Dear TMW Community.

[ObiOne]

OK, because i got tired of all that BS, i asked a lawyer friend for his opinion. He said a lot of lawyer stuff that's hard for me to reproduce here (not a native English speaker), but bottom line is this:

Platyna has no case. She should be worried though for "slander defamation" (i hope i get it right) from the people she called names.

Just my friend's two cents.

P.S. Oh, and please, don't reply to my sayings. It is not my point of view, and i won't debate for something that's not mine.

[WildX]

OK, because i got tired of all that BS, i asked a lawyer friend for his opinion. He said a lot of lawyer stuff that's hard for me to reproduce here (not a native English speaker), but bottom line is this:

Platyna has no case. She should be worried though for "slander defamation" (i hope i get it right) from the people she called names.

Just my friend's two cents.

P.S. Oh, and please, don't reply to my sayings. It is not my point of view, and i won't debate for something that's not mine.

Does your friend have internet connection?

[Ledmitz]

I hope accounts are not in debate. My account belongs to me.. not TMW, not Platyna or anyone else... and the accounts file is generated from mana software based on user input. those files should have NO copyrights at all or even be made to have them. I believe that would be a privacy act arguement.. not a licensing one.

[Platyna]

I hope accounts are not in debate. My account belongs to me.. not TMW, not Platyna or anyone else... and the accounts file is generated from mana software based on user input. those files should have NO copyrights at all or even be made to have them. I believe that would be a privacy act arguement.. not a licensing one. :?:

Yes, your individual account belongs to you. However all of the server data as a whole belongs to me. It is not about copyright, it is about responsibility. You have created your account on my server, and I am responsible for that.

For now, your personal data was scattered around the world, they were sent to Yahoo or Hotmail accounts along with multiple hostings with uknown owners and private PCs, now it is hard to track how many people are in posession of these data because of nonchalant treatment by a group of people who abused my trust. This is not the way responsible persons should treat the users.

Regards.

[Axalix]

I am asking administrators and other responsible people to make a note on the home page, on the game news window and on the forum about necessity to change forum and game passwords ASAP, reasoning "why".

By the way, when you change the password on the forum - you can't use it. Please, check this out, to be sure, what's wrong. Another issue is captcha, that seem doesn't appear in a place where it should be, including "forgot password" page.

[Frost]

I hope accounts are not in debate. My account belongs to me.. not TMW, not Platyna or anyone else... and the accounts file is generated from mana software based on user input. those files should have NO copyrights at all or even be made to have them. I believe that would be a privacy act arguement.. not a licensing one.

As a player, I always assumed that the TMW project would store account data, and that the data would be used as necessary to provide me access to play the game, including backups, redundant servers, whatever -- just as long as the purpose is to let me play. Given the architecture of the game, no other way really makes sense.
I was never notified, nor did I see any reason to assume, that any private individual would assert exclusive ownership of that data, nor that any claim would be used to limit (instead of support) my ability to play the game.

As an admin, my duties include making backup copies of the game files for the purpose of recovering from a crash or otherwise maintaining the game we play. This shouldn't be a surprise. Backups are to servers at other sites, as approved by other TMW leaders, and other admins have access to the data.

To date, I have not heard any credible legal argument that would affect either of those two statements, or the ability of TMW to make changes to the game including changing hosting providers.

Current situation: Not only have I not heard anyone in the current TMW Committee claim personal ownership of the game data, I have universally heard distaste for the very idea.
We are being extremely careful to prevent anyone from being able to hold the game hostage in the future.

[Platyna]

I hope accounts are not in debate. My account belongs to me.. not TMW, not Platyna or anyone else... and the accounts file is generated from mana software based on user input. those files should have NO copyrights at all or even be made to have them. I believe that would be a privacy act arguement.. not a licensing one. :?:

As a player, I always assumed that the TMW project would store account data, and that the data would be used as necessary to provide me access to play the game, including backups, redundant servers, whatever -- just as long as the purpose is to let me play. Given the architecture of the game, no other way really makes sense.
I was never notified, nor did I see any reason to assume, that any private individual would assert exclusive ownership of that data, nor that any claim would be used to limit (instead of support) my ability to play the game.

As an admin, my duties include making backup copies of the game files for the purpose of recovering from a crash or otherwise maintaining the game we play. This shouldn't be a surprise. Backups are to servers at other sites, as approved by other TMW leaders, and other admins have access to the data.

