Re: [Rails-devel] Permissions to implement games?

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

You can look in the mailing list archives for past discussions on this.
When I started the project, we talked about it and made some specific
decisions about what would and would not be included in Rails.

We recognize that 18xx is a niche hobby and many of the game designers for
the games we enjoy are a part of the Yahoo 18xx mailing list. So, as a
courtesy and gesture to show seeking to add to the hobby, not take away, we
generally do ask for the game designer's blessing.

I know you didn't explicitly ask, but I'll also summarize the other aspects
of this discussion for the sake of completeness. :-)

In the U.S., much about a board game is not really able to be copyrighted.
(See: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html) That means, for the most
part, we don't really need permission to implement a digital game that is
very similar to another board game. Certain aspects of the game can be
trademarked, which would disallow using the same name (e.g. Monopoly,
Scrabble, etc.) but as far as I'm aware, no 18xx game name has been
trademarked.

The other requirements for implementation we have are that we will never
ship the rules to the games with Rails. We believe this also encourages
Rails users to buy copies of the physical board games. Finally, all of the
game assets (i.e. the artwork), which is copyrightable, must be original or
licensed to the creative commons (see: https://creativecommons.org/about ).

---Brett.


---Brett.


On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 12:01 AM, Michael Alexander <out...@gm...>
wrote:

> I was just talking to a local train game player who asked if we needed
> permission from the authors of a variation in order to release it in
> rails.  Now that I have some time to work on 1862 I'd like to make sure
> I'll be allowed to release before I put too much time in.   So do we
> generally ask the authors?
>
>
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