    Intellectual Property and Dead Souls

    Updated 27 December 2006

    When I began work on Dead Souls, I hadn't
    thought that I'd have much to worry about, in terms
    of intellectual property, or IP. Little did I know!

    	There have been some areas of concern for
    folks in this regard, and this article is intended
    to clarify my actions and intent when it comes to
    Dead Souls and IP.

    First, let's establish some basics:

    Basic concepts of copyright in the US as relevant to MUDs

    The main DS IP issues break down into
    four main categories:

    The legal status of Dead Souls

    The controversy over Cygwin GPL violation

    The controversy over Mudmagic and GPL revocation

    The question of MudOS distribution

    Basic concepts of copyright in the US as relevant to MUDs

    What copyright is.
    When copyright obtains.
    Some limitations established.
    The meaning of consideration.
    The meaning of licensing.
    The nature of revocation.
    Contracts and revocation.
    Public domain.
    Disclaimer.
    Discussion.

    1) Copyright is a feature of US law explicitly outlined in the body
    of the US Constitution. It is intended to protect a person's right
    to their own creative works in order to provide incentive for
    people to enrich society through their creative efforts.

    2) The moment you write something original, it obtains copyright. It
    is not necessary to "register" it. When you place it into tangible
    form, you have copyright. For example, this web page is copyrighted
    by me, even if you don't see my name on it, or a date, or that
    (c) symbol. If you have a document you didn't write, you must
    assume it is copyrighted and treat it as such, until you know
    for sure that it is otherwise.

    3) When you have copyright on something, it means that nobody can
    distribute it, or a work derived from it, without your express permission.
    It doesn't matter whether they make money or not. The commercial
    use isn't the issue. The copying is the issue. That's why it's
    "copyright" not "commerceright".

    4) "Consideration" is a legal term which roughly means an exchange
    of value. If you give me money (or promise to do so) to use my lawnmower,
    that is consideration and really, it isn't "borrowing", because
    we've entered into a "contract" involving the use of the lawnmower.

    5) "Licensing" is a legal term for allowing people to use your work.
    There are many kinds of licensing. If consideration is provided to
    secure the licensing, this can constitute a contract. The difference
    between "license" and "contract" is important. Note they are
    not mutually exclusive.

    6) With the exception of something called "estoppel", a copyright
    holder can revoke a license at any time, if that license is not
    contractual. If you borrow my lawnmower, I can demand to have it
    back any time I want.

    Yes, this means that GPL can be revoked.

    Please re-read that. It is correct.

    If you write a program called LeetFooProg, and GPL it, and put it
    on SourceForge, you can then go back the next day and tell everyone
    who downloaded that program for free that you're revoking GPL and they
    can't use it any more.

    This is a concept that is very, very upsetting to some people,
    because it means that a lot of the software they use (in many
    cases, all of the software they use) can go away in a puff of smoke,
    if the copyright holder goes crazy and decides to revoke license.

    In theory, Linus Torvalds could wake up tomorrow, insist that
    the Linux kernel license is now null, and a lot of people would have
    to then go use some other operating system.

    In the context of a mud, that means that if someone builds some
    stuff on your mud for free, then decides to revoke your license to have
    it in your mud, you are legally obligated to remove it.

    However upsetting this concept is, that's just how it works.

    Some people find this 100% intolerable, because it means that they
    have to deal with the fact that people over whom they think
    they are "boss" actually have authority over features of their mud.
    If you are among those people, don't flame me because you wish
    things were different. Change your ways or change your mud so that
    you are no longer exposed.

    For others, it's just unacceptable that the creator of their
    codebase could, on a whim, show up and tell them they have to use
    some other codebase. If you run Diku, and any one of the Diku
    copyright holders showed up and told you to stop using his material,
    you need to do so. Period. For some mud owners, that's a pretty
    scary thought.

    7) If the license is contractual, it may not be possible for the
    copyright holder to revoke it. If we enter into a bargain for you to
    use my lawnmower for a single week for $10, I cannot then insist on
    getting my lawnmower back before the term of the contract expires.
    A new contract could be required for that, depending on controlling
    legal custom. Similarly, if I pay you to use LeetFooProg, it may
    be (depending on the wording of the contract and the applicable
    jurisdiction) that you cannot revoke my right to use it.

