother, if someone's just going to strip out the credits and claim it as their own.

The only people who really benefit are those who run completely custom muds, and don't use anyone else's work. For them, it reduces the viable competition within the community, as less newer stuff is being released.

Just to clear up a little confusion - registration is not a prerequisite to receive copyright for your work. Copyright is a right that is automatically given to an author, irregardless of their national origin.

Both the US and Denmark (where the DIKU team was based) are members of the WCT (WIPO Copyright Treaty) and prior to that to UCC Paris 1971 (1974 for the US), which guarantees copyrighted Danish works protections through local legislation in the US.

Section 104 of title 17 of the US Code states:
"Subject matter of copyright: National origin:
...
(b) Published works. The works specified by sections 102 and 103, when published, are subject to protection under this title if: -
 (2) the work is first published in the United States or in a foreign nation that, on the date of first publication, is a treaty party"

There are some differences in the copyright legislation, but since the EU recently issued a directive (that has been turned into local laws) extending the period of copyright to 70 years after the authors death (some exceptions for photographs and databases apply), the period of copyright is similar for US and Denmark.

DikuMUD is registered with the US Copyright Office. It's copyright number is: TX 4-424-366

The EULA's or Terms of Service that accompany many software, is equally not a contract, but a license to use a piece of software for a specified purpose. Yet, several provisions of EULA's have been overturned (especially dealing with limit of warranty) as they have been found unenforcable or against the local laws. I fail to see how this is materially different from the DIKU license. Hence Medievia could claim that they are complying with the license for some parts, and not complying with others which they feel are unfair, overly restrictive or which contradict local laws. It is then up for a court to decide if that is the case.

I will agree with you though, that the credits part is problematic.

Edit:

I just went back and reread the DIKU license, and now I wonder *why* it could not possibly be seen as a contract. I have raid the ilaw.com.au article that states:
The first of the preconditions could arguably be filled with providing visible credit (at the MUD admins expense) to the DIKU team. There is no requirement that the "something of value" has to be money, nor that it has to be in proportion to the goods received (selling a car for $1 is legal under contract law). The DIKU license differs significantly from what GPL or most open source licenses require (and that's what the ilaw.com.au article deals with) in requiring such favors from the other party.

The second precondition is fulfilled by the licensee sending "a message, by snail-mail or email". Or so I would interpret it, but the differences between contracts and licenses isn't really my strong side.

I'm not sure.  The thing I am saying is that usually, there is a dustributor and a distributee.  The person who receives a copy is not generally the person being held responsible for "distributing".  So, receiving the thing is not a violation of the license, even if one chooses to download it in bad faith, knowing full well they mean to break the agreement, they are not the distributer.  Once the code has changed hands, it doesn't matter anymore about the license, because copyright law simply does not give any rights to check on or control that.  Copyright is about copying, not usage.  Fair use is another issue altogether, but it doesn't even come up here as long as the person who used the code for profit does not then go on to redistribute it in some fashion.

I imagine one sneaky thing one could do is apply to code there, wait to "receieve" the code in some form or fashion, then accuse Medievia of distributing after having broken the license, but as has already been posted as of my reading of your post, the Diku team themselves acknowledge they have no legal leg to stand on to demand a code audit.

I don't know what the legal ramifications are to faking an interest in coding there so that you can then receive code and accuse them of distribution.

KaVir, I've always wondered this: Where did you get your law degree?

You speak in absolute terms as if you have perfect, absolute knowledge of the law and how a case such as this would be ruled upon. Since you do that, you must have formal legal training, right?

Otherwise, you'd just be giving your UNTRAINED OPINION of the law, and therefore should stop declaring in such absolute terms what is right, what is the law, and how things would be decided.

Furthermore, I hope you realize that there is a reason for law schools, bar exams, clerkships, and apprenticing (sometimes known as associate work). The law is more complex than an untrained layman can possibly understand and interpret with any degree of certainty or reliability. In fact, (sad as it may be) lawyers (who happen to be the ones who write the laws as judges, politicians, or legislative assistants to politicians) deliberately craft the law so as to guarantee the importance of their own profession. You would do well to remember that and stop declaring things as if you know them to be absolutely true.

