why do you have an issue with it? do you think the people who made these maps would care about them being used on this game? wouldnt they be more likely to be pleased with it?

you are a whole new kind of idiot. i cant imagine you actually existing in real life.

Lartokul, if you are so bloody worried about copyright infringement I recommend you either:

A - Don't play the bloody game!
B - Create your own original map and only ever play on that map.

In scientific publishing it is common to redrawn an image or figure from another paper for purposes of illustration or argument. Usually you redraw to exclude information that is not germaine to the topic at hand. Then you just include a simple statement of "Redrawn from John Doe (c)1995" and you are covered. Probably would suffice for purposes here. Slightly pedantic, yes, but good practice.

You can ignore my threads (yes, multiple threads probably wasn't the way to go - I'll stop posting in the other one), if you'd like. Those who wish to participate in this discussion may continue if they'd like.

This thread is probably going nowhere, anyway. This may be a question for the experts, as some have noted. I believe the discussion of copyright is important, and I don't want to infringe on copyright in any way, even while realizing that this may seem to be a rather bizarre question.

Since the source of many of these maps is likely forgotten and/or their creators are no longer active on Warlight, I would wager that the only way to play without fearing copyright concerns would be to create your own original map to play on. Or rely on the novelty maps which even then aren't guaranteed to be safe.

there must be some kind of cartography coypright forum out there on the internet for you somewhere, if thats what youre interested in. this is a strategy game.

Yeah, I think I will just try to create my own maps. No painful chore for someone who already loves drawing maps for and creating fictional worlds. :D

I did post a question about this on a (pretty inactive) copyright forum. I thought I'd try this forum, and it turned out to be much more active. I'll persist with the copyright forum - I never did think of trying a cartography forum: certainly worth a shot!

Thanks for the replies

You said in post 19 that you had a previous account. However in your other forum you said

|>I joined a couple days ago and am still confused about a lot of things (copyright included). I'm not even sure I knew I signed up for that game, much less remembered it. Sorry.

Yes, I signed up my new account a couple days ago. I hadn't played in a while and can't remember my old account's information.

A reaonably accurate answer from a reasonably knowledgeable person (cos it's sort of my job)

1) You aren't breaking any laws by playing on a map which comes from a copyrighted source.
2) Maps can be copyrighted, and there can be legal disputes about it which can become quite arcane. However the real money is in patents for location-based technologies, not in the maps themselves- it's **highly** unlikely that anyone on Warlight, or Warlight itself, would be sued. Ordnance Survey in the UK might send out a stern letter, say, but it wouldn't be worth their while to do more than that.
3) There are several good sources of public domain svg and other mapping, so it doesn't follow that anything/everything on Warlight is illegal.
-Wikipedia has several SVG maps under Creative Commons licences, worth a look. I did begin converting one of these for Warlight, so I know that's a viable route.
-Open Street Maps is a good source of open source mapping (non-svg) which you can do whatever you want with. It covers the whole world, and for Warlight purposes is accurate enough.
-In the UK Ordnance Survey have made many of their large scale datasets available as Open Data
-data.gov in the US might work in a similar way, but haven't looked. I think some states have released map data as open data, to stimulate the market.
4) It's a little too simple to say that copying a map makes it ok to use. It might be true if you copy by hand, but is not likely to be true if you are say using detailed snapping tools.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks, not spartacus. Much appreciated.

Copyright law is complicated to begin with. It being different in different countries only makes things worse (then again, that goes for much of law enforcement on the Internet; under what law do you sue when a French guy visits a website written in German (as spoken in Germany, but also in Austria), owned by a Dutch company, hosted in Belgium, talking about a Danish movie someone watched in Sweden?).

That being said, I know that in the Netherlands it is in fact possible to copyright maps. The problem with that being that you can only copyright the map itself, not the data (the real-world location of streets) it is based on. For that reason, it's not uncommon for mapping companies to insert very *very* few streets (usually in industrial zones, or other areas where they are highly unlikely to cause any trouble) which are deliberately incorrect. If someone (once you've sued them) says "No, I didn't copy your map, I made this thing myself." (which, if true, would be a perfectly legal action!) you can simply answer "Then how come you are listing a street which does not exist, and has never existed, in the exact same location we placed it?". A similar issue is "database copyright"; even if the data in a database cannot be copyrighted (such as a database of postal codes (zip codes)), the database itself *can* in fact be protected (if that were impossible, no company would spend the time and effort to make the database). Here too, it would be possible to deliberately add a few spurious lines to the database to "watermark" it, so that you (and more importantly, a court) can tell the difference between someone having collected the data himself, and someone having made a copy of your database.

