How open means open? Problems I see ...

OpenTTD is a fully open-sourced reimplementation of TTD, written in C++, boasting improved gameplay and many new features.

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Oracle
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Post by Oracle »

I'm sorry, I forgot to say:
http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/indetail/basicfacts.htm wrote:Copyright] rights cover:
  • copying;
  • adapting;
  • distributing;
  • communicating to the public by electronic transmission (including by broadcasting and in an on demand service);
  • renting or lending copies to the public; and,
  • performing in public
Therefore adapting is illegal.
Conversion between computer languages is classed as "adapting".
And I'll leave the last line of the argument up to you :wink:
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Post by Killer 11 »

If something will try to sue you we all will say eis_os? who is eis_os? we don't know anybody with that name 8)


They can't find you becouse they don't know your addres real name or surename.
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Post by Marcel »

It is very easy to find his real name in the forum, and when you are good looking you can find his hometown too.

It is really useless to discuss if it is legal or not, there is no lawer among us. It is more important how we treat the ideas of each other. I must say I don´t know the owner of the rights of this game, so I don´t care about it. I have no problems with changing anything of it. But, I know more or less eis_os, so I respect his wishes and ideas. It doesn´t matter if I like his point of view, he simply want it to be like that.

So why shouldn´t there be a TTd clone, enjoy it, support it if you want, and let this discussion come to an end. We had to much of these in the last time.
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Post by krtaylor »

Look eis_os, if you don't want to work on OpenTTD nobody can make you. That's fine. And if you expressly forbid people to use your code in OpenTTD and somebody actually DOES anyway, then you cannot be held liable for it. The Patch will need some work on it for a while yet, and once OpenTTD has evolved far enough away from TTD that it's not a problem anymore, then it will have absorbed all that the Patch is and maybe then you'll want to cross over. Until then, it's good to have people still working on the Patch. We don't want OpenTTD to use up all the oxygen from everything else.

I would suggest you go look up "fair use" though. You might be surprised.
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Post by eis_os »

krtaylor wrote:Look eis_os, if you don't want to work on OpenTTD nobody can make you. That's fine. And if you expressly forbid people to use your code in OpenTTD and somebody actually DOES anyway, then you cannot be held liable for it.
Yep, exactly. (But: I can't, not I don't want, don't get that wrong)
The Patch will need some work on it for a while yet, and once OpenTTD has evolved far enough away from TTD that it's not a problem anymore, then it will have absorbed all that the Patch is and maybe then you'll want to cross over.
Hmm, I don't think I can but thats a other question... To support more than such a project is far beyond my capatable aswell.
Until then, it's good to have people still working on the Patch. We don't want OpenTTD to use up all the oxygen from everything else.

I would suggest you go look up "fair use" though. You might be surprised.
I already looked for "fair use", but it's not adaptable in Germany...

Maybe someone someday get the copyright or can get rights on TTD and will release it, that would be nice.

Until then I look forward to Zugspiel/TTU and maybe I find time to restart my own Project...

Ohh, as we are on page 3 currently I think this topic was needed and not useless :)
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Post by Darkvater »

eis_os wrote:
krtaylor wrote:Look eis_os, if you don't want to work on OpenTTD nobody can make you. That's fine. And if you expressly forbid people to use your code in OpenTTD and somebody actually DOES anyway, then you cannot be held liable for it.
Yep, exactly. (But: I can't, not I don't want, don't get that wrong)
The Patch will need some work on it for a while yet, and once OpenTTD has evolved far enough away from TTD that it's not a problem anymore, then it will have absorbed all that the Patch is and maybe then you'll want to cross over.
Hmm, I don't think I can but thats a other question... To support more than such a project is far beyond my capatable aswell.
Until then, it's good to have people still working on the Patch. We don't want OpenTTD to use up all the oxygen from everything else.

I would suggest you go look up "fair use" though. You might be surprised.
I already looked for "fair use", but it's not adaptable in Germany...

Maybe someone someday get the copyright or can get rights on TTD and will release it, that would be nice.

Until then I look forward to Zugspiel/TTU and maybe I find time to restart my own Project...

