On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 07:49, Geoffrey Spear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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. > Copyrighting any intellectual property in the modern internet age seems rather pointless IMHO.
BobTHJ