I actually have a law degree and worked as a lawyer for a short time (before I realized I hated it). Even with that formal training and work experience, I am still aware that IP is one of the more complicated areas of law and would not feel comfortable making declarations as absolute as yours.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but the degree of absolute certainty you claim to have is utterly absurd and ridiculous.

DonathinFyre wrote:
Let's assume this is what they asked (which is far from certain. What they asked is what the license says, not what anyone's individual interpretation of they'd like the license to say is.) How are you able to prove that Medievia, for instance, is making a profit?

That's also not their only request, incidentally. They also requested that everyone running DIKU send them an email or snail-mail informing the DIKU authors that they are.

A few people does not the community make. The people who regularly attack Medievia don't have any legitimate claim to community representation. They weren't elected and given that there may be over 100,000 people in the text MUD community, claiming representation on the basis of a couple dozen voices is beyond dubious.

--matt

John wrote:
Isn't there a problem here insofar as you are assuming they are breaking the DIKU license? IP law is very complicated, as many posters (including one with a law degree) have pointed out. The idea that some non-experts on internet forums are capable of accurately predicting the outcome of a legal process involving the DIKU authors challenging Medievia is a little ridiculous. Even when I spoke to an IP expert on the matter, he cautioned that all he was giving me was an opinion based on the facts I gave him. I'm not a lawyer and I'm certainly not a lawyer who is an IP expert, so it's therefore entirely possible that I unintentionally left out facts that are material to the case. I'd have no way of being sure what IS relevant to the case, because I'm not an expert.

--matt

The Disciple wrote:
The legal aspects aren't irrelevant though. If the DIKU teams feels they are being harmed significantly, the usual legal avenues are open to them. If they don't feel they're being harmed sufficiently to sue, then apparently it's a pretty minor issue in their lives.

--matt

DonathinFyre wrote:
You keep claiming this, but fail to provide any evidence. Here's what I see: I see a couple dozen individuals, at most, who attack Medievia (and none of them have any proof or even rudimentary evidence that Medievia makes a profit). On the other hand, I see that Medievia has thousands of people in the MUD community actively supporting them by playing their MUD. The two largest community portals (Mudconnector and Topmudsites) also appear to have no problem with Medievia vis a vis the DIKU license (Medievia is off the TMS voting list for violating the voting list rules, but is still perfectly welcome here according to Synozeer, the site owner.)

Now, it may be that there are thousands of people in the MUD community who are 'against' Medievia, but if there are, well, show them to us instead of continually claiming that the people attacking Medievia are representative of the community.

--matt

This is sad to me, and together with the cryptic remarks of Threshold regarding the law as it pertains to IP it constitutes this sort of culture of fear that pervades the atmosphere for people who want to get into developing muds.

MOO and MUSH codes have for years offered in game coding functionality. I do not know what the state of their licensing is, but I know I hear a lot less about them than I do Diku, and that they appear to offer much broader features, though they admitedly require a lot more of the prospective builder than Diku or Lp would.

No one needs to get all defeatist just because a rather unique attempt to publicly license a work met with a certain amount of failure. IP law may be complex, but it's not so far beyond the lay person that they can't get into the business of mud design and coding without taking on a legal staffer just to protect general copyright. Apache and GPL appear to be viable alternatives for people who want to release their code publicly. I think the secret is not to try to use a copyright license as a prybar to control things other than how your code is copied and distributed. If you want protection on how it is used after it is out of your hands, that's where things appear to get complex, but there's no real reason to worry about that is there, if your intention is to release something for free use?

