Explain why the other main open source desktop software from Sun -- OpenOffice -- was German based? (As McNealy did not say on TV: "I liked it so much I bought the company!")
I certainly haven't read German copyright law cases like I have US, but it sure seems to me that translations have always been covered by the right to control creation of "derivative works" granted by copyright. So the only way that the translation could be legal without permission would for it to be fair use; it seems to be in trouble on the "unrelated to other copying" test, since the translator teams obviously intended that the translation be widely distributed, and it does seem to affect the copyright holder's ability to make money on their work -- presumably Infogrames pays Firaxis money for the right to translate the game; if a free translation were distributed Infogrames would have no reason to pay Firaxis that money.
Whether suppressing "fan" works is good marketing or not is arguable, but it doesn't seem that Infogrames/Firaxis is going beyond traditional copyright (as we knew it in, say, 1970) here.
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Explain why the other main open source desktop software from Sun -- OpenOffice -- was German based?
(As McNealy did not say on TV: "I liked it so much I bought the company!")
I certainly haven't read German copyright law cases like I have US, but it sure seems to me that translations have always been covered by the right to control creation of "derivative works" granted by copyright. So the only way that the translation could be legal without permission would for it to be fair use; it seems to be in trouble on the "unrelated to other copying" test, since the translator teams obviously intended that the translation be widely distributed, and it does seem to affect the copyright holder's ability to make money on their work -- presumably Infogrames pays Firaxis money for the right to translate the game; if a free translation were distributed Infogrames would have no reason to pay Firaxis that money.
Whether suppressing "fan" works is good marketing or not is arguable, but it doesn't seem that Infogrames/Firaxis is going beyond traditional copyright (as we knew it in, say, 1970) here.