The addition of the points system and PPSC may be more than sufficient to remove any copyright issues. But beyond that, the Judges have been around for a lot longer and Hasbro/Wizards never threatened them either. I think the others involving Magic the Gathering were because of the artwork on the cards. The Scrabble clone was clearly because there was an official one coming out and they wanted to steal the market, but it didn't work.

Its very clear that this game we play is diplomacy. Anyone think we aren't playing diplomacy? Would you be willing to argue that in court? Obviously not.

Corporations only take down sites that become really efficient at doing things like this. Napster is one example, Scrabbulous is another (which had a million users or something).

Centurian, maybe you didn't read the posts about how copyright works, but the government's own website seems to pretty clearly indicate it's just fine to play Diplomacy without paying anybody. It only matters if you copy their rulebook or artwork. Scrabulous copied the artwork.

Napster is a completely unrelated issue, except inasmuch as they were actually distributing exact copies of copyrighted content. I suppose the equivalent here would be running off copies of the Hasbro rulebook and distributing them.

If anybody REALLY wants to bark up one of these trees, trademark law is probably where the trouble would start. I'm sure Hasbro has trademarked the name Diplomacy, and trademark law is quite a bit more vague than copyright law.

By more vague do you mean nigh unenforceable?

lol, trademark law is a joke, unless you are a multinational corporation.

Trademark infringment requires proving both monetary damage and confusion/reputation damage. Also you can't trademark a word in the dictionary and diplomacy is just that.

I did read it Ninjaperson, but I don't really want to get into legal nuisances. I just wanted to say that to think this game isn't Hasbro's diplomacy is stupid. That is how a court would see it. Not that it would ever make it to court. Kestas would simply shut it down if he ever got served.

As there is a Hasbro Diplomacy computer game on the market, there is a very clear harm that this site is causing Hasbro. There is absolutely no question this is copyright infringement. No one has even attempted to hide it.

But its never going to be a problem, so don't worry about it.

Agreed we don't have to worry about it, but disagree on the harm. The Diplomacy computer game has no community type options. It's just a stupid computer game and does more harm to the Diplomacy name than anything out there.

Plus, I would imagine Alan Calhamer still has some say in the copyright and trademark. I doubt he gave everything over to Avalon Hill way back when, and he is a supporter of the online communities.

it doesnt really matter what the law might say technically, if Hasbro hit kestas/dreamhost with a DCMA order and scary letters from lawyers then its over i guess. thats how it works in the real world, the big boys have bigger sticks and/or deeper pockets, who is right or wrong wont come into it.

I really think the fact that Kestas isn't making money off the site is a big deal. It might not be too different from how people write those dumb fan fiction for Star Wars and Harry Potter and such. Again, I'm not going to pretend I fully understand how intellectual property and copyright laws work, but I'm pretty sure the intent of them is to keep other people from making money off what the inventor created himself.

However, I think if they wanted to Hasbro could shut the site down and frankly, they'd probably be in the right to do so.

A few points:
There are intellectual property and copyright issues in the international arena.
There has been discussions on the relationships between the publisher(Avalon Hill->Wizards->Hasbro->Wizards Avalon Hill Division) before.
Part of the critical issues are the site being a volunteer non-revenue generator and the fact that it is not competing with a "licensed or in house" commercial site. There are no damages financially. This is also what protects the Judges and all the hobby sites like Stabbeurfou.
A problem could arise with a site like PlayDiplomacy which charges a fee to play regardless of whether it is disguised as a premium membership fee or whatever. From my experience that is just a problem waiting for a spark to set things off. However, I would suspect that the hammer, if it were to come down, would not hit on this site unless it was felt that they had to create a licensing across the board even at a nominal royalty structure such as $1 a year plus a % of revenue which for this site would be zero, to assert their intellectual property rights

However, currently the description that things are below the radar is fairly accurate. Hasbro has greater issues at the moment than Diplomacy sales and Internet revenues.

invictus & Edi: Not making money? Think Plura. Revenue is revenue, large or small, unfortunately.

But sean's comment is dead on: right or wrong, a DMCA takedown order is threatening enough that the question is unlikely to reach a courtroom. Despite clear copyright violations in the case of Scrabulous, Hasbro still went for the easy DMCA kill anyway.

Not making money - it only starts to count as making money once you're into credit surely?

If I were Hasbro, I would wait until the demand is peaked and release an official online sight that is ad revenue driven, and force the site shut downs.

And hire Kestas to design the site for them. :)

I'm still not clear that making money even matters. Nothing on this site is using a copyrighted(able) aspect of the game.

That being said, again, right or wrong lawyers with lots of resources could probably shut down the site fairly easily.

Of course since the code is open sourced and out there, there's nothing they could do to stop people from setting up many many other versions of the site all over the place.

Renegade Site Diplomacy... Have the site up for a day or two and constantly keep it moving with a renegade mailing list informing the site members when it has moved and how long it will be there. I like it.

Well ideally, one would be set up by someone with the resources and desire to fight it out in court, and ideally win. But yes that would be another option.

One could also set up private servers that only those you authorized (probably with a password or something) could access it. This would work well for people who want to play with friends.

Even if the copyright was not an issue (and I'm not convinced it isn't), there are other ways that Hasbro could sue, such as using state unfair competition laws. But that would depend on where this site is hosted, and there are lots of jurisdictional issues they'd have to overcome.

What kind of unfair competition could they claim?

while I'm not in agreement that this site is breaking the law, I'll play devils advocate for the unfair competition question:
Hasbro can't sell their game because people can play here for free.

Honestly, I think that Hasbro MAKES money from this site because it garners interest in the game. I know that if I found 7 guys wanting to play nearby, I'd go buy myself a board and play FtF. I'm guessing Hasbro thinks the same thing, because there are lots of Dip sites and they aren't stopping any of them...