Why P.U.R.E. will not be GPL or CC-PD. Very long.

[Evil4Zerggin]

Note that bit though, as to use:

but the owner of copyright in an anthology of poetry could sue someone who infringed the whole anthology, even though the infringer proves that publication of one of the poems was unauthorized.

To my mind, the "owner of copyright" in this case is analogous to us, the CA developers, and "that publication of one of the poems was unauthorized" is analogous to our own unauthorized use of OTA content. This seems to be consistent with the part I bolded in my original excerpt. The only wrinkle in my interpretation that I can see is that this requires a shift in who is being referred to as the "infringer" between this and the previous sentence; however, I believe this is the more reasonable interpretation given the less ambiguous meaning of the previous sentence and the fact that the "infringer" is reintroduced as "someone who infringed the whole anthology".

Meanwhile, the opposite interpretation, that the "owner of copyright" refers to the preexisting work (as opposed to the derivative), would mean that this sentence deals with the rights of the owner of the copyright of the preexisting work--which is not what the rest of this section is about. Furthermore, the use of "but" and "even though" indicates a contrast to the first part of the sentence (the part not quoted by Argh), whereas an interpretation that the "owner of copyright" refers to the preexisting work would make the two parts similar, not contrasting. With this interpretation, it does not make any sense to say "even though", as the fact that "publication of one of the poems was unauthorized" would be the whole reason why the "owner of copyright" could sue. And why would an infringer incriminate themselves by proving that "publication of one of the poems was unauthorized"?

[Argh]

but the owner of copyright in an anthology of poetry could sue someone who infringed the whole anthology, even though the infringer proves that publication of one of the poems was unauthorized.

Whoa. You're not reading that whole section correctly. Moreover, you're quoting the analysis, not the law itself.

What this sentence from the analysis says is that the owner can sue somebody who published the entire work in an infringing fashion, even if the infringer can prove that one part of the work was not specifically authorized for publication by the infringer, or was infringing copyright.

IOW, if I write a poem and include it in an anthology, I can sue for infringement if somebody uses my work in an infringing way, even if they can prove that some other poetry was infringing! Two wrongs don't make a right, basically.

It's a basic concept of fairness here- the poet, in that case, may not have been aware that the anthology is not legal, but still has protection over their work.

Now, does that cover stuff put into CA? Well, it covers Trepan, and certain pieces of code put in that were originally published elsewhere, I think. But I think that anything published via SVN is almost certainly not protected.



Let's go back to the cookbook example, I think it's easier for people to understand.

I've published a cookbook. I am the copyright holder.

Now some guy takes my cookbook, scans the whole thing, and puts it onto the Internet, for free, in an editable PDF- which is clearly infringement.

Next, some other person comes along, and edits the PDF, adding some new recipes, and tries to pass it off as his own work.

I, the copyright holder, can sue both of them. That's what that whole section is trying to explain.

Copyright starts with the original holder- in this case, Atari. Cavedog, like any developer for a big publisher, would have had to give their rights to Atari (or whoever owned Cavedog back then, who would have sold those rights as part of Atari's purchase, etc.).

Even "innocent infringers", who thought what they were doing was legal, aren't immune. For example, there are lots and lots of retro-game sites that have had to remove many games, due to DMCA requests. There have been many, many, many instances in which Nintendo has either shut 'sites down, or eradicated the distribution of Super Nintendo ROMs, even though they haven't made the hardware and no new games have been published in years. They'll probably stop someday, but not yet- I read, the other day, a ROM 'sites declaration that certain titles, like the Final Fantasy series weren't being distributed because they'd been threatened by lawyers. The people distributing these works weren't the hackers who got rid of copy protection or copied the ROMs. But they're still infringing.

In short, no, that section's not providing a fig leaf for CA. Just because Caydr was the original copyright violator does not mean that further violations are all right- otherwise, people putting out hacked copies of games would just change a few things and say it was theirs, for example, which is clearly illegal.




I think, honestly, that the more I look into this, the more it looks like I'm right about it, and that the only wiggle-room concerns "mere aggregation". Meh, I have the case law coming, I've just been away from home for over a week, so I haven't had much time to do all of this. Tomorrow, when I'm not getting the new nifty models done for a new unit in P.U.R.E., I'll be happy to try and explore this further, but tbh, I think your line of reasoning is based on hopeful assumptions.

