[OT?] Copyright infringement, Scrabulous, and the GPL

[Marc Lanctot]

On 20/04/09 06:02 PM, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Apr 2009, Marc Lanctot wrote:
>
>> I'm interested in games, board games in particular, and the case with
>> Scrabulous. Scrabulous got nailed with lawsuits because they referred
>> to Scrabble and used a trademarked name attached to their product;
>> they have now renamed their service to Lexulous, but it's still the
>> exact same game as
>
> Hi Marc. IANAL. I'm a long time boardgame player[1]. My understanding
> from discussions around the boardgaming community is that games
> themselves _cannot_ be copyrighted but the rules and artwork can. As a
> result it is possible to produce a "work alike" game as long as it
> doesn't look like the original or share the same words in the rules.
>
> Again, IANAL but this is a topic that has been discussed in boardgaming
> circles.

That is good news, even if I can't your word as legal fact. I figured 
this would be the case because Lexulous is still around and Richard's 
PBEM server has never had any issues as far as I know.

>> So my question is this: is it legal to implement a (say GPL'd) online
>> game which allows users to play a game whose original rules etc. are
>> under
>
> Quite a number of board games can be played online and often with the
> original name and artwork. In these cases I presume permission was
> granted or they are flying underneath the radar.
>
> [1] These days I'm mostly into German Games. Favourite games include
> Mideast Peace, Medici, & Merchant of Venus.

Do you have a username on BSW? Mine is 'lanctot'. Let me know if you 
ever want to play any games.. I'm always up for it.

I was hoping to keep this somewhat under the hood but after this email I 
just won't be able to.  I'm developing an open gaming site with a 
friend. I've described it on this list before. Think of a GPL / Web 2.0 
version of Yahoo Games or a real-time version of Richard's PBEM server, 
where anybody is free to write games and have them hosted by us (like 
Kongregate but exclusively for multi-player games). Work is under way.. 
we've got a good chunk of the base code already done. We're just a few 
months away from an alpha version with about 5 working games...

Marc

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