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Thanks Floss, makes me feel a bit better. It scares me sometimes people saying "It just isn't right or fair that EA could sue the project". Unfortunately anyone can sue anyone for anything in this day and age. It does not make it right, but that is the way it is. EA being the last (on record) owner of the intelectual property ie. EnB.

I hope I am being a chicken little.

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Whether or not EA is likely to sue us is beside the point. Placing copyrights on IP you did not create is unethical and EA doesn't need to go to all that much trouble to send a C&D order. Though the server might be reconstructed and less of that is EA's property, the entire content base is, most of the site graphics have E&B elements, etc. etc.

In the long term, if the project is successful, EA will most likely assess the publicity factor. Will this project (further) harm EA's reputation (say by management issues) or could it be turned to EA's advantage somehow? I consider both to be possible which is why I'm conceptualizing a few docs intended to convince EA the latter is the case. This project has some potential to be leveraged into a marketing tool by EA. The emulator succeeds, EA could take over certain aspects of it (say, hosting the forums) and using it to generate ad revenue/customers.

In any case, it's stupid to claim copyrights on someone else's IP. :blink:

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Mneme, as some devs already explained, what is copyright-ed by the Emulator team is not the EA IP (we all know its theirs, and we're using it not-so-legally) , but the server code that the devs wrote from scratch, yes, scratch, nothing, blank screen...completely. Now, you might say that many of the mechanism they are reproducing using that code are EA IP (Item effects, warp, w/e) but the server code is the emulator team's IP, under creative commons license. Ofcourse its outright silly to try and enforce copyrights on behalf of a project that is completely based on infringing copyrights from the start, but thats a different issue. LOL.

Since EA abandoned this game, from an ethical perspective I think its safe to look at it similar to how you would look at modernization/recreations of Shakespearean works or w/e... no clue on the legal similarities/dissimilarites in that analogy at all so feel free to expand here if you're familiar with copyright law.

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EA owns clients, assets, and name. All code is capable of being copywritten by the project because the project created it from character number 1. We don't claim copyright over anything EA created.

I just added a copywriter saying that all of the code that is made from this open source emulator is not allowed to be used to make money or sell. Anyone that uses the source code must also open source their project. We can copywriter anything that we make our self’s. We are in no way copywriting anything that EA owns. This is more to project the open source community and keep people from selling services using it.

Thanks,

David

Well thats what the devs say , so cheer:blink::D

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The actual damages would be zero, unless EA could prove that this somehow hurt their sales of other games which would be a ridiculous assertion. They could dig into the "donations" and view that as revenue, which could open a small can of worms.

Also might be some tax implications for whoever actually owns the server/pays the bills/etc as it is income (even if it makes just $1 net over the fiscal year) whether you are incorporated or not, would hit a personal return for somebody. This really depends on the jurisdiction of the owner of the project (person paying the bills, renting the server, paying for the website, etc) and while I'm familiar and have practiced US and Canadian tax, I'm not going to pretend to be competent in other country's tax laws. I would assume whatever jurisdiction they are in is similar, where if the project makes nothing ($0 or less) on a cash-basis for the calendar year (assuming the tax system operates on a calendar basis), then there is no income to report and EA wouldn't have anything concrete to chase.

I kind of thought that the emulator IP is held/owned by Net-7 Entertainment... and that the company was formed under EUropean law...? You'd have to ask who receives the funds, and if it is a foreign corporation along with the server being hosted in the EU, it would have no US tax liability.

Now, EA could send a C&D letter (Cease and Desist) under the DMCA, as such happened to to ProjectXI.org (the Final Fantasy XI emulator) --- even though SqEnix was still making money off it (ProjectXI client users still had to pay $$ to the SqEnix PlayOnLine service and maintain a content ID - still around $12 base per month)... and it still got C&D'ed.

I wouldn't put anything past the large, money-seeking software corporations to do things in spite of their revenue stream, and I wouldn't put it past EA to try putting the kibosh on this EMU if they thought that someone might be able to monetize the fruit of their acquired (WestWood) labours.

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The tighter your hold, the weaker your grasp.

I've been around since the early days (way before Stress Test One), ran a local server (with multiple concurrent users), was a beta tester for this project as well as EA's EnB, and have oodles of previous emulator experience (Ultima Online, another EA title). But I have no stake in this project, whether it succeeds or fails, for two reasons.

By engaging in and abiding by messy internal politics, the stewards of this emulator have placed their egos before their task (this is so conspicuous that it has become noticeable to the community at large).

By putting property ownership and power above community ownership and freedom, our stewards have been replaced by gatekeepers.