If we can't find a clear way to prove that games for Spring represent aggregations, and that they're to be considered complete software programs that just happen to have a bunch of subroutines written in several languages or scripting methods, then it's we're in a very bad place here, imo- games would either have to be wholly GPL, or not, due to the copyleft issues.

Now, would that prevent other projects from using CA's code legally? I really don't know. I'm not sure how the law would apply here.

That's why I want more clarity here about aggregation. If we've established that data structures aren't being shared, and that we have APIs that serve to provide, among other things, separation between same, and we know that each COB script and each Lua script, unless it specifically calls another one, is probably separate... then it appears to support the idea of an aggregate, at a technical level.

However, from a judge's perspective, it'd be very hard to argue that an entire game is not a "work" but is merely a bunch of separate code that was combined and produced a given result. It'd be like arguing that Windows is just a few major DLLs and EXEs that just happen to produce an operating system- I don't think anybody would buy that, in reality.

I'm really looking for any serious arguments that would strengthen the aggregate argument, though, as I think it's about the only thing that salvages multi-licensing as a serious legal concept. Without multi-licensing, using GPL looks incredibly unattractive to most people. Share-alike is one thing. Having to put an entire game under the GPL, because of a few lines of code somewhere, is why the past license wars have been so awful. We'd be right back to saying that E&E is now GPL, for example, and I would have to yank the one piece of GPL'd code I use besides World Builder (the Healthbars Widget) or take extreme measures to demonstrate that it's just an addon module, and in no way establishes dependency

And using gamecode of any kind would be flat-out impossible. Miserable situation for all concerned, tbh.

[lurker]

Even if the final end-user packing counts as a single work, each widget/gadget is created as its own work and placed under the gpl before being uploaded to the CA svn. So either way the lua is protected, and either way CA is in violation of copyright. The question of aggregation is an important one, because it decides whether the gpl spreads over the game, but it doesn't affect much of anything else.

You mentioned an operating system. I urge you to look at the structure of linux. You have the kernel, the daemons, the X server, the window manager, the programs themselves, all communicating through APIs and not cross-contaminating each other with license issues. The only issues come about with some of the libraries they may load. (A quick search says that libraries only spread GPL if they are sharing data structures or if they have significant such interdependencies.)

[Evil4Zerggin]

I'm not trying to say that CA is legal (as a whole). To use the cookbook example, how I believe it works is this:

You make a completely original cookbook. You hold the copyright to it.

Sam (random name) comes along and takes some recipes from your cookbook (without permission), puts them into their own cookbook along with some of their own original recipes, and distributes it for free on the Internet. I think we all agree this is infringement of your copyright.

Now a third person, Tracy, comes along and takes Sam's cookbook and tries to pass it off as their own. Again, I think we all agree that Tracy is also infringing on your copyright. However, (and this is the part I'm not sure that we are all in agreement on), my interpretation is that Tracy is also infringing on Sam's copyright (which Sam has in the part of the cookbook that they created themselves).

As far as 17 U.S.C. § 103 goes, it does not distinguish between derivative works and compilations, so this distinction is moot.

Please correct me if I have misinterpreted your position. I disagree with this:

At any rate, under US law, and supported by numerous precedents... "derivative works" are not entitled to any copyright protection. None. You're putting work into public domain.

But I agree with this (provided I interpreted your post correctly, namely that "other poetry" refers to poetry in your anthology):

IOW, if I write a poem and include it in an anthology, I can sue for infringement if somebody uses my work in an infringing way, even if they can prove that some other poetry was infringing! Two wrongs don't make a right, basically.

[Argh]

At any rate, under US law, and supported by numerous precedents... "derivative works" are not entitled to any copyright protection. None. You're putting work into public domain.

I do not (yet) have any definitive case law to cite to support that statement, so I'm quite comfortable treating it as speculative and unfounded. IOW, I may be completely wrong- it's probably the hardest of the arguments to prove, and has the weakest foundation.

I'm looking into this this afternoon, although I'll have to keep it short, as I have a lot of work to do on my game today.

What I'm seeing in case law is that there has been a huge amount of back-and-forth about these issues. I think that the key issue here is when the work is to be considered "published", which is why I keep going back to the issue of how it's included in CA. The courts have been fairly clear about infringement- the issue almost always seems to come down to the way that infringing work is being transmitted to the public.

