Re: Bug#310994: ITP: openttd -- open source clone of the Microprose game "Transport Tycoon Deluxe"
Restricting this to -legal.
Michael K. Edwards wrote:
> The right to create sequels is reserved to the copyright holder,
> absent the sort of potent First Amendment defense which prevailed in
> SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin ("The Wind Done Gone"). Similar
> reasoning holds in many non-US jurisdictions, under national
> implementations of Article 2.3 of the Berne Convention.
Actually, it's stronger outside the US, in countries which don't have a
strong free speech right, which consider copyright to be a natural right,
and other bad things like that. In the US the sequel-creation right is
seriously hedged in by the First Amendment; not so in some other countries.
...
> OpenTTD -- a reimplementation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe with
> enhancements -- is precisely such an "unauthorized sequel". It may
> not have "characters", but it has some story line
"Some people run companies which transport things, and try to make money."
Perhaps a story line, but the story line is a cliche.
> and has "mise en
> scene" out the wazoo.
> Basically harmless, if TTD is abandonware;
Consider that it has an official "successor" by the same author. Oh, but
copyright a different company. Do you think maybe he plagarized himself?
(Just to throw confusion into the mix....)
The problem of being effectively unable to legally reproduce or make
derivative works from out-of-print copyrighted published material is
beginning to come to a head for other reasons. This is a case where the
current statute law is not on the side of sanity or freedom -- but due to
the nature of the situation, people almost never get sued -- and something
will have to give, eventually. Well, who knows what will happen; it's not
immediately relevant.
> but unambiguously (IANAL)
Non-literal copying is *always* ambiguous. (With the possible exception of
things corresponding to direct translations.) If I got one thing out of
reading copyright cases in the US, I got that. In the realm of computer
programs, it's even worse: there aren't many precedents, they tend to
contradict each other, and some of them are clearly wrong. IANAL, of
course, but I think I can fairly claim that it's muddled!
> an infringement of the copyright on the
> original, whether any literal copying is involved or not.
But you claimed earlier that something close to literal copying *was*
involved. If there is actually decompiled code from TTD in OpenTTD, that's
completely unacceptable (mechanical translation of copyrighted material),
and for this case we wouldn't have to think about the ambiguous and
confusing parts of copyright law.
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