I think this is the point where I have to remind everyone that I do not even work for Atlas, much less speak for them. I am speaking purely as a user of the licence.
This is what I am saying. This is a question for lawyers. If you cannot afford lawyers, your safe option is to put all the mechanics under CC BY-SA. I cannot afford lawyers, and that is why all the text of my Ars Magica products is under the licence.
I am evidently failing to get my point across. Let me just state then that, if this were brought to court, my money would be on the Ars Magica mechanics not managing to get protected under copyright.
I think this grossly misrepresents what I said. I pointed out that, if one cannot afford a lawyer, giving up one's IP in this case on the suspicion that not doing so might violate Atlas rights might not necessarily be the best bet. And the reason I gave is that a) I suspect there would be no violation of rights anyway and b) even if there were, I suspect it would be for sufficiently little money that it would not be worth for Atlas to sue.
However, it seems that I am failing to get my point across. As I mentioned, it's often hard to communicate effectively about this stuff with non-practitioners. So, I'll just give up, to avoid derailing the thread any further.
Directly giving up rights and control for fear of legal consequences is not the purpose of licensing law! I agree with ezzelino that, while copyright protection in this case is technically murky territory, itās extremely unlikely that the implementation as discussed would generate a meaningful claim.
Keep in mind that writing such a program is an entrepreneurial activity that takes a significant amount of work and may yield enormous rewards. While placing the whole program under the CC BY-SA license may be the safest bet wrt the atlas legal team, it comes with its downsides. Giving up commercial control of your work is a huge issue! If you hit it big, youāll be crying bloody tears.
My personal recommendation is to directly contact atlas games to get their position in writing rather than working on assumptions. Chances are theyāll be fairly tolerant - the lack of an NC clause signals their intent. If they do make excessive demands, youāll at least be able to situate the project.
Finally, consider placing the whole venture under limited liability. The difficulty and implications of doing so vary heavily from country to country and state to state, so it may not be worth it for you, but itās certainly worth looking into to cover your bases before you invest years of work.
I think it is AWESOME AND EXCITING that someone is working on an Ars Magica game under the open license! Yay!!
I am not going to give legal advice, but I am going to offer some observations.
The first is that the rule that copyright protects specific expression and not ideas is important in principle, as is the general principle that rules (as opposed to the specific expression of rules) are not subject to copyright. I lack the experience or expertise to generalize those principles to software.
Thereās also the principle of fair use. And in combination, thereās a lot of ambiguity as to what would be found legally permissible in terms of third part products, at the end of a long and costly legal battle. (See: TSR vs. Mayfair, for instance.) Itās quite possible that anyone all along could have made fully Ars Magica compatible products without any license or permission. Of course, thatās the legal advice Mayfair received; TSR differed; they spent a lot of $$ on litigation and then settled out of court.
Our intent in adopting the CC-BY-SA is that we actively encourage the creation of derivative Ars Magica works by third parties, even commercially. As David says in his other thread, the Creative Commons license creates a āsafe harborā where people can feel free to derive from Ars Magica without worrying that they are under the shadow of a threat that might appear any day out of the blue.
Our intent in making it SA and not just CC0 or CC-BY is that we ALSO want to encourage people, as strongly as possible, to extend the same grace to the next generation. I am excited to see people build on what Ars Magica has made over the decades, and Iād also like to see people build upon each othersā works!
If someone creates something that is derivative of Ars Magica and it SHOULD be also Share-Alike, but they donāt identify it as share-alike, what does this mean? For Atlas Games, not much, honestly! Where it is a problem is if someone else then uses it in a way that might be construed as an infringement, which creates a legal dispute between the second party (the one who claimed it was not share-alike despite being part of or associated with an Ars Magica-derived work) and a third party that uses that material which the second party claimed was NOT share-alike. (And possibly then downstream disputes with a fourth party who derived from the third, ad infinitum.) The second party would need to pursue a claim of infringement against the third party; the third party would no doubt say that the restrictions asserted by the second party contradict the CC-BY-SA itself, which prohibits additional conditions. Lawyers rack up billable hours, it all sucks for everyone else.
As David pointed out in his other thread, the reasonable course of action is thus to actively avoid using anything that is ambiguous in how it implements the CC-BY-SA. The only way to win the litigation game on the scale of Ars Magica derivative works is not to get sucked into playing.
Thank you so much for posting this! It helps put my mind at ease.
Hereās my latest devlog on where the future of this game could be headed!
https://dragynrain.itch.io/ludus-mercurii/devlog/1458410/post-mvp-where-this-game-could-go
A little unmentioned note here: even if you could create a highly-derived but legal work, your core audience is still, in theory, Ars Magica players, which leaves you vulnerable to an expression of ill will from the creators in the community.
Without speaking to this particular project at all, Iām noting that the people arguing you -can- get away with various things legally are not mentioning that the customers, at the end, still get a vote, and if you rip off someone we like, the German Venice people for example, and they do a tearful YouTube video, your project is still toast regardless of law.
There are legal ways to steal from the cauldron we are all adding to, certainly. If we catch you, you donāt get to sell much soup afterwards and thatās not a legal thing, itās a community thing.
Has this happened? Am I out of the loop or is it just a hypothetical?
Hypothetical.
