I just posted an interesting concept in response to one of Mark's posts, but thought it more worthy of its own thread. With PF having difficulties when played in the Classic Environment under OS X and the known bug in the M1 engine that causes problems in Classic, and with the fact that newer Macs cannot boot into anything less than OS X, do scenario makers have the right to let their scenarios die?
You can probably guess where I'm going with this. The authors of Trojan have expressly forbidden anyone to port Trojan to AO. Their explanation makes sense - that they would feel an obligation to thoroughly test it before they could give it their blessing, and they don't want to take the time to do this. Ultimately this will mean that there won't be any computers capable of playing Trojan in the future, except possibly on PC's, ironically, since Trojan was ported to M2/PC.
From a legal standpoint, once a scenario is released free of charge to the public, is it truly in the public domain or do the authors retain copyright? Can the authors enforce their copyright if fans decide to take it upon themselves to make a mod based on their game? How about the use of textures or weapons in other scnearios - something that seems to happen all the time without nearly as much controversy as porting an entire scenario? Is it ethical for scenario makers to refuse to let their fans port their games to other platforms, and is it unethical for fans to do so knowing that the authors object to this?
Now, my opinion is that the authors probably do retain legal copyright, but would have an incredibly difficult time enforcing it, particularly since there are very few scenarios indeed that themselves do not contain snippets of copyrighted material. Ethically, I think it is wrong for scenario makers to refuse to let others port their scenarios to other platforms - the argument about not being able to test it is IMO bogus - there are plenty of us around to do that and to ensure that the ported scenario is faithful to the original. On the other hand, it is probably unethical to make such a port knowing that the authors object. Balancing these two ethical conflicts is thus the question - does one wrong justify another?
Personally, I intend to get ahold of a copy of Trojan for M2/PC and try to get it to work with AO for personal use. The authors cannot prevent me from doing so. For the rest of the group, however, I don't think it would be inappropriate to develop an open letter from all of us at large demanding that the scenario be released to the public domain rather than allowing it to die.
What does everyone else think?