You're the new EA, Net-7 Entertainment. Congratulations, and shame on you.

The single largest factor that will allow Ultima Online to survive and thrive well into the future (with or without EA's servers) is the community's freedom to share in each others efforts. This is paramount. This is an MMO community's lifeblood. And this includes tons of content, enough to make your eyes bleed. No hiding behind Open Source mantras or Creative Commons labels. Just a big all-you-can-eat buffet of shared efforts, where you can still get fame and glory for your creative efforts, all without any iron fist crap. The leaders of this project ought not to care whether the community is playing on their servers, but to seek satisfaction in knowing that people are playing Earth and Beyond at all. Anywhere. Period.

Earth and Beyond should be the community's priority. Net-7 entertainment should not represent the entirety of the community, as much as we've allowed it to. EnB will thrive in a sea of development teams, but it will surely fizzle and pop if left to the devices of a single development team. Development teams come and go. Eventually, the Sands of Time will have their way, even with this long-lived development team.

For anyone out there with the skills and the tools and the inclination to save this game and keep it running, the moral thing to do should be clear: With regard to ownership of content, always remember to give Net-7 Entertainment the same amount of respect they've given EA.

Damned right.

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The tighter your hold, the weaker your grasp.

I've been around since the early days (way before Stress Test One), ran a local server (with multiple concurrent users), was a beta tester for this project as well as EA's EnB, and have oodles of previous emulator experience (Ultima Online, another EA title). But I have no stake in this project, whether it succeeds or fails, for two reasons.

By engaging in and abiding by messy internal politics, the stewards of this emulator have placed their egos before their task (this is so conspicuous that it has become noticeable to the community at large).

By putting property ownership and power above community ownership and freedom, our stewards have been replaced by gatekeepers.

You're the new EA, Net-7 Entertainment. Congratulations, and shame on you.

The single largest factor that will allow Ultima Online to survive and thrive well into the future (with or without EA's servers) is the community's freedom to share in each others efforts. This is paramount. This is an MMO community's lifeblood. And this includes tons of content, enough to make your eyes bleed. No hiding behind Open Source mantras or Creative Commons labels. Just a big all-you-can-eat buffet of shared efforts, where you can still get fame and glory for your creative efforts, all without any iron fist crap. The leaders of this project ought not to care whether the community is playing on their servers, but to seek satisfaction in knowing that people are playing Earth and Beyond at all. Anywhere. Period.

Earth and Beyond should be the community's priority. Net-7 entertainment should not represent the entirety of the community, as much as we've allowed it to. EnB will thrive in a sea of development teams, but it will surely fizzle and pop if left to the devices of a single development team. Development teams come and go. Eventually, the Sands of Time will have their way, even with this long-lived development team.

For anyone out there with the skills and the tools and the inclination to save this game and keep it running, the moral thing to do should be clear: With regard to ownership of content, always remember to give Net-7 Entertainment the same amount of respect they've given EA.

You do realize that the only reason this copyright was added is to prevent others from taking the code, claiming they did it all, and trying to charge for or sell services for what we intend to be open source work, right? Your response looks like you didn't read the copyright header nor what the terms were. Everyone's entitled to an opinion though, so if you did and this is still it, good on ya. :P

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You do realize that the only reason this copyright was added is to prevent others from taking the code, claiming they did it all, and trying to charge for or sell services for what we intend to be open source work, right? Your response looks like you didn't read the copyright header nor what the terms were. Everyone's entitled to an opinion though, so if you did and this is still it, good on ya. :P

I will make my point clearer and apologize for not making it clearer above. If we're on the same page about all this, great! If not, boo-- and I'll come back to EnB when a fairer-minded development team opens another server.

If there are plans to create any copyrights with the aim of withholding content (such as story arcs, talk trees, or items) from free community use on their own potential servers, then the above still stands. If there are plans to restrict access to code or content data, or plans to avoid efforts to make code or content data easily available to the community at large, then the above still stands.

The concept of gradually releasing story content data to outside projects has been passed around, the goal being to encourage retention of users on Net-7's server(s). I hope this isn't the case. The success of the project should be based on the merits of the team's efforts, not based on the team's ability to enforce ownership in a way that's really just engineered to keep other developers away from your content.

When it comes to emulators, letting the community have your stuff is the right thing to do, whether you're the only development team on the block, or one team among hundreds. Spend some time at RunUO.com's forums. Thousands of emulator developers sharing each others work is a good thing. It works faster. It works stronger. And it keeps the emulator community decentralized, which has the benefit of making a cease and desist letter useless. Net-7 Entertainment ought to be in a hurry to decentralize the community, rather than putting it off.

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