Re: Moving "blockade" from non-free to main?
Cross posted to ensure OP sees this. Please continue on d-legal.
"Harald Dunkel" <harald.dunkel@t-online.de> wrote in message
news:44DF16D7.5070805@t-online.de...
Hi folks,
I am pretty optimistic to clarify the license conditions for
blockade (http://packages.qa.debian.org/b/blockade.html), making
it possible to move it to from non-free to main (hopefully).
Currently the game is public domain, except for the game scenes.
Is there some specialist for this legal stuff (I am surely
not), who has some time to look at
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/b/blockade/current/copyright
?
Many thanx
Harri
Ok.... Obviously you need to clarify the rights for the levels, or drop
them...
Now I'll go over the rest of the copyright file.
License (see COPYRIGHT file in the sources):
Is there any information in the COPYRIGHT file that is not reproduced in
that file?
If so, please post that.. The rest of this post is based on the assumtion
that all relevent
information from COPYRIGHT is included in the copyright file.
The Macintosh version claims to have been written by Christer Ericson,
and provided a contact address (christer@cs.umu.se). I wrote to that
address, asking permission to write an X version; the reply granted
permission, and gave permission to use the built-in scenes from the Mac
version provided I credited the scene designers.
That should be good enough to remove any doubts about lack of licence to the
game concept.
(There are some who claim a game concept can be copyrighted. Regardless of
the truth of that
your permison information aleviates any concern.)
The next part of that statement *MAY* be sufficent to include the scenarios.
It would be better if Christer Ericson could confirm that he has the legal
rights
to grant you the rights to include the scenes with the sole condition of
attribution.
The font stuff is fine and legal IF and ONLY IF the Adobe copyright
statement
is included in each of the font files. The PBM format allows for C style
comments
so that is entirely possible.
The bitmaps found in blockade-pix.c are my work, but they were designed
to mimic reasonably closely the overall look of the analogous bitmaps
used in the Macintosh game. Exactly who owns the rights to those is
unclear to me and probably depends on jurisdiction - but see the last
paragraph of this file.
AIUI (IANAL), in the US anyway:
The legality of those pictures depends both on content and on intent.
If they are virtually identical to the originals, then that is a problem.
Otherwise if "der Mouse" created them trying to be similar than that is
fine.
If "der Mouse" created them trying to be a virtual duplicate of the original
then that is not fine.
That does need clarification.
It is fine to create new images similar to existing images. There is a
problem however
if one attempts to duplicate the originals. Regarless of the work required,
or how similar
the end product is, a copyright licence is required for that.
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