Re: [Enigma-devel] Copyrights

[Daniel Heck]

Sorry to open this can of worms again...


> Sccording to the FSF nethack is officialy gnu. Legally there is a
> small but non-zero chance that enigma may ve violating  the oxyd
> copyright. That would come from the laws stating that reproduction
> including manual reproduction of existing woks are owned by the
> original copyright owners. that is to say you can just duplicate a
> painter's painting by hand and sell it, nor can you retypea book and
> sell it. That said, I don't belive that applies directly to computer
> applications but I'm not a copyright lawyer.

Neither am I, and I think sooner or later we will have to ask the GNU or
the debian-legal people.  I just noticed that rocks & diamonds was
removed from debian 3.0r-2 due to license problems with content from
commercial sources.  I haven't been able to find more details so far,
but I dearly hope Enigma won't go the same road.

[Btw, I just found a few details: it seems the author of
rocks-n-diamonds simply copied some of the graphics and sounds from a
commercial Boulder Dash game, so we're definitely in a better legal
position.]

The real question here is: how does copyright law apply to ideas like
level designs?  I don't think we will have a problem with the graphics
or the game itself looking similar to Oxyd.  

> > The Sokoban levels are copyrighted by people I contacted and asked
> > for permission to include their levels into Enigma.
> > I think these levels cannot be GPLed.
> 
> they can be gpled but only through a joint agreement by the copyright
> owner and the creator of the level file. If they are not gpled then
> things get VERY ugly.

> The problem arises with the concept of libraries and programs as it
> related to the enigma.

Not necessarily a problem, since it's always possible to explicitly
allow this sort of "linking".  It's only a matter of changing a few
lines in the COPYING file.

> I would assume this is the case so distribution of the sokoban levels
> is straightforward. You cannot distribute the sokban levels as part of
> the enigma package as the pakage as a whole is under the gpl. However
> you can make it a second 'extention' package that is distributed under
> a different licence. You can also package the extention package in an
> installer (such as the windows installer) as long as you give the user
> the option not to install the 'extention' and make it clear that it is
> a different package and is licenced under a different licence.

In fact, that may turn out to be necessary, likewise for the Oxyd and
Esprit level packs.  But we're at a point where we need the advice of
experts...

Daniel