First off, I want to echo the whole "rotten tomatoes" thing.
Finally, we're having a discussion about license and copyright that isn't just baaaaawing and people saying hateful stuff to score points.
Release has nothing to do with copyright.
Actually, at least under US law, it
would matter to a judge. Your situation's not quite that simple, and copyright law gets rather complicated-
how a thing gets included in a work matters.
What you guys are doing, technically, is that you're game
publishers. And CA is a published work, under the law.
If we look at the whole process, and start with the original coder, then when it's on their machine, it's copyright-protected. There
are copyrights when you make a work, in most countries. All well and good.
However, given the way that you're doing things... then that coder uploads that code via SVN and commits it- which, given that you guys allow the general public to get your commit versions, is, in effect, publishing, as the law understands it.
In that context, that coder is now
publishing a derivative work- so the code sitting on the coder's machine was originally copyrighted, but the code as it is in CA is probably not, because it's part of a derivative work.
Making more sense now? I keep talking about releasing stuff separate from CA, because it matters, in terms of how the law applies here.
If it's still not making sense yet, let me use an analogy, maybe it will help.
Let's say that you found this great cookbook, full of wonderful recipes. You and your friends love this book, and want to add new recipes to it, and give it to the world, for free. That is illegal. It violated the copyright of the original author, who wanted to make money on the book. That you're wonderful people who just want to give everybody those wonderful recipes
does not matter.
If your group just makes these new recipe pages, and sticks them into this copyrighted cookbook, your recipes aren't copyrighted to you or your friends, because you've published a derivative work, and you cannot apply for protection on a derivative work, at least in the US (different countries have different standards about where the line is drawn, but this is almost certainly illegal everywhere).
If, however, you just put your recipes online, and some other party took them, edited them, and included them in the cookbook... well,
they would still be publishing a derivative work, but you and your friends would still retain your copyrights. And you, your friends
and the original author of the cookbook could all sue for copyright infringement.
Does that make more sense now? I'm out of homely analogies at the moment.
Atari did not magically lose copyright, when your team started making CA, and its copyrights have precedence over yours. If you act as a publisher, then you are publishing a derivative work. Using a SVN and distributing public builds like CA does is publishing, as the law understands it.
This is why the discussion over what an "aggregate" is matters so much. It effects what the CA team could do that would actually be legal.
If we see games / mods as "mere aggregates" of various pieces of code that just happen to come together and produce a given result (working game design) but could be used in other ways, then all CA would need to change, to protect the coders' work, is the way that the work is included and published. It would still probably not be entirely legal, but it'd be a lot closer.
If we do not agree on that, then I see no way for anybody to apply for GPL protection, regardless of how it was published, unless the entire game is GPL. Which CA obviously
cannot be, at this time.
Do you see why I wanted to drop this now? It's not a happy situation, and I'd rather just ignore it, or "pretend", as I said earlier. I saw Quantum's remarks, and I assume he thought I was being snarky or something- I'm not, I really
did just want to drop that, I don't want anybody on CA's team to be under the impression I'm on a witch hunt, because I'm not- I'd rather just get one issue dealt with at a time, and just leave these issues which are specific to the copyright-infringing mods to one side, because they're yucky and I think people will get their feelings hurt if people aren't very careful about it.
For now, I'd rather get this discussion to mainly be about how we're going to determine what a "mere aggregation" is. Because regardless of what is determined about CA's status, we need this for the future.
TA IP free does not just mean not using the exact files used by Cavedog, it also means not using any derivatives of TA's content. The T1 core remakes are still highly derivative of the original TA designs and as such not TA IP free.
Exactly. It's not "different" when it's a design based on movie stills from a copyrighted work, people. That's still derivative! Quit even trying to argue that- something like Spherebot is not infringing... Mr. D's remakes are, and pretty darn deliberately so.
Until every unit in CA is renamed, all sounds are removed, all models look substantially different (
enough to be non-derivative, which is a gray area... if you want to see how far I think you need to go, maybe I should show "before" and "after" shots of the Resistance mecha we put into P.U.R.E.) and you're not using OTA GAF files (conversion into bitmaps doesn't change their status) CA is obviously and clearly a derivative work.
And, don't forget... CA was based on BA, which was based on AA, which includes copyrighted content from lots of people who never worked for Cavedog. Even Caydr doesn't have a list of everybody whose work was borrowed. So, you can't just do the OTA models, a lot of the other content is not legal for you guys to apply the GPL to, either.
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Meh. Moving on...
How do I reconcile Lurker's, AF's and KDR's statements about "mere aggregation"? The three positions all look different to me. I would like to see more about this, and see if we can arrive at a useful consensus.