To date, I have not heard any credible legal argument that would affect either of those two statements, or the ability of TMW to make changes to the game including changing hosting providers.

Current situation: Not only have I not heard anyone in the current TMW Committee claim personal ownership of the game data, I have universally heard distaste for the very idea.
We are being extremely careful to prevent anyone from being able to hold the game hostage in the future.

You were given a special directory to perform game backups. You never got permissions to copy the files elsewhere. And I as a project admin never allowed you tu change hostings (in fact you didn't even asked...)

Regards.

[blackrazor]

Every part of the game is owned.

Every piece of TMW software, scripts, and art assets are owned under GPL licence, which allows anyone to copy and modify them, subject to the terms and conditions outlined in the GPL licence.

The software output, namely the datafiles containing the player saves, are owned by the person or organization that assumes responsibility for their running on whatever hardware is running them. They are not covered by GPL licence, just standard copyright, unless you make arrangements otherwise. They cannot be modified or copied at will, because standard copyright does not allow this.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free? (#GPLOutput)

In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.

Ownership is power. The TMWC took for itself the power to come into being, from the olde GHP. The TMWC took for itself the power to throw Platyna to the curb and strip her of every right and responsibility regarding the admin and hosting of TMW. The TMWC took for itself the power to move the game datafiles from host to host, without the players or Platyna's consent. In fact, the current host is anonymous, something we never had to endure under Platyna. So there is real power involved. The only real question is: who gave you that power and was it legal? I joined this game in 2007, before any of the top TMWC had even heard of this game. When I joined, there was: Platyna, Bjorn, Elvenprogrammer, Crush and a few others, but none of the current top TMWC. Who gave you guys the right to take this game's datafiles from Platyna, move it about at will, and to call her horrible names http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 5&start=18 without repercussion?

If anything, I feel like more of a hostage now, under an anonymous host and under a TMWC that took a game's datafiles for itself, than I ever felt under Platyna. I'm not saying Platyna was perfect, but the TMWC is no better. There is still no transparency, no constitution. Only now we have a split community because the top brass couldn't get along and play nice with each other. If you want to really be leaders, then lead us properly, to a place of mended fences, united community, and a constitution. And all of you can stop spewing how you are better than the alternative, because you're not.

[Rill]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

...copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you.

According to the above-referenced section, before an individual can attempt to claim a copyright interest in the output, he or she must be the owner of the input.

[Platyna]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

...copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you.

According to the above-referenced section, before an individual can attempt to claim a copyright interest in the output, he or she must be the owner of the input.

I am. I have received it from Ultramichy, he gave me it. I am the owner. Hello.

Regards.

[blackrazor]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

...copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you.

According to the above-referenced section, before an individual can attempt to claim a copyright interest in the output, he or she must be the owner of the input.

That is an excellent point !

In the case of an MMO-server software, the save files are both input and output. It's the same as your save files on any (single-player) game, or mySQL database, or electronic roladex or email program. In any of these cases, the output is the same file as the input, and continually evolves and appends through use. Even in the absence of a starting input, these input / output files' ownership are still not covered by the GPL licence that covers the software that generated them, and their ownership (standard copyright) would default to whomever owned the hardware or was responsible for what was running on it.

In plain English, in the absence of a legitimate competing claim, you own the data on your own computer. If you run an MMO server on your computer, the default is that you own the data file(s) on your computer.

[Freeyorp101]

I'll elaborate upon on my impressions of things as they were, please correct me if I err - I am running from memory here, and I no longer have all the logs that I once had.


Please bear with me, this has become quite long, but I feel it's important to get some history out there.


Years ago, there were two bright red names, and two project leads, Elven and Bjorn. Platyna had a green name, and the important role of community manager. At the time, I saw more of that green name than the two red names combined. Never, in the forums, nor the wiki, nor mantis, anywhere, did I see mention of a third project lead. Platyna's role was unique, dedicated to looking after the community. I would not count this as being project lead, and if it did, there are other old authoratative roles that would be included, for instance, maci or Rotonen. Platyna's role was one of one, not one of five or one of three.

Authority has been delegated to many over the years. For content, Elven to Rotonen to first Jaxad then to Wombat to Pjotr to Jenalya. For hosting, Elven to at first Ultramichy then to Platyna, then to Hetzner, then to our current host. For service administration, Bjorn to Jaxad to me to Frost. For moderation, Elven to Platyna and Bjorn to Platyna again (see below).