For example, Perfect10 vs. Google seems to revolve around the argument that Google was providing infringing thumbnails from websites that were infringing Perfect10's works, and thereby profited through its AdSense program, even though Google itself was only providing a technological conduit for the display of said works, but was not hosting them itself.

Even if the final end-user packing counts as a single work, each widget/gadget is created as its own work and placed under the gpl before being uploaded to the CA svn. So either way the lua is protected, and either way CA is in violation of copyright. The question of aggregation is an important one, because it decides whether the gpl spreads over the game, but it doesn't affect much of anything else.

I agree, these two bits are very separate- if CA's authors are allowed to GPL their work and publish it directly to CA, then we're "merely" down to the issue of aggregation, and to what extent the GPL may be applied to a game- whether games are to be considered works or aggregates, basically.

I'll go look at the Linux example. I can see the argument that daemons, the window manager, and software are all to be considered part of an aggregate, even though they invoke portions of the kernel through API calls- that makes perfect sense to me, nobody claims Photoshop is Microsoft's, simply because it makes use of some features of Windows to operate, for example.

The question, then is to what extent it can be argued that a Lua, COB or CEG script can be said to operate like a shell script. I think the argument's actually starting to look like a good one- even data transfer between such scripts is handled through an API layer. So the aggregate argument, as difficult as it would be to establish in front of a judge, might actually be defensible.

[EDIT]

Just so we're all totally clear on what the GPL says about aggregates, here's the language from v. 3:

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an ├óÔé¼┼ôaggregate├óÔé¼┬Ø if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

Given this definition, I think that the argument comes down to what "combined with it such as to form a larger program" really means.

In a typical piece of software, if you remove anything, it either won't compile, won't run or it will run, but crashes during operation.

In a Spring game, removing a given piece of Lua may cause error messages, but it does not crash the software. I think CEGs still make things crash, if they aren't present, but I'll have to test that. And the lack of a COB script removes that entire Unit from the game, but doesn't halt Spring as a whole.

[Argh]

Ok, I think this is the last bit about CA's specific status. It's not what I wanted to find, but I'm fairly certain it's accurate.

Basically, you cannot apply for either copyright protection, nor ask for GPL enforcement, except in cases where the code was first published elsewhere. The whole concept of "publish" is definitely key here.

CA is violating Atari's exclusive right to publish, which means that you cannot apply GPL to the published work in part or in whole.

Here are the relevant quotes, all from here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:H.R. ... 1476_(1976)_Page_061.djvu (pages 61 and 62 are where the following citations were taken from).

Rights of reproduction, adaptation, and publication

The first three clauses of section 106, which cover all rights under a copyright except those of performance and display, extend to every kind of copyrighted work. The exclusive rights encompassed by these clauses, though closely related, are independent; they can generally be characterized as rights of copying, recording, adaptation, and publishing. A single act of infringement may violate all of these rights at once, as where a publisher reproduces, adapts, and sells copies of a person├óÔé¼Ôäós copyrighted work as part of a publishing venture. Infringement takes place when any one of the rights is violated: where, for example, a printer reproduces copies without selling them or a retailer sells copies without having anything to do with their reproduction. The references to ├óÔé¼┼ôcopies or phonorecords,├óÔé¼┬Ø although in the plural, are intended here and throughout the bill to include the singular (1 U.S.C. ├é┬º1).

This establishes, really clearly, that the "two wrongs don't make a right" principle applies here. CA's infringing- its collective authors cannot then take other people to task for infringing their work. So, it's all right for people to use CA's stuff without worrying about the authors having a change of heart someday. However, as I'll explain later, it doesn't remove the threat from Atari.

This does not mean that if the authors of the said works were distributing their work elsewhere, and CA's authors were then grabbing that code, that the original authors would be in trouble- however, that's not what is happening.

I didn't draw a line here about Trepan's source for no particular reason, and it appears I was correct. Putting stuff directly into CA without it being released elsewhere is almost certainly infringing, and all participants could be found liable.

It also "poisons" that code, and means that if Atari ever issued C&D and took our projects to court, anybody who used it and couldn't prove they got it from somewhere else might be in trouble.

