[ANNOUNCE] Umbra role-playing game 0.2 pre-alpha

[D-Man]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 08:01:04AM +0000, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
| practice, copyright protection means (1) having the force of the law on your
| side, (2) making things difficult for people who want to break the law.

How many books have you seen that _aren't_ copyrighted?  How many
(try to) make it difficult to break the law?  How do you make it
difficult to plagerize a book?

Sure, in software commercial companies try to make it difficult to
violate the copyright, but that is largely because it is easier than
trying to actually enforce the copyright.

What it all comes down to is respect and honesty.  An honest,
respectful person won't copy, etc, the code/book/whatever when they
see the owner's/author's copyright and their wishes that it isn't
copied.  The dishonest people aren't going to care one way or the
other.  See the number of cracks for comercial software (mostly games)
for an example.  It is _really_ easy to take a CD and a license key
(if the software requires one) and install it on several machines, but
only pay for 1 copy.  If the machines aren't networked then there is
no real software-only technical solution (from the licenser's POV)
(the special keyboard adapters I've seen are an exception, but they
are hardware).

The GPL and every other license exists to provide a legal basis for
communicating and enforcing the author's wishes with regard to their
creation.  Whether or not people respect the license is an entirely
different story, and totally unrelated to what the license actually
says.  (To play devil's advocate, though, if the license gives all
ownership rights to the user then it is really hard to violate the
license, but this is unrealistic)

licensing-discussions-in-an-imperfect-world-is-never-fun-ly y'rs  -D