OpenChess

Simple question: Is Houdini 2 legally copyrighted?

The official website currently provides no information regarding the product’s copyright, all specific legal details should be easily accessible and provided upfront. To anyone who has purchased the product, is any legal copyright information provided with the distribution? If so, I’m interested in seeing it posted.

BTW: It’s interesting the official Houdini website Acknowledgements section no longer cites Crafty, but still does in the promotional Wikipedia entry.

MoldyJacket wrote:Simple question: Is Houdini 2 legally copyrighted?

The official website currently provides no information regarding the product’s copyright, all specific legal details should be easily accessible and provided upfront. To anyone who has purchased the product, is any legal copyright information provided with the distribution? If so, I’m interested in seeing it posted.

BTW: It’s interesting the official Houdini website Acknowledgements section no longer cites Crafty, but still does in the promotional Wikipedia entry.

I don't have it, but of course it's copyrighted. The Berne Convention sees to that, even if there's no explicit copyright notice. I don't know what the exact terms of the included license are, but I think I saw an excerpt posted on the Rybka forum the other day.

Jeremy

Anyone can take the same tap water everyone drinks, put it in a fancy bottle and market it as good for you. The bottle can be copyrighted, but not the water. I’m interested in what is claimed bottle.

MoldyJacket wrote:Anyone can take the same tap water everyone drinks, put it in a fancy bottle and market it as good for you. The bottle can be copyrighted, but not the water. I’m interested in what is claimed bottle.

Sure, but that's not really what Houdini is:

Houdini is based on Robbolito or Ippolit. In general, that code is free as beer, so whatever Houdart did with it, it was legal to do so, even if not ethical. And if he decides to incorporate it in a copyrighted, closed-source package, that's his legal prerogative.

IF Houdart took GPL modifications from Norman and Milos (which seems likely), his code remains copyrighted, even if there were GPL license violations. Norman or Milos would need to demonstrate that violation and get the FSF to pursue a case. The outcome of such a case would clarify the Houdini 1.x license situation, I suppose. Since such a case will probably never happen, it's pretty much a waste of time to speculate.

IF Houdart replaced all of the 3rd-party code in Houdini (whether GPL or not), which seems very improbable, given that Houdini 2.0 doesn't appear to play all that much differently from Houdini 1.x, then I suppose there's not even the slim chance of a FSF action and that's the end.

So I don't really see any room to claim that Houdini is illegal, or under illegitimate copyright, at least in layman's terms. Maybe you're a copyright lawyer or an expert, though, and can explain why your proposition is founded.

Jeremy

It’s not a proposition, simply a question: Is Houdini 2 legally (as in legally defined, spelled out) copyrighted? If so, what are the specifics?