Public distribution.├óÔé¼ÔÇØClause (3) of section 106 establishes the exclusive right of publication: The right ├óÔé¼┼ôto distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.├óÔé¼┬Ø Under this provision the copyright owner would have the right to control the first public distribution of an authorized copy or phonorecord of his work, whether by sale, gift, loan, or some rental or lease arrangement. Likewise, any unauthorized public distribution of copies or phonorecords that were unlawfully made would be an infringement, As section 109 makes clear, however, the copyright owner├óÔé¼Ôäós rights under section 106(3) cease with respect to a particular copy or phonorecord once he has parted with ownership of it.

The exclusive right to publication is key here. CA's in clear violation of that. But CA isn't a single entity- it's a collective of individuals. Anybody with SVN commit status is a publisher.

So... it appears that CA code can only be really GPL if published elsewhere, then integrated into CA by a third party. Doing it directly via SVN, as I stated before, is an act of publication, and is infringing, unless somebody has a serious argument they'd like to advance that putting out SVN builds is not publication, which I think is impossible to make a good case for.

To go back to the cookbook example, what's happening is not that person A is making a new recipe, and person B is putting it into an infringing version of a cookbook- then person A would be all right, and person B would be found liable.

Instead, person A is both making the recipe and putting it into the cookbook. Which is not legal.

I don't think anybody can use any of CA's gamecode without being a party to infringement. The only way for CA's code to be GPL'd under the current circumstancesl is to release it elsewhere, and have other parties take the legal risk, which, at least from where I'm sitting, would be unethical.

****************************************************

Sorry in advance, I wasn't expecting to find stuff that was this clear, but it is and that's what appears to be the case here, at least under US law. People should not use CA's source until it's been published elsewhere, they're taking a risk otherwise. Thankfully for me, the only bit of CA code I'm using was published elsewhere, so I'm not going to have to pull it, I'll just have to make it clear where I got it from

To establish that the individual copyrights have real force, and therefore have a reasonable expectation that the GPL is enforceable, I don't think that the CA team has any real choice but to either build a new game... or to publish all new code elsewhere, and have a third party act as the violator, by integrating it into the project before publication. I think that's both unworkable and unethical, myself, but it's not my problem.

Anything less is almost certainly just giving Atari the right to take away all of that work, from all subsequent infringers, should they ever choose to do so (i.e., if anybody makes a commercial game with Spring, for example, and it uses any CA code), or at the very least try and sue all such parties for damages, which could effectively destroy the entire Spring project at a stroke. Ok, we'd still have KDR's games, and NanoBlobs, and P.U.R.E. and maybe a few others, but that's it. Not a pretty picture.

This is a very serious mess that's been created here, and should get cleaned up, fast, imo.

[KDR_11k]

1. Copyright law is pretty much weakest-link, if a work is at any part of its existence not protected by copyright it is effectively not protected at all. I'd argue there CANNOT be a situation where a work is both copyrighted and not copyrighted. If it is copyrighted on the harddrive of its creator then it is copyrighted PERIOD. The law says you cannot GAIN copyright on an infringing work, it does not say you FORFEIT copyright on a work if you publish it together with an infringing work
2. Your cookbook analogy would allow the publisher of the original cookbook to take those new recipes and publish a new cookbook containing them, effectively stealing the work of the additional authors.
3. Copyright infringement can and will happen in the real world even when not intended. Most if not all major programs had problems with "stolen" lines, if you were right those versions of those programs would be in the public domain and anyone could take them, sell them, create derivative works, etc.
4. The anthology example allows for a lawsuit, that means just infringement is taking place, it does NOT mean no copyright is granted at all!

Now, would that prevent other projects from using CA's code legally? I really don't know. I'm not sure how the law would apply here.

If your interpretation is false CA's own licenses apply to the non-infringing parts. If it is true CA is public domain. Either way you can take their code.


The "E&E is now GPL" argument is similarily retarded. Just because it would not be legal to distribute a non-GPL version does not mean the distributed version is automatically GPL. It's just infringing. Same thing here, CA is not copyright-less, it's just infringing. The law marks unlawful things as infringing, it does NOT automatically take corrective action. As was mentioned MUCH earlier, only a court of law can find a copyright invalid.

Want to try your theory? Upload a copy of Limbo of the Lost to your website and see what happens.

[Erom]

CA is not copyright-less, it's just infringing.

