Guild of Writers

Apologies to robbieagray if this posting continues to distract from the intention of his discussion, but I hate to see misinformation permitted to spread.

ddb174 wrote:By the way, and this is important: copyright infringement is a *civil* offence.

This is also important: Dustin is not a lawyer. Nor am I. But, readers in the United States should observe the following:

Title 17 of the US Code of Law defines Copyright, and section 506 of Title 17 describes Criminal offenses involving Copyright. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usco ... -000-.html

Title 18, section 2319 describes the penalties for Criminal infringement of a copyright. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html

Bottom line: Yes, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. What laws apply and which courts would preside depend on where you live, and it's your responsibility to know the rules.

Back on topic: I agree with Dustin's other comments about why an expansion pack wouldn't be a worthwhile or successful endeavor. Unfortunately, quite a bit of MOUL's content was not designed for single player, and some of MOUL's content was actually previously released content that was reworked to require multiplayer. The limitations of this content become clear pretty quickly if you import the content into Complete Chronicles using Dustin's tool, Drizzle. It's nice to explore but there is quite a bit that a single person cannot complete. The Pod Ages' puzzle is something that a single player would be unlikely to solve unless he or she was VERY fortunate. Delin and Tsogal require multiple players. Minkata is the only Age that a single player could complete.

On top of the above issues, Complete Chronicles is very old software and won't run on some newer computers; an expansion would certainly require Cyan to port the graphics card support from MOUL back to CC. And perhaps most sadly of all... I don't think there was really enough original content in MOUL Season One to justify releasing as an expansion pack.

If you'd like to support Cyan, you can do the following:
* Purchase Uru themed merchandise from http://mystwear.com/ . I understand that Cyan gets a cut of the profits.
* If you are in the United States, you can purchase Cosmic Osmo's Hex Isle through Fanista: http://www.fanista.com/Product.aspx?pur ... t/12753123
* Purchase iMyst for the iPhone/iPod Touch when it becomes available.
* Send donuts. I understand Rand likes them.

Marten wrote:

ddb174 wrote:By the way, and this is important: copyright infringement is a *civil* offence.

This is also important: Dustin is not a lawyer. Nor am I. But, readers in the United States should observe the following:

Title 17 of the US Code of Law defines Copyright, and section 506 of Title 17 describes Criminal offenses involving Copyright. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usco ... -000-.html

Title 18, section 2319 describes the penalties for Criminal infringement of a copyright. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html

Bottom line: Yes, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. What laws apply and which courts would preside depend on where you live, and it's your responsibility to know the rules.

Yeah, laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it's near-on impossible to know the laws everywhere. Case in point: I'm not in the USA. Perhaps most distressing about this is how it can be used: the person who owns the copyright cannot, by their own convictions, decide not to litigate. It would appear that this allows the government to prosecute in cases where the copyright holder would consider it not infringing. And virtually everything that can be, is covered by copyright...

Does anyone know when precisely these modifications were brought about?

robbieagray wrote:I put up this topic to discuss MOUL being adapted to be an expansion not to talk about Adam and his chicks. Can we please get back on topic.

This post is incorrect! I see no infant chickens in Adam's avatar. Nor are those chickens warm.

is there a possiblity then that we may be able to add content from MOUL onto our UCC versions without having played MOUL. I never had a chance to play MOUL and I always wanted to play on many of the ages used in MOUL. is there a way I could legally find and download MOUL files for my UCC game?

Please answer soon.

I think the only fully legal way would be to wait until cyan opens up that data server they promised, and get the files from there.

Trylon wrote:I think the only fully legal way would be to wait until cyan opens up that data server they promised, and get the files from there.

And if you can wait that long, you might as well wait a little longer (hours/days/week) until some one gets a server up and you won't have to worry about adding them to U:CC; you can just go play them in OSMO!

I suppose I can wait I've just heard about the server thing from Cyan which sounds cool but from what I have heard from my cousin (who works at Cyan) they may not be able to fund this. Just something to keep in mind.

robbieagray wrote:I suppose I can wait I've just heard about the server thing from Cyan which sounds cool but from what I have heard from my cousin (who works at Cyan) they may not be able to fund this. Just something to keep in mind.

I'm not sure what Cyan would need to fund, they're open sourcing the code so that the fans can run with it.

I think he means the data server Cyan wanted to run.

While we have to wait to see what Cyan does, I suspect lots of people will want to download the MOUL age files. That could use lots of bandwidth and run up a cost.

If Cyan has a cost concern, I would expect some type of distribution network. Cyan would provide MOUL ages to, call them, level 1 server operators, may be GoW, OU, and GoMa and others that volunteer. Everyone else would then download from them. That could hold Cyan's cost down and distribute it through the community. We might even see fans set up a Torrent to reduce cost.

Until we see the license we won't know... but just as Amazon sells books copyrighted by others so too might fan run MOOS servers distribute the MOUL ages to other server operators and fans...