I had always been under the impression that Platyna served in two distinct roles, moderation and hosting, which were strictly separate from each other. To avoid confusion, I'll examine each separately.


Lets look at moderation first.

Platyna had forum moderation permissions removed for a time, after Bjorn misinterpreted a statement from Platyna about her leaving. Platyna returned not long after, and brought this up. Bjorn expressed surprised surprise and gave her power back and then some, giving her the absolute forum founder flag. He wondered aloud in the channel seconds after the first highlight whether that was the right thing to do, but what was done was done, and Platyna had immediately made herself exclusive leader of the forum administrators group and locked it from others.

People were generally happy to not have to worry about moderation and get on with their pet projects, so this never came to light until years later, where Rotonen was denied accessing the group to fix duplicity caused by restructuring. In any case, I believe it was this that was the foundation of the agreement to divide moderation and development, where Platyna took Moderation to be her absolute demesne, leaving the Developers to their work, and the Developers would be left with the development side of matters, leaving Platyna to her work.

This was a workable arrangement when I was around. There have been some arguments regarding timely disambiguation for moderation since I left, but I can't speak for either side, and I'm attempting to stay as objective as possible here.


Next, lets look at hosting.

Hosting has been the most stable side of things. People may argue over Platyna's presence, but Platinum is undeniable. Year after year, TMW got, for free, a better service than we would from most commercial hosting solutions.

I can speak with more confidence on this side of things. Platyna was root, the sysadmin. There was a time when she also operated the athena service directly, but this was before my arrival, let alone my joining the team.

Her role was professional to the last, and she would respect user operations even under extreme situations. Lets look at an example - the infamous easter event from a few years ago shortly before I became services admin. I remember it vividly, as the server was crashing every few minutes, players were understandably very upset at this, and it was all my fault (I had missed a divide by zero case in some quest dialogue logic).

It was a simple problem with a simple fix, and one I tracked down very quickly once I realised what was happening. I begged Platyna to update and restart the server. It was in the main channel #themanaworld if anyone still has logs. She would not; could not, under her code of sysadmin conduct, which precludes sysadmins from interfering in the domain of their users. I was told to wait for Jaxad to get back, and he would fix it.

Rotonen was around, and immediately understood the nature of the situation more than I did in my distress. In time, I also came to understand this, and respect Platyna all the more for it. Yes, Platyna has strict codes and rules. However, she is an extremely logical person, and she her rules of her own, too.

To my knowledge, Platyna has always been sysadmin and netadmin, and has not directly operated athena services in all the time I have been involved in development. Of course, it's very hard to tell for sure. Almost all of the role, save for the necessities of corruption recovery (which Platyna has, as a sysadmin, been invaluable in and saved the databases more times than you and I probably know) and restarts, are completely invisible to all if done right. That said, if Platyna has acted as service admin, it casts the easter incident in a rather different light, and I'm not sure how I'd feel about that.



Next, lets look at the claims to the character databases, since this, surprisingly, seems to be a point of contention.

It has been standard practise for almost all of the service administration team to routinely make offsite backups. I suspect I'm the lone exception, by virtue of my terrible, terrible internet connection making it entirely impractical. This is done out of necessity, as tmwAthena absolutely destroys storage with its constant writes. I have a nice collection of flash drives which all quickly burned out due to tmwAthena. Onsite backups are the first call where a rollback is necessary, but /mnt/nobackup/ isn't always around, due to either iscsi playing up for the thousandth time or other issues, and the game must go on.

Common sense revolts at the idea of Elven not being able to move the data from his own creation. The one thing that has not changed hands over the project's lifespan has been Elven's control over the DNS. As the project founder, it is his exclusive right to decide what themanaworld.org should be, and any move would have been technically impossible without his consent.

I'm not really sure where the exclusive claims to user data have come from. I never expected any host, past or present, to lay any particular claim to the character databases, and I would be shocked beyond words if, say, hetzner demanded sole ownership.



Finally, lets look at where things can go, or could have gone, from here.


Platyna made a counter proposal to return as host, under conditions that Jenalya would be sole services admin and no offsite transfers are allowed.
I don't think the GHP, or whatever they're called now, will be able to concede either point.

