On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 7:08 AM, Joshua Boehme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the Ruleset has multiple authors. > Would there be a distinction between the legal rights of someone who has > contributed versus a player who hasn't? What if a player contributed to the > Ruleset, but eir contributions have subsequently been removed? (Those > questions probably only make sense if we disregard any implied license.)
I believe the only distinction is that someone who contributed could sue everyone else for creating derivative works and distributing their IP without a license. It doesn't grant a license to distribute others' work that happens to include your contributions. I think it's quite likely that there's plenty of technical infringement of copyright going on, but from a practical perspective, it's incredibly unlikely anyone would try to enforce their copyrights in game documents. And it's also possible that Peter Suber holds the copyright and all of the derivative works based on his initial ruleset are un-copyrightable as unauthorized derivatives. It would probably be safest to include an explicit grant of license in a future nomic if you're really worried about such things, but trying to track down all of the contributors to get a license for the existing ruleset would be kind of pointless.
