[Scummvm-devel] Discworld distribution. How to proceed?

[Eugene Sandulenko]

Hi Travis,

First of all, there is much more than that fax, there is a multi-year
correspondence with Colin Smyth, sir Pratchett's agent.

Second, the rights got returned to Terry Pratchett about 2005, just by the
end of that year.

And fax is a legal document in UK.


Eugene

On 25 April 2016 at 15:11, Travis Howell <kirben at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> A freeware release of Discworld 1 & 2 would require much more proof, than
> that fax alone. That fax only states Terry Pratchett give his permission,
> but did the games rights actually revert back to him?
>
> Discworld 1 & 2 were developed by Perfect 10 Productions/Perfect
> Entertainment, and part of a multi-game license to Sony Entertainment. Are
> we sure Sony Entertainment no longer have the rights for Discworld 1 & 2?
> did they only have limited rights for the games, time wise?
>
> I would be especially careful, after noting there was a court case about
> Discworld Noir, based on that multi-game deal with Sony Entertainment.
>
> On 25/04/2016 9:38 PM, Eugene Sandulenko wrote:
>
>> Hi Team,
>>
>> After all of these years and some consultations around, I finally came
>> up to the conclusion that we could release both Discworld games as
>> freeware.
>>
>> This is all based on a fax from 2005, I am attaching a copy which I am
>> going to distribute instead of the license file. Per Colin Smythe in our
>> correspondence with him: "It is our policy NOT to give an official
>> licence if we have already stated that we have have effectively granted
>> freeware."
>>
>> Now, we're coming to a different area. Finding a way to distribute the
>> game. The games are pretty big, almost 2Gb combined. We were asked to
>> limit our monthly bandwidth consumption, which makes putting the game
>> straight away a bit problematic.
>>
>> Moreover, another big game is coming to be freewared, that is the
>> Hopkins FBI, which is another chunk of versions of about 5GB worth of
>> data.
>>
>> Thus, after talking around, I have an idea of putting up our torrent
>> server, and limiting it, say, to 500kb/sec. That will give us 1.3Tb of
>> monthly traffic, which is well beyond our thresholds. Also. I can help
>> from my home with a more speedy upload bandwidth. But the main idea is
>> that the users will be helping each other, especially during the peaks
>> after we announce the availability of the games.
>>
>> Additionally, I could put the files on the sf.net <http://sf.net>, and
>> thus, offer both the direct link and .torrent file from our site.
>>
>> So, what do you guys think, should it be the way to go? Or we could just
>> put it on the sf.net <http://sf.net> and not mess with the torrents at
>> all?
>>
>>
>> Eugene
>>
>>
>>
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