The (in my opinion) biggest potential copyright issue on Warlight would be the "adoption" of abandoned maps. The process of creating a map (both the tracing and the steps to make it playable (selecting centre points, making connections, etc.)) are very much copywriteable work. I have no idea if Wizzer makes map creators sign over their copyright to him, but I doubt it; on various occasions he's refused to send people the SVGs for maps, stating copyright as the reason. (Of course, uploading a map and clicking the "make this public" button can be viewed as tacit approval for making it publicly playable, but that still doesn't cover adoption.)

Also, to everyone who's calling OP a troll or telling him to stop whining: like it or not, the guy has a point. It might be academic and of little practical impact, but a point nonetheless. Wanting to discuss it seems to me to be protected under free speech. So, if you don't care: feel perfectly free to ignore this thread, but don't tell him to shut up and/or go away.

@RvW

The "adoption" seems to be covered by this line in TOS: [http://warlight.net/TermsOfService.aspx]

> However, by submitting Content to WarLight, LLC., Users hereby grant WarLight, LLC. a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and WarLight, LLC.'s (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

("Content" is earlier defined to include maps.) Now, I'm no expert on legalspeak, much less on legalspeak in English (not my first language), but this seems to grant Fizzer the right to do whatever to a map, and to allow anyone else to do whatever to it. Still, the original author should probably be mentioned somewhere - the fact that he isn't is probably just a software limitation.

RvW writes:

"It being different in different countries only makes things worse" [...] "Wanting to discuss it seems to me to be protected under free speech."

Oh, the irony.

shut up and/or go away. far away. /freespeech

What about information, such as country names and basing reinforcements off populations found on a copyrighted source?

Also, with Wikimedia, would it be possible for people to take a copyrighted map, do a little editing, and then call it their own and claim to put it in the public domain?

How the hell could country names possibly be copyrighted? That makes ZERO sense.

Like I said before, I highly recommend you make your own map if you are going to be this paranoid about the source of the maps. Just be careful... you may just happen to imagine the same map as someone else out there in this universe and thus produce copyrighted material! You had better make sure it is 100% original!

[q]Also, with Wikimedia, would it be possible for people to take a copyrighted map, do a little editing, and then call it their own and claim to put it in the public domain?[/q]
In that case, it's their problem. Unless you could've reasonably suspected it to be copyrighted, it should (but, not a lawyer) suffice for you to say "it was marked as being in the public domain" to get off the hook.

According to whois, warlight.net is hosted in the US, so I believe it would fall under US law. Since maps are user-submitted content, Warlight probably falls under DMCA safe harbor provisions. That is, Warlight's hosting of the copyrighted material, and our use of the copyrighted material through playing the game, do not infringe the copyright. Rather, the only infringer is the one who uploaded the copyrighted map in the first place. (Provided that, when asked by the copyright holder, Fizzer actually takes down copyrighted material. If he refuses, then Fizzer becomes an infringer as well, although the rest of us users wouldn't be.)

One of the major problems with SOPA/PIPA was that, had they passed, we *would* be guilty of infringement simply for playing the game on a copyrighted map, or possibly even for creating a game that pointed people towards the copyrighted map, even if we never played it or knew that it was copyrighted. Since those bills were defeated, I think we're safe.

You don't need whois, according to US law, *all* sites with a TLD of .com, .net or .org are under US jurisdiction (the same goes for .us and .gov, but at least in those cases it makes sense).

No, we're not safe; SOPA and PIPA got shot down, so the huge companies will wait a year, invent a new acronym and simply enter a nigh-identical proposal again. And again the next year, until people get weary, can't be bothered to protest it and then it will pass. It usually only takes two or three tries. Go look up what happened to the "European Constitution"!

ps. Sorry for those [q]-tags in my previous post, that's how you quote on the forum where I post the most.