Re: quake2 and german youth protection law
Michael Below <mbelow@antithese.de> writes:
> Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com> writes:
>
>> In my opinion, the game engine by itself can't be classified in those
>> terms. It contains no inherent depiction of violence, glorification
>> of war, or whatever else is on that list. I am fairly certain that
>> the quake2 engine could be used to create a totally non-violent game.
>
> Sounds reasonable to me. But I'm afraid that you could as well stick
> to the letter of the law and say it's essentially identical to content
> of media that has been found to be youth-endangering.
The original CD consists a small (a few MB) generic game engine, plus
several hundred MB game data. I can't see how a copy of the engine
only could possibly be considered essentially identical to the full
kit, being only a small fraction of the combined data. Add to this
that all the offending elements are in the portion that was not
copied.
> Also, there is the problem that you may not advertise for Quake
> II. And the package description could be seen as advertisement.
Advertising is not equivalent to mentioning the existence, or
requirement, of something.
> Finally, there is a package quake2-data that provides an installer
> for the Quake 2 shareware game data. And that data is definitely
> problematic.
That's certainly more debatable. Of course, the debian package
doesn't actually contain any of the data, so it could easily be argued
that it is to be considered harmful. AFAIK, it could be used equally
well with other, similarly formatted data.
--
Måns Rullgård
mru@inprovide.com
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