From: "Neal Rogers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> The circular states pretty
> clearly that a system is >not< and that the idea for a
> whole game can be duplicated by somebody else.
It is important to remember that the material in question is an
administrative opinion - not a law. Title 17 is mute on the subject of game
material. The copyright office has been repeatedly forced by the courts
over the past decade to consistently expand its defintions for what can be
copyright, and how extensive those copyrights are. Until and unless a
highly complex product like a modern adventure RPG goes through a court
test, I would take the copyright office's opinion on the matter with a grain
of salt. The intention of the copyright office is quite clear: in as much
as the rules for games are ideas, those ideas cannot be copyright. Since
they've not yet been confronted with "our" kinds of rules for games, which
embody quite a bit more than simple ideas or mathmatical formulas, I suspect
that if and when such a case is litigated there will have to be some
extensive revisions to simplistic statements like "rules for games cannot be
copyright".
(This is a particuarly humorous issue to me, considering that a court
rebuked and summararily rejected the copyright offices opinion that "Pong"
could not be copyright because the game it embodied was so simple and used
basic geometric shapes in its screen display. Wait until they get a look at
half-dragon drow cleric PCs...)
> Well there's a flaw in this analogy. Microsoft
> already allows people to build applications for use
> with Windows without entering into a licensing
> agreement with Microsoft.
That is inaccurate.
First, you agree to an extensive licensing agreement with Microsoft when you
install Windows. While it might technically be possible to write software
for Windows without ever installing the product, it is impossible to test or
run such software.
Second, you agee to another extensive licensing agreement when you install
software containing the necessary header files and other proprietary
Microsoft content required to produce executable stand-alone code for
Windows. That licensing agreement is the descendant of a deal between
Microsoft and the publisher of whatever tool you are using wherein Microsoft
licenses the right to those proprietary bits in exchange for a royalty or
other consideration.
In the case of an interpreted program or something similar (like a Perl
script), Microsoft either has a licensing arrangement in place with the
producers of the interpreter, or the interpreter is supplied without certain
key files and it is up to the user to reassemble a working development
environment capable of compiling Windows applications. (Note; I
differentiate here between a shell or "command line" program and a true
Windows application with a message pump and hooks into SYSTEM, USER and
GDI.)
In fact, IBM owns the patent on "dynamic library linking", and gets paid a
royalty with every copy of Windows as a part of the license which allows
programs to call SYSTEM, USER, GDI, and the thousand other DLLs that
comprise the Windows OS, so in effect you have a licensing arrangement with
IBM as well.
Microsoft arrived at this fairly transparent licensing scheme after a long
period of time (Windows 1 and part of the Windows 2 lifecycle) where it was
impossible to write a Windows application without first buying the
development envrionment from Microsoft at a cost of several thousand
dollars. Even that was a step forward from the proprietary "windowing"
operating systems being developed by the publisher of VisiCalc, IBM and
Apple - all of whom tried to restrict who could write programs for their
systems and enforce a very strict standard for UI design. It was not until
the advent of Windows 3 and a shift in strategy away from controlling the
"look and feel" of applications that Microsoft embraced a fairly low cost
and low impact royalty system for the developers of competitive development
tools. That it has become so low-cost and so unimportant as to go
unrecognized by the people who use it is a testament to the fact that the
strategy is working. Perhaps 5 years or so into the Open Gaming era, at
about the same time frame that Microsoft moved to that strategy, Wizards
will adopt it as well.
Note that of the major systems, Apple still holds tight control of the
development licenses (and can do so because so much of the UI is in ROM),
Windows' .NET platform relies on the use of a Common Language Runtime which
is proprietary to Microsoft, Java uses a similar situation except all the
Java compilers are licensed from Sun with very, very stringinent controls
(see the MS v Sun lawsuit over the matter), and only Unix (once the most
proprietary OS of all) has a free and open programming environment.
But I digress.
> In the D&D world there's this hint of 'lawsuit!'
This comes up all the time. It's >not< a "D&D thing". It's a hobby game
publishing thing. Lots and lots of companies have sued each other over
these issues, not just TSR.
Ryan
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