Being the sole active services admin is hell. I remember the spree of social engineering attacks, where you could never know whether an email from a distressed kid who can barely speak english begging for their account back is what it appears to be at face value, or whether it was a social engineering attack designed to violate someone's character. I made the email recovery system, it is objective and as far as I can tell, it works. Goodness knows I took every precaution on top of that still, cross-referencing IP accesses, paging through server logs, constructing elaborate bash-fu setups, anything to find any anomaly... and I still have nightmares, as despite my best efforts, I'm pretty sure I've absolutely destroyed some kid's day at least once. At least when Jaxad was around, I had someone to talk to and make sure I probably wasn't going insane. I would not wish this on Jenalya or anyone.

As I understand it, TMW has a pretty solid hosting solution now, and people probably won't feel the need to shift any time soon. People seem pretty burned out as it is, and I don't think they'd want to go through the hassle again.


From the moderation side of things, there was a recent poll in GMCS suggesting Platyna for GM.

The polls were fairly favourable, but Platyna has stated that she will only accept her old position back. There are distinct advantages to protecting development resources from the burden of moderation, but the main issue as far as I can tell (colourful images of hands being cut off aside) has been in timely disambiguation. I don't have enough information to properly conjecture on this point, but I think this decision would fall to the GMs, as it'll affect them the most.


Finally, some closing remarks.

"People can't be a Developer and a GM at the same time" wasn't policy as much as a simple fact. Those that had tried have always been GMs first; it's just the way the mind works when it comes to perceived responsibility.

Platyna has a history of friction with the development team. When I joined, it was in the aftermath of something that had disgruntled the entire development team, though nobody ever explained to me what happened, instead preferring annoyed stabs at character, which is completely useless when it comes to figuring out what happened. Always assume good faith, character assassination doesn't help anything. I have nothing against her or o11c, and I'd advise against joining, or even forming, sides. It just gets in the way. There are only facts, and lack of facts, and I would like to see things move to as much as the former as possible.

Communicate, and lighten up! Honestly, reading through this all has been like watching our policians bawl in their circus tent. There was a time when I, too, was wary of going to Platyna in much the same way as of going to the company lawyer for much the same reasons. Then Rotonen forced me to stop being such an asocial shut-in and talk to her. She looks out for the good of the project too, and has an entertaining sense of humour at times. At least give her the Borg Queen rank back, that was pretty awesome. I can't help but feel that this could have all been avoided if everyone had just talked.


---Freeyorp

[Ledmitz]

The software output, namely the datafiles containing the player saves, are owned by the person or organization that assumes responsibility for their running on whatever hardware is running them. They are not covered by GPL licence, just standard copyright, unless you make arrangements otherwise. They cannot be modified or copied at will, because standard copyright does not allow this.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

Thanks for the link. However, your example is not quite on topic. The next question is though.

In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too? (#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL)

Only when the program copies part of itself into the output.

And that says it all. Save files are NOT covered under the GPL. You can't copyright them, which means they are public domain, in a sense... that is, if there were no privacy issues.

[GARRETTtheGREAT]

[Edit] I'm going to redact this post. I wrote it without knowing some of the other things that had and are currently happening and this thread has no room for such ignorance.

[Platyna]

Freeyorp, you are wrong in one case - five years ago Elven and Bjorn left the project. This is the time when ManaClient and ManaServer was created. Elven did not created eA server. In the 2006 we mainly had an arguments when Bjorn was telling that there is no need to invest the time into eAthena and the forums, so I took a free spot. And I had to put on my shoulders whole of the project when they left.

It is not Elven who copied the data. His and Bjorn main error is thinking that if o11c left the project it would die, that's why o11c basically blackmailed them. They did it because they were inactive and they believed I am inactive too and this is the only way to keep TMW alive.

For the same reason I gave o11c the access to server files and why I divided my powers - I didn't want TMW to be abandonware.

Problem is o11c is an abusive and power hungry person, now I am receiving emails from players, including screenshots that o11c was playing a GM and a forum admin despite the fact I have set "no devs as GMs rule".

I have never demoted Elven from his founder role on forums, if I did no one could demote me from a forum admin position without manually changing the DB. I have removed his founder status at http://forums.themanaworld.net today as I was always loyal to him, and he wasn't loyal towards me.

I have refused to update the server in the easter day, because when new content developers came I resigned in the name of proper division of powers. I have always upheld this rule and it is the most important rule, a true base of our long term organisation structure.

Your current host is MadCamel, who you should know very well - as he is an abuser, who was spamming and DoSing the server.

Freeyorp, bad people took over TMW, I don't need any forum title from them. You and other old time contributors and friends of TMW are more than welcome to join themanaworld.net

Regards.