I don't think you're understanding the dynamics of running a commercial MUD. Outside of MUDs that got their playerbase from the AOL days (Simutronics' games, etc), I think most successful commercial MUDs (including ours) would never have succeeded without the large hobbyist MUD community growing the market in the early and mid 90s, and DIKU was a big part of that. Creating a market is -much- more expensive than plugging into an existing market, and I know Iron Realms would not have had the resources to create a market for text MUDs if one didn't already exist (particularly given that our resources in the early days consisted pretty much only of my time/sweat).

So I think there's an argument to be made that most of us benefited from DIKU's release, including me personally. I just don't see that as particularly relevant though, insofar as the DIKU team apparently doesn't feel it's even really being harmed enough to bother with their very clear legal avenue, and I'd agree. It's hard to point to any real harm they are suffering if the violations people allege are happening are indeed happening.

I also think DIKU II is a non-issue. DIKU was in the right place at the right time, which doesn't diminish its contribution, at all. To presume that DIKU II would have seen any similar success is baseless, particularly given that it's the legacy of work built on DIKU that makes DIKU valuable more than DIKU itself.

--matt

I'm merely speaking from my own personal experience of having attended college for two degrees, one of them being specifically in sociology. I have better things to do than to provide a bibliography every time someone with less education on a certain subject than myself tries to invalidate commonly accepted theories by saying what you have just said.

This thread also is not an "anti-Medievia" thread, and I am not attempting to make it so. Medievia's success has made it the most easily accessable example of a MUD that has received social reproachment for its breaking of the DIKU License. Of course it still manages a certain level of professional success, and it has a playerbase that supports it.

You do not seem to understand what is being said, Matt. The majority of MUDs and Admins may or may not be specifically "anti-Medievia"; I would assume that many, many admins barely even think about Medievia(I never do, really, outside of the forums and DIKU Licensing issues). However, the majority of DIKU-derived MUDs support the spirit of the DIKU License by not attempting to make profit off of the DIKU codebase, and by crediting the original team that created the codebase.

The issue is the DIKU License. Medievia just happens to be the easiest example to draw of the license being broken, and the community responding with a judgement on its ethics.

DonathinFrye,

"Grouping yourself together with Matt and Medievia(arguably the two most accessable symbols of questionable ethics within the MUD-Community), also brings your own opinion and value-set into the line of ethical fire. Your own agenda or angle are fuzzy, but not particularly important to understand in order to further this conversation."

I sort of missed how Matt got into this.  Is there something about the Rapture engine that is also questionable?  Does it have anything to do with Diku?

Or heck, Matt, you may as well clue me in if you're reading.

Mildly off topic, but I think if you do a little deft searching, you will find the history of 'Monopoly" is fraught with this same sort of drama.

He started this particular thread. Read the first few posts - they are all his. He also claims in them that ethics are decided by law(and then goes on to argue about the weak-law-aspects of the DIKU license). I got into the conversation by correcting him on the nature of ethics.

---


Since I apparently have to use the dictionary to show that ethics =! law.

I agree, generally, though ethics can be dissected and studied far more specifically.

I disagree, generally. Yes, this topic has caused flame wars in the past(and probably will again in the future), as many other "hot topics" in the community have. This particular thread has been pretty positive(for the most part, at least), however.

The re-occuring argument here comes down to this. There are those[GROUP A] who would argue that it is not unethical to break the DIKU License, for whatever reason. There are also those[GROUP B] who strongly believe(and they are in the majority) that the DIKU License should be followed on basis of ethics, at the least. So the things that are happening in this re-occuring argument;

1) GROUP A tries to change the status quo of what is socially acceptable in our community, by trying to lobby for the disregard of the DIKU License as something worth abiding by.
2) GROUP B defends the status quo and states that the community believes that the DIKU License should be upheld.

and also;

3) Some of GROUP B decides that it is important to make it vocally known to the rest of the community which MUDs have broken the DIKU License. This is much like the groups in America that publicize when a known or potential child molester has moved into the local area. This approach, in itself, is the cause of debate by some.

Copying is one of the rights.



Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

* To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;

* To prepare derivative works based upon the work;

* To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

* To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

* To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

* In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

So what are you planning to do with the codebase which doesn't infringe any of those rights?  You can't compile it, you can't modify it, you can't make backups, you can't let other people connect to it...

Where did you get your software engineering degree?

Don't have one? Does that mean you're not qualified to discuss programming issues? Should we all ignore your posts on programmnig topics, even if you cite links to articles written by well-known software engineers?

Well, nowadays I understand the issue a lot better, but as I have tried to point out, when I was first trying to make the transition from player to "Dungeon Master" as it were, the issues regarding LP and Diku were pretty arcane to me.

It makes it hard on the prospective "DM" to have to sort all this out, and emotional tension of the subject can lead to a lot of people simply backing off altogether just to be on the safe side. That's the damaging aspect I am trying to point out here.

There are a lot more options nowadays than there were back when too. Coffeemud and MUDMAKER being two.

I'm not saying that - in fact, I specifically asked "What do you think the mud community would be like today if there'd never been a Diku mud?" Without Diku, I believe things would have been very different today, and that's part of my point. Because now we'll never know how much more different it might have been if the Diku team had carried on developing.

My post was from the perspective of the state of muds today, now that the market is saturated with more muds than players know what to choose from. They've certainly got here with the help of Diku (and other hobbyist codebases), but the completely custom muds no longer depend on that continued development. If fewer hobbyest mud developers contribute back into the mud community, it's unlikely to greatly hinder the truly original muds (they write their own code), and may even help them (the competition is less advanced).

I'm a bit confused as you are using a more or less typical set of examples about writings, music, art and so forth. Code copyright is the actual written code itself. I have not seen anything in this example at all to suggest that the activities you list constitute a violation of the copyrights.

The point at which copyright violations would normally be enforced is at the point distributing, performing, etc. Because the violation of the license happens afterward, people's privacy rights and so forth interfere with the enforcement of the copyright license as laid out for Diku.

And I want to be clear again I am not considering doing anything with the codebase. My interest in this is purely as a hobbiest who is worn out with the ongoing effect this debate has on potential builders and game designers.

Maybe I can clarify somewhat, Kavir.

"MUD servers, unfortunately, break the usefulness of the GPL on a technicality. You can simply run a MUD server at home and let other people connect to it. That means you're not giving away a binary of your MUD server. The GPL only requires you to give source to the same people you give a binary to. You never have to give away a binary, so you never give away source. The GPL's intended purpose is foiled. There is no existing license that does for MUD servers what the GPL does for applications. That grudging spread of features has never happened for MUD servers the way it has for GPL-licensed applications and libraries. And so GPL-licensed MUD servers like Shattered World and ScryMUD have languished. "

-http://www.skotos.net/articles/neo3.phtml

Once one has a mud in their grubby little hands, copyright violations, even though they exist, cannot be enforced for similar reasons to why muds do not benefit from the explosion of the open source community. As multi-user platforms, they can be "shared" without doing anything that openly invites legal authorities to violate their rights to privacy, just as when running a mud, there is no reason to distribute the binary and therefore no reason to share improvements, because there is no copying and distribution going on of the code itself, only the added content that is indeed the work of the user of the engine. Anything anyone can legally and easily see about it is not a violation.


Fundamentally, muds are applications, not works of art, and I believe they would need to have patent protection for the sorts of enforcement you appear to believe is granted by copyright. That is not to say that a copyright violation has not occured! It's just that no one, including the owners of Diku themselves, seems to be able to fathom any way to catch the thief due to the "theft" happening after the thing is already given away to begin with, in any real physical sense. They didn't "steal" it until they misused it, but in order to prove the misuse, well, you'd have to access things of theirs that are protected from access without some sort of probable cause.

Given that something as simple as removing a line giving credit to the original team and changing the name of the game appears to be enough to keep the law off their backs, it seems a hopeless cause.

You see?

Probably had the Diku team been more diligent early on, you'd be entirely correct, but at this point I am not so sure that there's anything left that could be done now to enforce the license.