Entirely hypothetical
Good demonstration of my point, though
Starting PC: Marcus of Bonisagus - Ludus Mercurii
The starting character for the game! Including complete PDF downloadable character sheet! Check out my latest devlog!
https://dragynrain.itch.io/ludus-mercurii/
https://dragynrain.itch.io/ludus-mercurii/devlog/1468418/starting-pc-marcus-of-bonisagus
Frankly, I find such threats deeply annoying. "Nice content you have there, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it, uh? 'Cause you know, we are a family, and if you annoy the family, your project is toast regardless of law." Maybe that's not what was meant, but it's certainly how it sounds to me.
I also believe that, at least in some jurisdictions, such threats may be either illegal, or sufficiently close to illegal that I would never risk making them (and in fact, if I managed the website, I'd issue a public warning against them just to be on the safe side).
Iāve not threatened anyone: Iāve pointed out that consumer boycotts exist. They even exist in our industry. āBeast: the Primordialā and the āV5 Camarillaā Chechnya Incident happened. Law matters, but it doesnāt suffice, to maintain social license.
Iām not clear where you are that would make them illegal, but here in Australia they absolutely arenāt. Theyāre common and relatively effective. Sorry if Iāve offended you by crossing some sort of cultural boundary, but thereās no compulsion on me to buy stuff from other creators, and thereās no compulsion on me to do anything other than describe their work accurately, if I mention them at all. My point is that even if you can find a point of law that lets you get away with something that the fandom finds distasteful, there was nothing illegal in āV5 Camarillaā or āBeastā. Nonetheless, either would have been fatal to a hobbyist like myself and the others who publish for Ars, because each project funds the next project. (Or, in my case, each Maganomia project funds the next Ars project.)
I wanted to turn the conversation from āWell, -Technically- this is legal.ā to the rather more important, IMO, point that testing the edges of whatās legal may erode your social license in the fandom.
Much ado about nothing.
Personnally, Iāll wait and see what the reality is once the product is out. Anything else is premature.
Boycotts are generally legal in most jurisdictions (not all though, and there are exceptions in a surprisingly large number of corner cases). Had you said something along the lines: "Of course, following the law is just one part of running a successful business. Businesses that operate under legal but morally questionable practices - from putting out content of little originality and low quality, to exploiting ill-paid labour - may face a market backlash." I would have not called you out; in fact, I would have probably added a like to your post.
However, if you, an influential Ars Magica content creator, say:
"even if you could create a highly-derived but legal work ... you [are] vulnerable to an expression of ill will from the creators in the community" and
"if you rip off someone we like, the German Venice people for example, and they do a tearful YouTube video, your project is still toast regardless of law",
that's a completely different story.
Saying "I've not threatened anyone: I've just pointed out that consumer boycotts exist" sounds eerily similar to saying "you know, accidents happen". Accidents do happen, but if you suggest, even without explicitly stating so, that you have the power to increase their likelihood in case another party takes action that is legal but that you dislike, that starts crossing the threshold into a (veiled) threat.
Since you are specifically considering Australia, I would point you to Section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act of 2010, that prohibits entities with substantial market power to engage in conduct that has the purpose, effect, or likely effect of substantially lessening competition, and carries a penalty of up to 2.5 million AUD for individuals (potentially much more for companies). In this sense, Australia has one of the lowest bars for "substantial market power" in the world, even lower than the EU; I think that you, Timothy Ferguson would actually meet that bar in relation to the Ars Magica ecosystem. And I think that comments such as those above might be construed as a "conduct that has the purpose, effect, or likely effect of substantially lessening competition". At the same time I would stress that, in my opinion, the likelihood of someone suing you is negligible, because from the numbers I've seen there's so little money involved. Still, it's worth noting that the (il)legality threshold might not be as far off as some people might think.
Finally, I think that at this point I have derailed the OP (that was about an Ars Magica video game) enough, so I won't respond to additional posts on this issue on this thread. I'll be happy to continue the discussion in private though, or on another thread focusing on it.
You're giving advice now, based on a threat you and only you are reading in.
With regard to the law you cite, I have virtually no market share (because most of my products are available for free), there is no barrier to entry into the market (SA license) and I lack the ability to constrain the inputs of others. As such I'm not considered by that law. You're reaching.
I agree, enough. You've reached the point of arguing against a straw man twice, about a law you don't seem well versed in.
I've set you to āIgnore" for a year.
Goodbye.
I largely don't see a threat in what Ferguson wrote. It's a rather common sense statement, the open license is only going to be worth it to authors if we treat each other with respect. Much like we should treat Atlas with respect. This is something I agree with - if someone is ripping off fellow authors, he's not getting my $. I don't see anything that actually indicates he believes the original author is doing something fundamentally wrong. I'm personally looking forward to see where Ludus Mercurii will go.
The TL;DR: Reputations matter in business. I donāt think itās so much a matter of any kind of organized boycott, but rather that people will develop opinions based on what they perceive as fair or unfair, regardless of legality. If in doubt, I think it is a creatorās self-interest to do things that will be generally perceived as fair and positive.
I posted my newest devlog! It covers details about the Encounter and Approach system - the biggest fundamental system to the entire game. Let me know what you think!
https://dragynrain.itch.io/ludus-mercurii/devlog/1474271/encounters-and-approaches
My latest devlog covers the social encounters dialogue system including screenshots! Plus dice!
https://dragynrain.itch.io/ludus-mercurii/devlog/1482646/social-encounters