    This is a bit squishier. Your municipality may, for example,
    have an overriding Lawnmower Act that supercedes any authority
    outlined in a contract within its jurisdiction. Similarly, you
    may be a US citizen party to a contract with a foreign national
    whose locality invalidates your licensing expectations.

    In general, though, the exchange of consideration tends to give
    the user somewhat more protection from arbitrary license
    revocation (but read that EULA!).

    8) A circumstance that obviates the need for license worries
    is the use of material which is public domain. Public domain
    material does not have a copyright holder, and is therefore
    free from copyright-based limitations on its use.

    Public domain material is also non-copyrightable. Nobody gets
    a second bite at that apple. Once it's free, it's free. If
    you add some chapters to the Cratylus, and make some aesthetic
    alterations to the original text (redactions perhaps), then
    you hold copyright to the additions, but not to the original
    text itself. That original still belongs to everyone.

    Of course, this assumes you're altering the original ancient
    Greek text or using Jowett, since an English-language version
    of it could be a copyrighted translation. Never assume your
    source material is PD, ph.D.'s.

    9) Things are much, much more complex than it might seem
    from the above information. Intellectual property law is
    a somewhat involved subject. The preceding points are an
    introduction to my understanding of how it works relevant to
    people interested in running a mud. Before you make decisions
    related to copyright, be sure to consult a lawyer with
    expertise specific to the legal aspects of the nature of
    that decision.

    10) You may register disagreement with the preceding points
    at the lpmuds.net discussion forum for it. Please note that
    impoliteness is not appreciated and flames are moved to a
    flame section.

    The legal status of Dead Souls

    The original, not-touched-by-me version is 1.1pre, and it is public domain.

    There is a cleaned up version of 1.1pre, which is called 1.1. It is public domain.

    There is a modernized, updated version called 2.1.1. It is NOT public domain.

    A new public domain version has been released, composed of most of what
    is in 2.1.1. It is Dead Souls II.

    For complete details on all the versions, see this page.

    The controversy over Cygwin GPL violation

    	In early 2006, I released a version of Dead Souls
    packaged with a Windows-compatible executable. This let
    people run Dead Souls on their Windows computer.

    	For this to work, it needed some special files
    called "dll's" to enable the executable to run on computers
    which did not have Cygwin software. These Cygwin dll's
    are provided by Cygwin under GPL. I included these dll's
    in the Dead Souls release.

    	What I did not understand at the time is that
    distributing the dll's without access to their source code
    was not permitted by GPL.

    	I provided access to the source code as required,
    and the controversy subsided for a while.

    	Then there was a new ruckus because the Windows
    compatible executable had been compiled using non-GPL
    source, but linked with GPL libraries, which in the view
    of some people is not permitted by GPL.

    	So then with the great help of a Dead Souls
    stalwart named Saquivor, I ditched Cygwin entirely and used
    MinGW to create a Win32 native executable that can be
    run on windows without the taint of GPL.

    	That's it. That's the whole story. Some folks have
    chosen to inflate this event into allegations of Dead Souls
    containing "stolen" code, which is as baffling to me as it
    is untrue.

    The controversy over Kyndig and GPL revocation

    In early 2006 there was a big hullabaloo over the
    actions of a person known as Kyndig. He banned some
    people from his site, which caused a lot of displeasure.

    Much of Kyndig's unsavory behavior and his policies
    were discussed. After examining the
    available information, I determined that I did not
    want to be associated with Kyndig. I decided to pull
    Dead Souls from his repository, and I then revoked his privilege
    to host it, for good measure.

    This evoked a howl of protest from someone named Tyche,
    who spent some effort in excoriating my action as unacceptable.

    The ensuing flames unfortunately obscured the issue. For
    some time I assumed Tyche simply had a problem with me personally,
    due to the fact that he had been the one rudely hounding me
    about copyright stuff before (he'd been the prime mover of
    the Cygwin controversy and went so far as getting DS removed
    from MudMagic back then) and due to the rather unhinged
    and disproportionate bombast of his assaults.