I believe they're breaking the (well) stated intent of the license.

As I said in my very first post, you can do one of two things with the DIKU license. Attempt to use the law (and IMO most likely succeed) to wiggle out of the license so you can break it without repercussions. Or you can follow the intent of the license.

For those who ignore ethics (whatever your personal ethics may be) and supplant them entirely with the law, following an unenforcable license would seem ridiculous. For those who follow a set of ethics that may differ from the law, it might (or might not, depending on your ethics) seem right to follow the intent. Read one of my previous posts to see my opinion in full (in fact, the post you quoted. Why'd you ignore all of it? I thought I was fairly clear on my opinion).

It may be minor now, because of how much they've withdrawn from mudding (although it could be quite major), but that doesn't make it right. They shouldn't (IMO) have been forced to withdraw because of people breaking the intent of their license.

Sueing has advantages and disadvantages. Just because the disadvantages outweighed the advantages, doesn't mean that people breaking the intent of the license would have been some tiny part of their lives.

Oh for crying out loud, please stop trying to redefine this argument. Please. Make a poll if you must, but no-one who defends the DIKU license accepts your interpretation of it. So stop trying to push it forward.

I've often wondered why there is such an outcry in defense of the DIKU license in the MUD community while at the same time we routinely ignore the IP rights of authors.

How are the majority of the Star Wars, Star Trek, Forgotten Realms, Wheel of Time, World of Darkness, Dragon Ball, Buffy - The Vampire Slayer, Firefly and I have no idea how many other MUDs seemingly unaffected by the copyright and IP issues that seem to run rampant in the DIKU world? Why is it that the MUD Community doesn't appear to care about these potential abuses of copyright?

It seems we have two sets of standards - one for code and one for published works. Should that really be the case. For those of you who jump at any chance to point out those who may violate the DIKU license, why do you limit yourself to the IP rights of only that one group? Its possible I've missed posts regarding other IP issues or that there may be some special "use for on-line gaming" clause that I'm not familiar with, and if that's the case I'd like to hear a little about that as well.

Safe Journies
Sombalance

That's a cool insight.

It has to do with fair use, and you can find some interesting things on Wikipedia about fan art and so forth as well.

Basically, I think the makers of such works that are being used as the foundation of muds realize that the muds are nothing so much as free advertising, and that taking legal action would alienate more people than it would cause to buy their product.

To toss a monkey wrench into the discussion,



"How did the situation arise? And where should we go from here? In Math You Can’t Use, Ben Klemens draws on his experience as both a programmer and an economist to tackle these critical issues. The answer to the first question, he explains, is simple: while patent laws are intended to apply to physical machines, software is something quite different. Software is not just another machine, and it is not Hamlet with numbers. It is a functional hybrid that can be duplicated at no cost, it is legible by computers in some forms and by humans in others, and it has a unique mathematical structure. All of these facts have to be taken into consideration in designing an appropriate intellectual property regime."

Some, it seems, would question the ethics in applying copyright to software in the same way it applies to works of art.

Matt and the staff of Medievia are seen by certain zealots on these forums as the ultimate evil, and no statement, fact or reasonable debate will sway them. I believe Donathin Frey's statement in which I alledgedly group myself with Matt and Medievia, was intended to shut me up, as apparently posters are expected to practice selfcensorship so not to upset the line of the zealots. Failure to do so, will bring your ethical world under scrutiny (or to quote Donathin, it "brings your own opinion and value-set into the line of ethical fire" if you defend, even from a legal standpoint something which differs from what the "text mmorpg-community" (as they see and define) find acceptable), and you will be called a liar by a TMS moderator.

Really, all these guys would need is a godhatesmedievia.com domain, and they'd be just like Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church - equally sticking their noses where it doesn't belong, and enforcing their views as the ultimate truth on everybody else. Copyrights, ethics and legalities aside, it's amazing that the same individuals are allowed to wage a crusade year after year in a public forum such as this, turning the community ever more bitter while driving away anybody who doesn't feel the same way these individuals do.

