Thanks, not spartacus. Much appreciated.

Copyright law is complicated to begin with. It being different in different countries only makes things worse (then again, that goes for much of law enforcement on the Internet; under what law do you sue when a French guy visits a website written in German (as spoken in Germany, but also in Austria), owned by a Dutch company, hosted in Belgium, talking about a Danish movie someone watched in Sweden?).

That being said, I know that in the Netherlands it is in fact possible to copyright maps. The problem with that being that you can only copyright the map itself, not the data (the real-world location of streets) it is based on. For that reason, it's not uncommon for mapping companies to insert very *very* few streets (usually in industrial zones, or other areas where they are highly unlikely to cause any trouble) which are deliberately incorrect. If someone (once you've sued them) says "No, I didn't copy your map, I made this thing myself." (which, if true, would be a perfectly legal action!) you can simply answer "Then how come you are listing a street which does not exist, and has never existed, in the exact same location we placed it?". A similar issue is "database copyright"; even if the data in a database cannot be copyrighted (such as a database of postal codes (zip codes)), the database itself *can* in fact be protected (if that were impossible, no company would spend the time and effort to make the database). Here too, it would be possible to deliberately add a few spurious lines to the database to "watermark" it, so that you (and more importantly, a court) can tell the difference between someone having collected the data himself, and someone having made a copy of your database.

The (in my opinion) biggest potential copyright issue on Warlight would be the "adoption" of abandoned maps. The process of creating a map (both the tracing and the steps to make it playable (selecting centre points, making connections, etc.)) are very much copywriteable work. I have no idea if Wizzer makes map creators sign over their copyright to him, but I doubt it; on various occasions he's refused to send people the SVGs for maps, stating copyright as the reason. (Of course, uploading a map and clicking the "make this public" button can be viewed as tacit approval for making it publicly playable, but that still doesn't cover adoption.)

Also, to everyone who's calling OP a troll or telling him to stop whining: like it or not, the guy has a point. It might be academic and of little practical impact, but a point nonetheless. Wanting to discuss it seems to me to be protected under free speech. So, if you don't care: feel perfectly free to ignore this thread, but don't tell him to shut up and/or go away.

@RvW

The "adoption" seems to be covered by this line in TOS: [http://warlight.net/TermsOfService.aspx]

> However, by submitting Content to WarLight, LLC., Users hereby grant WarLight, LLC. a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and WarLight, LLC.'s (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

("Content" is earlier defined to include maps.) Now, I'm no expert on legalspeak, much less on legalspeak in English (not my first language), but this seems to grant Fizzer the right to do whatever to a map, and to allow anyone else to do whatever to it. Still, the original author should probably be mentioned somewhere - the fact that he isn't is probably just a software limitation.

RvW writes:

"It being different in different countries only makes things worse" [...] "Wanting to discuss it seems to me to be protected under free speech."

Oh, the irony.

shut up and/or go away. far away. /freespeech

What about information, such as country names and basing reinforcements off populations found on a copyrighted source?

Also, with Wikimedia, would it be possible for people to take a copyrighted map, do a little editing, and then call it their own and claim to put it in the public domain?

How the hell could country names possibly be copyrighted? That makes ZERO sense.

Like I said before, I highly recommend you make your own map if you are going to be this paranoid about the source of the maps. Just be careful... you may just happen to imagine the same map as someone else out there in this universe and thus produce copyrighted material! You had better make sure it is 100% original!

[q]Also, with Wikimedia, would it be possible for people to take a copyrighted map, do a little editing, and then call it their own and claim to put it in the public domain?[/q]
In that case, it's their problem. Unless you could've reasonably suspected it to be copyrighted, it should (but, not a lawyer) suffice for you to say "it was marked as being in the public domain" to get off the hook.

According to whois, warlight.net is hosted in the US, so I believe it would fall under US law. Since maps are user-submitted content, Warlight probably falls under DMCA safe harbor provisions. That is, Warlight's hosting of the copyrighted material, and our use of the copyrighted material through playing the game, do not infringe the copyright. Rather, the only infringer is the one who uploaded the copyrighted map in the first place. (Provided that, when asked by the copyright holder, Fizzer actually takes down copyrighted material. If he refuses, then Fizzer becomes an infringer as well, although the rest of us users wouldn't be.)

One of the major problems with SOPA/PIPA was that, had they passed, we *would* be guilty of infringement simply for playing the game on a copyrighted map, or possibly even for creating a game that pointed people towards the copyrighted map, even if we never played it or knew that it was copyrighted. Since those bills were defeated, I think we're safe.

You don't need whois, according to US law, *all* sites with a TLD of .com, .net or .org are under US jurisdiction (the same goes for .us and .gov, but at least in those cases it makes sense).

No, we're not safe; SOPA and PIPA got shot down, so the huge companies will wait a year, invent a new acronym and simply enter a nigh-identical proposal again. And again the next year, until people get weary, can't be bothered to protest it and then it will pass. It usually only takes two or three tries. Go look up what happened to the "European Constitution"!

ps. Sorry for those [q]-tags in my previous post, that's how you quote on the forum where I post the most.

So there are no worries legal-wise by simply playing on an infringed map; even if you know, or highly suspect, it to be infringed?

Also, does anyone know much about map development tools, that may have relevance to this conversation? What the Terms may require, etc.?

Thanks!

Would the GPL require that you must attach the Terms to your map if your SVG editor was under that license? In the Terms it seems to say that you must post them on any derivative program? What else should I know about the GPL?

Lartokul, a SVG is not a program, merely a file. That is like saying all MS Word licenses must be attached to any document printed from it.

GPL only requires derivative works of *the program* to be released under GPL. Works created *using the program* are not derivative works of it, and thus can be released under any license. (This last part applies to every license I know of, by the way.)

Yeah, I kind of suspected that. Just making sure.

Thanks!

ACTA is another potential nightmare for website owners. Under these proposals it only takes a complaint for a website to get shut down and has gone under the radar for the main part with nearly 50 countries almost signed up to it. The internet will soon be governed by big business via governments.

@raverbaby:
Not necessarily, thanks to the massive protests in Poland, a few countries are now second-guessing whether or not to ratify ACTA.

Also, if you want to be cheered up, take a look at the recent success of www.kickstarter.com, raising over a million dollar for two projects each, from regular people like you and me, without any banks, investment firms or venture capitalists getting involved. It may not be a big start, but it's definitely a sign the power (or, at least, the uncontested power) of big companies is crumbling!