[Freeciv-Dev] Re: the lack of respect for cloners

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Andreas Røsdal wrote:
> > > Game rules are ideas, and are as such not protected by copyright.
...
> I'd like some explanation about this, (preferably from someone other
> than Brandon.) I'm just translating the norwegian localization,
> but could I potentially be violating Civ2's copyrights by
> translating game rules/"ideas" in Freeciv?

What is certain is that copyright does not cover ideas. Game mechanics are
just that, ideas. Simple example, in Norway the most common version of
'Monopoly' is Damm's 'Millionær' - it is just a clone under a new name.

Once upon a time, 'Monopoly' used to be protected by a patent, which can
cover specific implementations of ideas. The name 'Monopoly' is a
registered trademark. 'Civilization' is also a registered trademark, which
we acknowledge on our homepage.

There is a long standing tradition of cloning in the game world. Everyone
does it. The legal gray area is our use of civ1 and civ2's tech/unit/govt
trees. While they contain nothing that by itself is covered by copyright -
since you cannot copyright common names and concepts - it may be argued
that the sum of them fall under a compilation or database copyright.

Compilation and database laws are still a young field in copyright law,
with few established cases to go by. Such laws vary from country to
country. Freeciv is in fact older than many of these laws. So whether we
might infringe or not is not easy to say for certain, but I am fairly
confident that we do not.

However, since so much time has gone by since the owners of the relevant
copyrights must have known about us, we are almost certainly immune to any
claims of damages. Not that anyone would ever sue us - we do not have the
kind of money that would make that worthwhile ;) but instead what could
happen is that the potential copyright holder(s) might send a cease and
desist letter. If this happens, we will just have to rewrite our rulesets
and drop civ1/2 support, since we are not able to finance a court case.

All this is of course IANAL, so take it with a grain of salt.

  - Per