Ohh, as we are on page 3 currently I think this topic was needed and not useless :)
I think I'll think I'll write a letter to ATARI holland to find about this TTDLX stuff, and how legal, etc something like OTTD would be. If they agree it is completely legal, will you contribute to it?
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Post by krtaylor »

eis_os wrote:I already looked for "fair use", but it's not adaptable in Germany...
Well, there's your problem then... :lol:
Darkvater wrote: I think I'll think I'll write a letter to ATARI holland to find about this TTDLX stuff, and how legal, etc something like OTTD would be. If they agree it is completely legal, will you contribute to it?
I strongly recommend that you not do this. As it stands right now, they are probably not aware of the existence of this community; it is probably better that it stay that way. It is inconceivable that they would abandon the game, whether or not they ever expected to make money out of it; corporations as big as Atari is don't work that way. That's why I spoke with them on the phone rather than writing a letter: no hard record. Also, I bet that Atari Holland has no authority over this issue, it would be handled by Atari Corporate in the U.S., and I spoke to the person in charge of old games there. He didn't want to spend the time to research if he even owned such an old game, but wouldn't declare it abandonware either - he said, "Why would I want to do that?" Which from his point of view, makes sense. As it is right now, they COULD make a sequel later if they wanted to. I think poking them any further would not be likely to have a happy result, and could conceivably cause a very unpleasant one.
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Post by Darkvater »

krtaylor wrote:
eis_os wrote:I already looked for "fair use", but it's not adaptable in Germany...
Well, there's your problem then... :lol:
Darkvater wrote: I think I'll think I'll write a letter to ATARI holland to find about this TTDLX stuff, and how legal, etc something like OTTD would be. If they agree it is completely legal, will you contribute to it?
I strongly recommend that you not do this. As it stands right now, they are probably not aware of the existence of this community; it is probably better that it stay that way. It is inconceivable that they would abandon the game, whether or not they ever expected to make money out of it; corporations as big as Atari is don't work that way. That's why I spoke with them on the phone rather than writing a letter: no hard record. Also, I bet that Atari Holland has no authority over this issue, it would be handled by Atari Corporate in the U.S., and I spoke to the person in charge of old games there. He didn't want to spend the time to research if he even owned such an old game, but wouldn't declare it abandonware either - he said, "Why would I want to do that?" Which from his point of view, makes sense. As it is right now, they COULD make a sequel later if they wanted to. I think poking them any further would not be likely to have a happy result, and could conceivably cause a very unpleasant one.
Hmm, good thinking. I just thought we might get a final stance on the legality of BOTH openTTD AND TTDPatch. It's a bit hypocrite not to contribute to openTTD while TTDPatch is just as well illegal, especially under the new DMCA.

Oh well. I have then no choice to either blackmail or bribe eis_os into changing his mind about this :lol:
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Post by CobraA1 »

DCMA is US, I believe TTDX is under UK law . . .
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Post by Darkvater »

CobraA1 wrote:DCMA is US, I believe TTDX is under UK law . . .
If ATARi has the rights who knows... :cry:
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Post by Patchman »

TTDPatch is legal. DMCA has to do with copy protection circumvention, which TTDPatch doesn't do. TTD has no copy protection. Also, my copies of TTD did not come with an EULA at all, so reverse engineering and disassembling it as such are both legal.

TTDPatch is 95% our own code, written from scratch. Maybe 5% (<2000 out of 40,000 lines) are using TTD's code to interface with TTD itself. If it came down to it, I could release TTDPatch without that code and it would work, but it would make development very tedious and frustrating.

Essentially, TTDPatch is legal because it contains (almost) none of TTD's code. Those <2000 lines make up less than 2.5KB of code, and thus less than 0.5% of TTD itself.

OpenTTD may not be very legal because it's compised of a large part of TTD's code, rewritten in C. It would depend on a court's opinion on whether taking assembly code and rewriting it in C is a translation or a reinterpretation. Like in literary words, if I translate something word for word it's subject to the original copyright, but if I retell the same story in my own words, I own the copyright.

