Anyone can, but you can easily check and see if someone has.

Your understanding of laches seems flawed, as I pointed out earlier, and gave source for, if you are still interested.

I've heard this argument before, but I just don't buy it.

Is this less of a crime than the guy who steals the $200 tv from someone's house? By what criteria do you consider this to miniscule? From my understanding (which is far from complete), the amount of money made by either party on the product is not a factor in copyright law.

Has anyone actually been involved in a copyright dispute that resulted in some level of criminal charges being brought forth? Is the process of filing a claim drastically more involved that filing a claim for theft of private property?

Sombalance

Actually it was me who pointed it out to you, as something you might find of interest, as I felt it was a more reliable source than Wikipedia.  The "laches" principle is a potential issue, certainly, but it's not one you can easily rely on one way or another: "The determination is very fact-intensive, based on the actions (or lack of action) of the copyright owner, the amount of delay, and the prejudice worked against the infringer by the delay".

Kavir, I based my assumption on this part of the DIKU license:
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.
Not knowing what the agreement between the DIKU team and the university might be, I guessed (and I could be wrong) that it might also limit there ability to profit from the code.


And, thanks for the link to the article. It helped to add some light to this topic.

Sombalance

Thats an incredibly ignorant attitude to have towards the Denmark team Sol. Especially when you should consider the fact at how different your life and game could very well of been if it hadn't been for this "engine" that your husband used to create it with.

The wording of the licence would imply that, but whatever that agreement was, it's the Diku team who hold the copyright. And the copyright holder is the one with the exclusive rights, unless they've signed them away (although not even that is permanent).

I have to confess that whenever this topic comes up, I normally only see the same group of people commenting on it. I would be hard pressed to come up with 20 names that spoke strongly for or against perceived violations of the DIKU license. That doesn't mean there aren't a majority supporting one side or the other, its just that I couldn't calculate it from what I've seen.

Sombalance

The engine it was built on is what led to its eventual growth into what it is today. It has everything to do with what it is today. Other advanced DIKU-derived MUDs, like Aardwolf or Clandestine, do not remove the credits to the DIKU Team, despite their far-reaching innovations and added code. It is because they acknowledge and honor the fact that DIKU has made their MUDs possible.

Your statement was that it would be 3 years after they shut down before Medievia would be safe.

"Thus if Medievia were to shut down today, three years from now they would indeed be untouchable."

That was the only comment you had to add to the text you quoted at the time. Forgive me please if I misunderstood it, but given your ongoing stance that there is really no question but that the license is fully enforceable, I took that to mean exactly what you said, which is to say that laches, time limits and all would only apply 3 years after Medievia shut down.

You did not seem to acknowledge at all that simply waiting the Diku team out might render their license harder to enforce. In fact, you have repeatedly stated that the license is always and only the sole protection for Medievia and that if it were found to be in some way flawed, all rights would simply revert back to the Diku team, haven't you?

My understanding of laches is that this is not true. Is that correct in your estimation as well?

There is more social evidence than just the number of people who speak of the subject in forums. There are various forms of social evidence, and the most telling form is perhaps the fact that nearly all DIKU-derived MUDs honor the DIKU License.

Sombalance wrote:
If you steal a tv from me, I no longer have that tv and thus have suffered the loss of the tv. If you don't put my name up on the login screen of DIKU, how do the DIKU authors suffer? I'm not arguing that their suffering is a requirement for copyright law to be enforced. I'm just pointing out that if they felt they were actually being harmed, perhaps they'd be interested in taking legal action. As it is, they pretty clearly don't care much.

-matt

This seems a bit extreme. If someone once worked on a DIKU mud, and then later produced a new MUD based on original source code (all new code typed into new modules) it seems as if even then they would have a hard time convincing others that they are not a DIKU based MUD.

It isn't a very pleasant thought.

At what point does something stop being a derivative and become an original work?

Sombalance

My statement was that if they were to shut down today, three years from now they would be untouchable. What I quoted before it doesn't disagree with that, it just adds further possible scenarios which even the linked site agrees are highly dependent on each particular case.

Actually my stance is to disagree with the various people who keep claiming that the licence is unenforcable. I believe there are many other factors which could sway the case in favour of the Diku team.

Oh I acknowledge that that could make it harder to enforce - what I disagree with is the automatic assumption that by waiting for so long, there is no way the Diku team could take action. They've not done themselves any favours, but that doesn't mean Medievia is automatically off the hook.

I've stated that the Diku licence is your 'defence' against copyright infringement, yes. The Diku licence is the thing that gives permission to use the copyrighted work (there is no concept or "reverting" rights - no rights have been signed over).

No. Laches is a very specific principle which depends on many different factors. It could work in favour of either side.

Yes, exactly. There's no evidence that most people in the community care at all. A couple people have taken to claiming that the fact that many DIKU muds follow the license (nevermind that they have no proof of that, given that they aren't able to verify whether the MUD operators sent an email/snail mail to the DIKU creators notifying them of use) means that the community must be against Medievia.

That's an extremely flawed argument, of course, and leads to one supposing that, by way of an example, people who don't practice homosexual behavior feel homosexual behavior is wrong. Some of them probably do, but the fact that they don't practice homosexual behavior says absolutely nothing about whether they support or oppose it.

In other words, a group of people doing A doesn't say anything about whether that group of people objects to or supports B.

--matt

When you delete it and start again from scratch.

Kavir,

Your parsing leaves a little to be desired for my comprehension, but I think I understand you now, except to say that laches, if it comes into play at all, always works in favor of the infringer since without the concept of laches the rights would simply remain intact.  It is specifically aimed at those who "sleep on their rights".

This relates very favorably to Medievia, in my opinion, because it has to do with all the mass of accumulated work that has been done there that people continually bring up but that Diku license supporters seem to dismiss.  In essence, what laches says is that it is unfair for you to stand by and watch while someone puts in countless hours of labor into something and then ruin their work by enforcing your rights years and years later.

"It is generally allowed by a court when a defendant could reasonably have believed that the plaintiff was not going to exercise his or her legal rights and acted on that belief to his or her detriment."







It does not appear to me to be a concept that cuts both ways, though it can indeed be a fairly weak twig to hang your hat on legally.

Yes, but it's not at all clear-cut, depending on many different factors - the result would be in favour of one side or the other, depending on whether the court applied laches.

It'd certainly be one possible defence, although it wouldn't be helped by the fact that Medievia claimed repeatedly to have been rewritten completely from scratch.  It would then need to be proven that the Diku (or Merc, if they were the ones suing) team had known that Medievia was really based on their work for all those years (Laches is an affirmative defense - the burden of proving laches is on the defendant)

Yup. Okay now I get you.

Take care!