* Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> [14/06/05, 13:57:02]: > But this doesn't matter at all. Our guardians became frustrated with > the necessity to index both the German translation and the original, > so they installed a mandatory rating system for computer games > (similar to movies in Germany and other countries). The main problem > isn't that quake2 is a violent game, but that it's a game. "M-x > tetris RET" has the same problem. No, it doesn't. The "or similar games" goes both ways. There's a bunch of rated Tetris games out there, so M-x tetris RET will give you a "similar game". I looked into that issue a while ago. (see http://mindx.josefspillner.de/advocacy/juschg/discussion.en.html) There is something I tend to call "lex microsoft". It's not in the law itself but in the "Bundesgerichtsblatt" comment, and usually courts follow those comments. (It's the closest thing to case law we have here). These comments usually elaborate what the gouvernment wants to achieve with a law. There's a section saying that if the computer game is "part of a bigger software package, and not a significant portion of it", it doesn't need a rating. (So noone would need a rating to play MS Minesweeper) I talked to the SuSE and RedHat people on that LinuxTag, and both companies seem confident this also applies to GNU/Linux distributions. Of course this doesn't change the fact that quake2 indeed is on the index of jouth endangering games. It just says that we don't need to get a rating for tuxcart, pingus and kolf. Of course the IANAL paragraph applies. Kai -- Kai Blin aka. nowhere (blin<at>gmx.net), WorldForge Project Web: http://www.worldforge.org/ He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
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