From the Wikipedia link Shane provided - Fan art is usually a violation of the original creator's copyright, but since it is usually intended as a tribute, the copyright holders tend to tolerate (and oftentimes even encourage) it, though some artists will not tolerate fanart of their creations being sold for a profit.

From this, it seems clear that MUDS based on published works would be in violation of copyright which the original copyright holder has decided to take no action to halt. Which seems very similar to the entire DIKU situation - at least from where I stand. If the MUD community wants to enforce one - shouldn't it enforce all?

Sombalance
-who now hopes there isn't a special hell for people who quote from the Wikipedia.

I didn't realize Matt had anything to do with Medievia. I thought he was Iron Realms related.

Well, I'd submit for your consideration that, while the "free gift" of Diku is not as free as some have tried to make it out, it was still a pretty darned admirable release of a lot of hard work under the idea that people would use it in the spirit intended.

Another difference is that fan art is not for profit. It makes a big difference whether you are just a bunch of people enjoying material that has a copyright or if you are using someone elses material for gain as if it were your own.

One of the resolutions to the whole affair would be for the Diku team to come out publicly and let people off the hook just as the aforementioned authors have done. I doubt they have any more intention of doing that though than they do of going ahead and trying to take legal action against Medievia.

You are correct, there is no formal link between Matt and Medievia. Medievia is hated by some for the DIKU licensing issue, Matt (and IR) is hated (or strongly disliked, if you will) for their stance of being a "free-to-play" game. This forum is full of threads about these two issues - as a matter of fact the same zealots have turned basically any thread that mentions IR or Medievia during the past few years, into a total flamewar.

Hrm.

Well, I find myself largely in agreement with Kavir and Donathin about the ethics of using the Diku code, if not Kavir's understanding of the legal situation, but I am at a loss as to how free-to-play is unethical. From a player standpoint, I am always leary of a game where people buy in game advantages, thus my near total lack of interest in paybased muds personally, but unethical?

Hmm.

It's pretty simple - if a Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, or Wheel of Time/etc MUDs attempted to make a profit off of their game, they would legally be required to buy a license that would allow them to make money off of the author's original works. They would also be likely to pay royalties.

As long as your goal isn't to make money off of someone else's original works without their consent, it seems that the text-gaming community does not consider it to be unethical.

Nhl, I am no zealot. I am not against commercial games, I am not against free games, I am not against Medievia. And my commentary was, of course, not meant to shut you up. Until you resorted to name-calling, we had gone thus far without resorting to flaming in a conversation that is prone to flamewars.

I will restate what I said, and again use a very recognizable comparison to re-enforce. If you seek to change the social acceptance and attitude towards MUDs that break the DIKU License through forum lobbying, you are more than welcome. If everything stayed the same, there would never be any progression. But, as this community largely feels very strongly about the DIKU Licensing issue, you should expect before you make even your first post that by siding with others whose acts have already been judged by the online society as unethical, that you put your own motives and opinions into ethical fire.

I'm not judging you, beyond the fact that you insinuated that I am some sort of zealot. If I were to politically lobby against women's rights in the workplace, because I honestly believed that, genetically, they could not do as well as men in certain fields of work - I would be ready for and even expect the social backlash, as I recognize that my point-of-view(whether or not it is valid) would be vehemetly disagreed with and possibly even viewed as unethical.

In summary, if you are prepared to lobby for a change of the social status quo, know that when you prod at a sensitive issue that you should be ready for backlash(possibly flames in the case of an online society). If you cannot accept that, then(as you are told if you desire to become a political lobbyist) you probably do not feel strongly enough about your opinion to really want to change the status quo.

---

Back to the thread itself, though - all of this talk of ethics and sociology originates from my response to Matt's statement that law should be the pencil that draws the ethics line for online code. I personally believe that the DIKU License should be respected for what DIKU has given the community, but either way - I have mostly just been using the laws of sociology(particularly online sociology, which tends to be unique and is very interesting to me) to explain the issue.

