A Dream

[Ed Kolis]

Last night I had this dream... in which I visited the forum here only to find that Aaron Hall had unexpectedly passed away! 8-O But apparently before he died he willed the existing source code to SE5 to the community, and Tesco and David Gervais were starting to head up an effort to build SE5 on their own!

I'm not a lawyer, but if my understanding is correct, let this be a reminder to everyone to will their intellectual property to SOMEONE, ANYONE, so that it isn't lost in the morass of copyrighted IP which no one actually owns! 8-O

[Fyron]

There has to be someone around to enforce the copyright for it to mean anything... since Malfador Machinations is Aaron Hall... the copyright would be meaningless, were he to die...

[geoschmo]

If that were true every song and book would go straight to the public domain when the author died, and that does not happen.

[Ragnarok-X]

sounds logical, geoschmo

[Fyron]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
If that were true every song and book would go straight to the public domain when the author died, and that does not happen.

Most songs and books are technically owned by the publishers, so there is someone to enforce the copyright... SE4 is copyright Malfador Machinations, not Shrapnel Games. Since at this point MM is just Aaron Hall, it disappears with his death. There would be noone that could enforce the copyright via law suits. Now, if MM had more employees and was thus able to survive the death of Aaron Hall, it would be able to enforce the copyright.

Of course, there could be a clause that the copyright goes to Shrapnel Games upon Aaron's demise, in which case this is all moot.

[ June 28, 2004, 19:23: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Raging Deadstar]

We could just form a "Church of Aaron" and declare the source code for SEV as a holy scripture of sorts. I'm pretty sure no-one owns rights to the bible

[ June 28, 2004, 19:22: Message edited by: Raging Deadstar ]