We're sort of meandering off topic here, because as far as the original point goes, it doesn't matter what would happen in a court of law if the legality of CF code copyright were tried. I agree that I think it would hold up, but it's not the issue at hand here.

(Granted, this whole discussion assumes that the telephone game of what was said from BT to ISP to other-mud-people to Vlad didn't lose anything important in the translation, which anyone who played the telephone game as a kid probably takes with a grain of salt.)

BT's not a lawyer. BT back in 1994 is especially not a lawyer; he's a college kid running a MUD. He's a guy who's protective of his stuff. Would it be reasonable for him to think team-other-mud-guys had stolen his (and Derit et al's) work and that he had a right to demand they not be able to run a game based on it? I can't see how any reasonable person would say no.

It doesn't really matter how they came by said code. They knew where it came from and it's safe to say they knew the authors of it (at least, the CF-original parts of it, which even in the earliest days of CF include some things you'd probably take for granted, like cabals and PK ranges) didn't want them using it. They don't have the moral high ground there.

You'd have to have a pathological, irrational hatred of BT to assume there's some arch underhanded plot behind him seeing that other people are using CF's code and going "Hey, they can't steal my stuff! Make them stop!"

This kind of thing is a lot of why Vlad has a reputation for making #### up. I don't think he's trying to deceive anyone with this account, per se -- I just think he's taking things people told him which may or may not have been exaggerated as gospel truth, settling on an extreme interpretation of those events which makes people he likes look as good as possible and people he likes look as bad as possible, and further deciding that anyone who doesn't share that interpretation is obviously wrong. I don't think any of that is intentional on his part, but it does hold up something sort of comical (20 year old BT as deceptive copyright legal scholar) as truth.