Copyright (was Graham Nelson's Curses)

Perfectly fine by me. I doubt it would be financially successful, however. I certainly would not expend an iota of energy to prevent it. Copyright is a legal issue; not a moral issue. There simply wasn’t any ethical system that said you shouldn’t copy or transcribe things, or modify them, until somebody made a law for it. Or if there ever was an ancient culture with an ethical system like that, it should not be a surprise that this culture was not preserved. Since cultural evolution favours things that spread without restraint, this has ensured that most people consider copying, modifying, and sharing an absolutely fine activity when considered separately from the purely legal arena of copyright, where modern minds tend to undergo a weird cognitive dissonance so that everything they have been trained by human evolution to believe gets turned on its head. (Plagiarism is the timeworn moral issue that people get confused with copyright; copying Zork or writing a derivative work isn’t morally wrong, but falsely claiming you actually invented it to begin with, is.)

Anyway, Activision has their own lawyers: they aren’t paying us to protect their silly misguided definition of ‘self-interest’. I wouldn’t help them do this, ever, not because I don’t care about protecting the commercial viability of old Infocom titles, but because they are entirely wrong that this is what they would accomplish by getting litigious about stuff like that. They would accomplish precisely the opposite.

Heh heh. Speaking of thought crime, I have complete copies of some oft-played commercial games entirely modelled in my head. I can even run through the various scenarios without a computer. Am I in violation? Sometimes I can even recite long passages of text, or completely describe a movie’s plot for someone, from memory. I can quote almost every line of dialogue from Blade Runner. My brain is the perfect DRM circumvention device. I think it might be illegal for me to carry it!

No. However, when we invent the mind-transference technology that grants us immortality in perfect sexy robot bodies, you will not be allowed to use it. Sorry pal.

:laughing:

What, no Linux version? Oh, dang. 87

so, I may or, may not get backlash from this, anyway, does anyone have the source code of curses? I’m creating an if game, and, I need to see how one portion is done, my game has nothing to do with curses, however, if I look at a source code, it’s easier for me to be able to understand it.

According to this article on the Digital Antiquarian it’s sadly been lost, along with the source code for Jigsaw.

(Doubly sad, because I seem to recall Graham considering releasing the Curses source code as a sample game for Inform 6. Perhaps ironically, if that email conversation actually existed outside of my imagination it too has been long since lost.)

So is @msww Jimmy Maher? If not, maybe the source code is still out there somewhere?

Sorry to disappoint, but it was a compiled copy of an old version of Curses I had access to, not source.

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Oh… Right. I misread that initial exchange there, since source code was mentioned. Sorry for bringing you back from the dead for that, haha.