I don't think anyone disagrees. The critical question is whether that makes a project using a non-Atari piece of code from CA also infringing Atari copyright. Obviously, if that piece of code was released separately and legally, and then bundled into CA, you can use it from that prior release (depending obviously on that code's license restrictions), but if it wasn't, it's a grey area that I admit I don't understand, but I always thought along the same lines as Argh.

I know I'm probably just repeating what you and Argh already understand, but I like to think I'm summarizing for the people skimming the thread.

2. Your cookbook analogy would allow the publisher of the original cookbook to take those new recipes and publish a new cookbook containing them, effectively stealing the work of the additional authors.

Exactly. I was under the impression that's exactly what is allowed - the original author can "steal" any work done in a derivative from the later authors. I have always been under the impression that a game company could take and own any mod for that game engine if they wanted too. I thought that until Spring was released free of TA IP, Atari could take and publish the entire spring project, but then again, maybe not under european law. I guess I'm wrong about this?

[Argh]

1. Nowhere in the above lengthy summary did I say that CA's work is in the public domain.

That was absolutely incorrect, and was based on my first reading of the law- I mistook the removal of copyright protection from infringers as saying it was now in the public domain.

I was just plain wrong, on that point. It's not public domain, it's infringing.

What follows from that is speculative, hence my statement that I'm not sure whether it's legal to use the work or not. I think that part is fairly muddy, and I just don't understand the process of applying a remedy well enough to know what would happen.


2. There's no such thing as "copyright on your hard drive", so far as I can tell.

It's property, but it's not copyrighted yet, because nobody's published it yet. If somebody steals your cookbook from your HD, and prints it and makes millions, they're stealing, and you get damages for that, not for copyright violations, unless I've misread the law here.


3. Dealing with the cookbook example... I think that the cookbook writer would, 99.9999% time, "just" sue for damages and shut the infringer down. Asking for the work to be transferred to them, in lieu of damages, is permissible, though.

The law's pretty clear here- once a work is infringing, it can't expect copyright protection. How that's interpreted appears to be largely up to the judge, based on the circumstances.

To further the cookbook analogy, if you really improved that cookbook, and made money, then the people you took it from will want the money, and forbid you from distributing further copies of the work to punish you for ripping them off.

If you gave it away for free, and have no money, they'll probably just take the cookbook, in lieu of cash, and start selling it themselves.


4.

The "E&E is now GPL" argument is similarily retarded. Just because it would not be legal to distribute a non-GPL version does not mean the distributed version is automatically GPL. It's just infringing.

No, that's not true, if you believe the FSF.

The FSF considers parties who have deliberately used GPL work in the way that Fanger did with E&E to be parties to the License, not mere infringers, unless it can be argued that it was used in a "mere aggregation".

The GPL is not just a fancy copyright, it's a license that can be applied even if the infringer removed it from the software or otherwise tried to obfuscate what they'd done. Otherwise it'd just be a bunch of copyright holders chasing people around and trying to enforce stuff, as Stallman points out in his argument for why the GPL was written in the first place.

At any rate... if anybody wants to argue that I'm in favor of the GPL applying to entire Spring games... that's ludicrous.

I wasn't in favor of that from the beginning, I'm not in favor of it now. It was AF's argument about this, that I took seriously, that pointed things in that direction. Why do you think I'm seeking any real arguments for "mere aggregation"?


5.

The law marks unlawful things as infringing, it does NOT automatically take corrective action. As was mentioned MUCH earlier, only a court of law can find a copyright invalid.

I haven't argued otherwise.

The fact that Atari's let things go this long does not mean that they can't issue C&D, make various legal complaints, and effectively destroy Spring, by scaring everybody with spurious arguments. Exploring this topic shows us what arguments they're likely to raise, and how we can defeat them, as well as making it clear that, as my OP stated, CA is not providing a good model here.

If CA was an original game, none of this would matter, except for the "mere aggregate" argument. This all hinges on the fact that they're making a game that's not legal in the first place, and probably never will be.

[Neddie]

Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of ├óÔé¼┼ôoriginal works of authorship,├óÔé¼┬Ø including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.

Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.

From http://www.copyright.gov and common knowledge.

[KDR_11k]

If you violate the GPL you violate the license and are infringing on the copyright of the material you took. You do NOT automatically apply the license to your own work, even more because you are infringing and thus not obeying the terms of the license. You are open to a lawsuit but you are NOT releasing your work as GPL unless you explicitely state so. There have been infringement cases before and it was NEVER just assumed that the work was automatically GPL, it was handled as a violation of the license and thus a copyright violation.

