10.06.2007, 18:23:32
Renegade Wrote:Bobingabout Wrote:hmmmm, still technically comes under hacked, or wares beacuse of the eula violation, and therefore can't be copyright.Dude. Wrong. Plain and simple.
VK's code is owned by VK, and he has the copyright to it. Period. His code may be useless without the copyrighted code of a third party, but that does not change the fact that the code he wrote is under his copyright.
True, but because it is derivative of EA copyrighted material, he has no right to distribute it without explicit permission from EA (permission he would never get). Further more, in some cases of copyright infringement (which VK would be committing by distributing a derivative work of EA's copyrighted material) a court has awarded ownership of copyright of the derivative product to the original copyright owner as part of the settlement. VK doesn't even have permission to make the patch, creating it itself is a violation of the EULA terms and thus a copyright violation. It would depend on jurisdiction as to exactly what rights the creator of the derivative work has but right to distribute isn't one of them. As I have said elsewhere, this is a very grey area AFAIK and I doubt the law would favour VK in any attempt to assert his rights over a derivative work of EA's copyright.