Ouch, that's all I can say there, just ouch! I had the same kind of situation arise a couple of years back. I had been working on the mud itself, the owner had a death in the family and had taken off for a couple of months, leaving me in charge of keeping things going.
Unfortunately, as they say, while the cat's away... The mice DID play. I threatened more than once to shut the game down untill the imp came back, if they didn't straighten out. When I finally did, they went whining to the system administrator, who gave them access to the code, allowing them to start it back up. I tried everything from appealing to the server owner to going to mudconnector and other places they were listed, to no avail. My solution for the problem, something I've implemented in my code rather heavily: --Create a library that your game depends on (a security library so to speak). --Take db.c out of the game and put it in this library. --Put a check in this library to a security function that checks for a hidden file on the system itself. If it's not there, it doesn't start the game up (I've set the security on my own rathe heavily, where it removes the entire user's home... Then again, anyone that has access to my source knows that this is there), then emails you. This doesn't stop them from taking your game, and using various parts of the source, but it'll at least stop them from running another copy of it, exactly as is. > At the moment, we are considering legal action for at > least the theft of intellectual property and possibly Legal action will do nothing but cost you a lot of time and effort, UNLESS you have the code copyrighted yourself (i'm not talking intelectual copyrights here, I'm talking paper, physically licensed and copyrighted). It's easy for them to say "we created this game", just as easy as it is for you to say that. Then, you get into a he-said / she-said match and OUCH, that's no fun. As for copyright violations, Rom is distributed via open source, which makes copyright enforcement even harder.If you've written any code and distributed it via snippets, then you'll have problems there as well. As much as it sucks, know you're not the only one out there that this has happened to.I know it's not much help, and I'm sorry you had to go through that (believe me, I know what it's like). -- TJW :Head tech, designer, bum:P Mud :http://dreamless.wolfstream.net telnet :telnet://dreamless.wolfstream.net 9275 OLC Pages:http://olc.wolfstream.net
