Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanbo
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
What if Daybreak were to step in at this point and request that 10 years of work for their next TLP?
|
They would have no legal claim to it. Quick backstory on copyright (with the obligatory warning that I'm not a layer) ...
When you write
anything (a book, a line of computer code ... anything that involves creative effort on some level, so not like phone book entries or something like that, but just about everything else), you own a copyright to what you wrote. You get that copyright automatically, the moment you write something. Whenever you see the © symbol and the author's name/date, that's not technically necessary: it's just the author adding a little more "legal strength" (should the copyright ever get tested in court). Fundamentally they already own the copyright without that symbol.
So back in '99-'01 the original EQ devs wrote the
server code for EverQuest, and because they signed a contract with Verant before they wrote it, Verant (later SOE) owned the copyright on that source code. But, as far as anyone knows, that code has since been lost to time: not even SOE or Daybreak have it today.
Because it was lost, the devs here never even had a chance to look at it. What they did was reverse engineer it (ie. they figured out how the old code must have worked, and wrote their own, completely original, code). Because they wrote original code,
they, not Daybreak, owns the copyright on that code.
So why did the P99 people enter that agreement with Daybreak then? Two reasons. First, there's the copyright
on the client.
For legal reasons P99 is
very careful never to tell anyone how to get the Titanium client, and the reason is they
don't own the copyright on that. No one has ever reverse-engineered and re-created an open EQ client (it's theoretically possible, but man that'd be a big project). Plus, the client doesn't just have code: it has graphic models, which are also protected by copyright. Even if programmers re-invented the code behind them, we'd need 100% new (unclassic) models if we wanted a completely legal and Daybreak-independent P99 client. Thus, all of us
players are in theory infringing on Daybreak's IP when we "pirate" the Titanium client.
Now again, P99 stays away from that, but in a sense they're encouraging copyright violation, so it's not 100% black and white in their favor. Sure Daybreak isn't even selling that client anymore (in fact, they never really
sold it originally either), and there are these things known as "fair use rights", so we players
might be protected ... but when it comes to IP laws who is right isn't all that matters. "Do you have enough money to to sustain a lawsuit long enough to prove that you are right" is also a huge factor, and Daybreak can almost certainly outspend R&N on lawyers, so regardless of who would "win" in such a fight ... R&N would lose.
On top of that, Daybreak still owns the
trademarks on terms like EverQuest and Firiona Vie. Without getting into details, trademarks work differently than copyright, and there's plenty of "gray area" there for a vicious corporation to out-lawyer R&N if they wanted.
Long story short, R&N definitely won with the Daybreak agreement (and so did Daybreak). Daybreak definitely has
some legal leverage to hold over R&N's head. But when it comes to the P99 server code specifically, that's R&N's, and no one can touch it.