    Turns out the bigmouth had a point, though.

    When I revoked Kyndig's right to host Dead Souls, I had
    assumed I couldn't really do that. Like many people even today,
    I thought that once a set of bits is GPL'ed, it's
    beyond the reach of the whims of the author. However,
    as my understanding of copyright law gained in sophistication,
    I saw that my action wasn't just an empty gesture of
    repudiation. It was an act with actual legal ramifications,
    potentially invalidating the licensing on all GPL'ed distributions
    of Dead Souls.

    Upon arriving at this understanding, I reversed my policy
    on Kyndig's privilege to host Dead Souls (not that I expect
    him to avail himself of it!). It is no longer a question of
    my interest in who does or does not host the files, but
    rather a question of whoever wants to host them being
    subject to the packaged license and applicable laws.

    Unfortunately, the preceding flames had already degenerated
    into ad hominem stuff, and it provided occasion for people
    who disagreed with me on *anything* to then raise the
    specter (purely FUD) of me running around revoking licenses.

    Entirely unfounded, from my perspective, but how could
    a potential Dead Souls adopter know for sure? The harm was
    already done.

    I think that the FUD is now effectively mitigated by
    the release of Dead Souls II, a public domain version
    which is entirely immune from my theoretical revocations.
    The fact is that it would be entirely against my interests
    to go about doing what Tyche and KaVir have implied
    or suggested I might, but if you can't stand even the
    slightest chance that I might wake up, lose my marbles,
    and start a revocation jihad, then you can just use
    Dead Souls II and sleep sound as a baby, knowing your
    mud is entirely free of my caprice.

    The question of MudOS distribution

    	The question of MudOS distribution hinges partly on
    tradition. It's been a generally accepted custom to include
    driver source code with lib distributions, and this is
    because sometimes getting a vanilla driver to run one's
    lib is not easy, and the idea of a distribution is to
    help others get going somewhat conveniently. Including
    the lib-customized source for the driver is a logical
    and widely approved-of policy.

    	However, it's good to get permission anyway,
    when possible. I emailed Marius, the current maintainer, for
    his permission to bundle MudOS with Dead Souls. I got
    no reply, but I came upon this: Marius tells someone off

    	In that document you can see that Marius would
    have been happy to let someone not only copy MudOS, but
    actually take it over completely and lead it forward...
    if only they had emailed him first. The key part of this
    document is where he states,

    "That's all it would have taken to get my blessing, either
    implicitly as a result of my silence (which is most likely
    what you would have gotten), or explicitly by my saying so
    in response."

    	This is about as clear a signal as I was likely
    to get as to how the copyright holder felt about the
    general distribution (indeed, maintainership) of MudOS.

    	Then, thanks to the sharp looking out of Skout, I
    was able to find Marius and we had the following conversation.
    The only editing done here was excluding the noisy "Joe enters the room."
    type messages, and formatting for clarity:

    You tell Verbal: howdy. i'm the maintainer of dead souls, and i'm told you
    maintain mudos. i'd like to ask for your explicit blessing in what I'm doing:
    http://dead-souls.net/articles/copyright.html#mudos (this url edited on 27DEC2006 -ed.)

    Verbal tells you: Yep, that's me.  I am also Marius of mudos.org
    Verbal tells you: I got your email, but unfortunately my response bounced.
    Verbal tells you: I'm fine with you distributing the MudOS driver bundled with Dead Souls.
    Verbal tells you: I would ask that you contribute any patches you've applied to the mudos-patches mailing list, though.

    You tell Verbal: sure thing. sorry i had to idle, visiting a friend in the hospital
    You tell Verbal: i'll submit the diffs for sure...i'd just thought the list was dead
    You tell Verbal: if you don't mind, i'll use a transcript of our conversation
    on my webpage, so anyone in doubt can have their mind set at ease.

    Verbal tells you: no problem.  all of the lists are still alive, though there's
    not much traffic.
    Verbal tells you: go ahead and use the transcript.  that's cool.

    	To the best of my ability to tell, it really is the
    man himself I was talking to. Anyway, I hope it was, because
    if it wasn't and he reads this, he might get awful pissed!

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