In my opinion, unless Ludde replaced each assembly instruction with its equivalent in C, what he did was no mere translation. Of course, he wouldn't have done that because it would be disgusting code in C to just write assembly code using C syntax. So what he did was not just translating it, but rewriting it "in his own words".

You cannot copyright an idea or a story, you can only copyright an expression of a story (e.g. the written words). So I think there's a good chance that OpenTTD is in fact legal. However, to really answer that we would need to ask a lawyer. The two jurisdictions of interest are Sweden (where Ludde wrote it) and the US (which hosts the Sourceforge files).

Unless someone finds a pro-bono copyright lawyer in both jurisdictions (not necessarily the same lawyer for both), we'll never know whether it's legal or not. But I think there's a good chance.

(Of course all of this falls down if TTD's sample.cat and trg1r.grf are included as well. That would definitely be copyright infringement. So we should not do that. Even though nobody cared about the download locations topic...)
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Post by krtaylor »

Patchman wrote:The two jurisdictions of interest are Sweden (where Ludde wrote it) and the US (which hosts the Sourceforge files).
One of those can be fixed quite easily. Stick it in Slovakia or something.
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Post by ChrisCF »

I hear cheap hosting in Russia (and many other former Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc countries) is still possible. Of course, having the code there is worthless as a legal defence when the people perpetrating it are themselves subject to the jurisdiction of a country that supports copyright (e.g. the forum users in Western Europe).
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Post by krtaylor »

If it gets to the point of actual litigation, we have all lost regardless, who wants to waste money on a lawyer? I'm banking on the low low likelihood of that ever happening.
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Post by eis_os »

I am bind to german laws even if the file is not hosted in germany because German citizen can access it. If it's a copyright break, it is around the world and not fixed to one country that host the file.

I had already that with trade names, in general they could call a lawyer in any country where the law is broken. Which means in the Internet time all around the world... :(

Change OpenTTD so it's 99,9% free code not derived by TTD and we are all happy around the world ;)
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Post by krtaylor »

eis_os wrote:I am bind to german laws even if the file is not hosted in germany because German citizen can access it. If it's a copyright break, it is around the world and not fixed to one country that host the file.
YOU are because you are German. But, for instance, I'm not. I have no presence in Germany, therefore nobody can sue me there. You have no presence in the US, therefore nobody can sue you there.
eis_os wrote:I had already that with trade names, in general they could call a lawyer in any country where the law is broken. Which means in the Internet time all around the world... :(
Sure they can call a lawyer all they like but it won't do them any good. If the target were an international company, then you are right, they can sue them anywhere that company operates. But if you are a private person, you can only effectively be sued where you live. What do I care if somebody sues me in Germany? There's nothing they can do to me, and I doubt if the court would take the case, knowing that - they would tell the plaintiff to go sue me in the US. There are only a very few situations where most courts will take an extraterritorial case, like crimes against humanity (there's a judge in Spain who's famous for doing that.)
eis_os wrote:Change OpenTTD so it's 99,9% free code not derived by TTD and we are all happy around the world ;)
I couldn't agree with you more, and I anticipate that during the course of Patch-izing OpenTTD, and adding all the other changes, this is exactly what will happen. So I won't worry about it.
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Post by eis_os »

If you don't know it, I don't fall into the category private person without any kind of business.
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Post by krtaylor »

Neither do I, but the point is, I don't have any operations outside of the U.S. If you have subsidiaries in other countries, then you might be vulnerable there, but otherwise, there's nothing they can do. In order to sue someone in a particular country, they have to have a presence there. I very carefully don't, I work through independent but allied intermediaries.
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Post by Spaz O Mataz »

This post is turning into one big argument. ludde has only done what a large group of people have done for scummVM he has wrote it so it works on windows and can be upgraded. To me I don't see this killigal at all as lucasarts havn't tried to sue scummvm. as long as the game files sample.dat and the grf files are not included in the download of openTTD then it should be perfactly legal.
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Post by krtaylor »

Let's sum up and lock this topic:

If you feel that you personally would be at risk by contributing code to Open TTD, then DON'T.

If, on the other hand, you feel that you personally are at minimal or no risk if you contribute, and you're able and willing to, then DO.

I think that pretty much covers it.
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