Let's quote the GPL (v2 since that's still the most common in the wild):

0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License.

If the copyright holder of the work does not do so it's not under the license. That it contains infringing material is not important.

As for the scope of the GPL:

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Make of that what you want.

[SwiftSpear]

No one here has the money to pursue a legal case against another nonprofit developer. Especially not in the case that it becomes an international issue. If you don't make money, and the offending party makes no money, then you can't sue for damages because there are none.

I don't know why we waste such endless time on this stupid issue... Seriously, I'm very very tempted to ban all licencing talk on these forums entirely. The reality is, you're NOT going to do anything about it if another springer steals your work. We'll all hate them and kick/ban them from our games, remove their files from the file hosts and what not, possibly even issue some community bans, but realistically, unless someone who actually has the ability to make money off your work steals from us no real legal action is ever going to take place.

Licensing is irrelevant to the community dynamic, irrelevant of what license a project is under the moods and opinions of the developer who owns the original content will determine the communities reaction to any infraction, not the license. License to protect yourself against external entities, your license doesn't mean anything to entities within the community working for non profit.

[Pxtl]

I know nobody cares about license disputes anymore, but probably the LGPL is closer to what people working on Spring have in mind - the GPL probably applies to the entire mod, whereas it could be argued that a single Widget or Gadget or Unit is effectively a single stand-alone unit within the context of the LGPL, meaning people only have to re-release the stuff that is specifically what you worked on.

[KDR_11k]

If you don't make money, and the offending party makes no money, then you can't sue for damages because there are none.

You can get statutory damages.

[Erom]

Swift- perhaps the within-community dynamic is not very productive (I disagree wholeheartedly, but I will grant you the point for the moment.) but exploring these issues and becoming better informed in general will significantly improve our ability to keep this project in the green when it comes to attention from outside the community.

[SwiftSpear]

If you don't make money, and the offending party makes no money, then you can't sue for damages because there are none.

You can get statutory damages.

The legal case will probably cost more to pursue then the total ammount you'd receive in most case. Otherwise, why hasn't Tired or Emmanual been sued yet?

Seriously, take the Argh vs Fang thing, there's a half a dozen reasons why GPL doesn't work the way it was presented in the dispute. Neither party understood GPL well, and people still took sides based on what was being said. The reality is, there is basically no legal standing for spring mods under GPL. GPL is designed for code, there's a plethora of loopholes and technicalities that make sense under the coding environment that break completely and absolutely when applied to art. Such a legal case would take at least weeks to come to an end. Argh was NEVER in any place to issue a lawsuit, especially one he'd quite likely lose just because the judge isn't willing to deal with complicated shit and set presidents. It was dramatic because it was a community issue, people had opinions and feelings on the matter, and people felt violated or insulted depending which side of the fence you're on, there WAS NO legal issue.

This is getting sickening, people are using complicated licenses without understanding them at all, and then getting mad at other people when they interpret the terms of the licenses differently then the content author did. Like I say, Licence to protect yourself from external entities (may I suggest cc-nc-sa or cc-nc which are actually sane licenses when applied to art resources, or just leave it copywrit and allow use with permission only) and then tell people exactly what you consider valid use in human speak.

[Guessmyname]

This is all fine and dandy, but aren't we all forgetting something?

Namely: we're 'content creators'* not copyright lawyers. Can't we just get back to doing more important things like, say, making the mods/games/whatever whose copyright we are arguing over?

(This is mostly aimed at Argh. Seriously dude, PURE needs love too!)

*I have a suspicion that if I say 'modders', someone will lynch me

[AF]

Far too much time and effort is being invested in GPL discussions when tbh if we all ignored licence implications and fixed things when notified of a violation we'd have literally hundreds of extra hours of free time to spend on our projects, morale would be higher, and people would get along better in general.

[KDR_11k]

The legal case will probably cost more to pursue then the total ammount you'd receive in most case. Otherwise, why hasn't Tired or Emmanual been sued yet?

I doubt it but most people here aren't so serious about it that they'd want to pay big money for a lawyer, even if they would come out ahead at the end (if the defendant can pay, that is, won't get much money out of an unemployed 37 year old living in his mom's basement).

[Peet]

Particularly if the defendant can [very successfully] plead insanity.