Quote:
Originally Posted by Danth
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
You're skipping the practical side: Who's going to sue? Copyright law isn't criminal and the government isn't going to do it on its own. They might technically be in violation but if nobody cares they can violate 'till the end of days and it doesn't matter. That was the same reason P99 existed at all prior to 2015: Letter of the law aside, the owners of the EQ IP never cared enough to make a fuss over it. Copyright law is funny like that and in many cases it very much boils down in a defacto sense to, "It's only illegal if someone cares." Again, I remind you of who controls EQ-Emulator.
Danth
|
Anyone who wants access to P99 source code could complain. Any other emulated server for instance, as they might want to benefit from P99's work, just as P99 benefited from EQ Emulator's work (again, the entire point of GPL3).
But it could be anyone, even you or me, because the GPL3 license provides a community benefit (ie. the EQ Emulator people gave their source code to the community under a license, so the entire community suffers if that license is violated).
And there's an entire site setup to handle such complaints:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html. Potentially the Free Software Foundation might even get involved and provide free legal aid.
(Now, once a complaint is made I believe they'll first try to get the rights holder to pursue it, and if the rights holder doesn't want to that might gum up the works a bit ... again, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know those details. But the point is, once you open source a creative work, you can't "take it back", so even if the EQ Emu people truly said "We think the GPL3 was a mistake, sorry R&N" it wouldn't matter, legally.)