I know this might be out of context, but has anyone from the original DIKU team actually brought a case against any said license violators and took them to court?

-- M

To be fair, what you seemed to have said was that Medievia AND Matt were both icons of unethical behavior, and it did seem as if you were then telling Nhl that he was going to suffer a little guilt by association in taking up any argument in their defense.

As I said earlier, I am somewhat confused how Matt is some sort of a symbol for unethical behavior.

I have a feeling there was a miscommunication somewhere along the way, but the wording of that post did come across as somewhat inflamatory, at least to me, even though I am not connected with either Nhl nor Matt.  Matt seems to have taken the accusation without even acknowledging it.

This right here... Mat and Medievia, both symbols of unethical behavior. And then the bit about questioning nhl's values.

Weird. Didn't post, then double post. Sorry.

So, if someone created a new MUD using the DIKU code, but stripped out all of the credit information related to DIKU no one would complain as long as they don't make money off of it?

I went back and reread the posts in this forum and I think you (DonathinFrye) were probably on the money when you said
It does make DIKU sound like the little brother you need to protect from the bullies, but it sort of explains the level of intensity applied to this issue.

Another thing I've wondered is why does the DIKU team have to sue for copyright infringement? Base on the blue screen at the beginning of all the DVD's I watch, it is a federal crime. Couldn't they as the original copyright holders, file a claim?

Sombalance

"Though many jurisdictions impose criminal penalties for certain blatant acts of copyright infringement and may try to stop certain infringing imports at the border, copyright infringement is still mainly prosecuted through private lawsuits by the copyright holder or their exclusive licensees. When successful, these lawsuits will typically impose monetary damages against the infringer as well as injunctions against future infringing uses."

Also, I found this interesting.

"The failure of a copyright holder to bring a timely lawsuit against known infringers may later block such a claim by establishing an implied license, as may other acts or omissions that could informally signal consent to use the work."

Simply because the majority of copyright cases are handled privately, it doesn't mean that is the only option. In a situation like this, where "no profit" is part of the issue, a private lawsuit for monatary damages would probably not be productive and would be expensive for the original copyright holders.

I suspect (but do not know one way or the other) that the DIKU team is also limited to not profitting from the DIKU code. which may impact their ability to consider monatary damages in a civil case.

Sombalance

DonathinFyre wrote:
So in other words, you don't have any evidence but since it is "commonly accepted" none is required. I'm curious in what field of social science you believe that the assertion that the MUD community supports your personal interpretation of the Diku license is commonly accepted?

The real answer is 'none' of course, because there's never been any real research on this question, and thus there is no real evidence for it.

Let's not forget notifying the DIKU authors that you're running a DIKU. You and someone else (Emil) have asserted that the majority of DIKU-derived MUDs follow the license or the spirit of the license, but nobody's yet demonstrated that they've audited the majority of MUDs and somehow discovered proof that all of them notified the DIKU creators.

I'm also not aware of any proof that Medievia, or any other MUD supposedly violating the profit clause, is turning a profit. Do you have some? Have you seen their financial statements? If so, please, share them with us. Share the evidence with us.

In the real world, evidence is required, and your assertions don't appear to be backed up by any but your favorite type "common knowledge." Sounds like the sort of common knowledge that held the earth was flat to me, though no doubt you're going to reply that my refusal to recognize this "common knowledge" makes me unethical or something.

--matt

Sometimes there's just no point in responding to silly accusations and dignifying the attacker thereby.

--matt

No. Which probably says a lot about how much they actually care about this issue or how much they think they've been harmed.

--matt

Likely some district attorney, or the Attorney General of the US(!?) would have to sign on to make it a criminal prosecution if the mud is based here. Just getting here to make the official accusation might be more trouble than it is worth to the Diku team.

I guess my point was that it appears that by and large the blue screen on DVD's is just a scare tactic, but that the majority of the time it doesn't happen that way.