What is the copyright status of Colossal Cave Adventure?

Question

What is the copyright status of the source code of “Adventure” (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure)?

There is a good record today of the history of Adventure. Specifically: The 1975–1976 Crowther and Woods “350-point version” for PDP-10 Fortran is available.

What is the copyright status of this work? Not just who holds the copyright, but: What license do recipients effectively have in the work? If I derive a work directly from that one, and release the result under e.g. “GNU GPL version 3 or later”, am I violating copyright?

Answer 1

If the software is in the public domain, it is effectively free of copyright, and you are free to release a derivative work under any license you want. If it's not, you don't have a license to publish any derivative work.

The oldest existing code for Adventure seems to be from 1976, and a lot was added in 1977. In 1976/7, the copyright act of 1976 was not yet in effect (it went in effect in 1978), so the work is still governed by the copyright law of 1905. That copyright law required all works to be published with a copyright notice for it to be governed under copyright law.

If it was published without a copyright notice, the 1976 and 1977 files are now in the public domain. If it was published with a copyright notice, it won't be until 2072/3 until the material enters the public domain.

For later versions of adventure up to 1989 roughly the same goes, but it also retains copyright protection if it was registered within 5 years of publication.

I have seen no direct indication that the original code had a copyright notice when it was first published. However, conflicting with that narrative is the fact that The Software Toolworks payed "a royalty" to the original authors, which suggests that they did believe the work was copyright protected. One would assume they checked. On the third hand, many others, among which Microsoft, have published Adventure, and according to lore never payed anyone any royalties. On would assume they checked as well.

It is unclear what the exact deal was between The Software Toolworks and Crowther and Woods; whether it consisted of a transfer of copyright - if there even was eligible copyright protection - or that they licensed the work to them.

Crowther and Woods are both still very much alive, and the best way to get certainty about the whole deal is to ask them (and, obligatory, your lawyer, which I am not).

Answer 2

The Open Adventure project, distributed as free software under the 2-clause BSD license, reportedly has permission from Don Woods, though there's nothing from Don Woods himself to allow outsiders to verify that permission is granted. No other documentation about permission from other copyright holders in the work is described.

So there is no clear grant of license from all the copyright holders of Colossal Cave Adventure. I can only assume that Open Adventure, if tested on its copyright status, would have to produce clear documentation of license from all copyright holders – documentation that is not presented anywhere I'm aware of – or to rely on an argument that the work entered the public domain.

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From what I can gather at the research on Colossal Cave Adventure's history of publication (published in Digital Humanities Quarterly as “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky”):

• The source work (Fortran and data files) available today was originally published 1974 through 1977, without copyright notice.

• According to the Cornell University Copyright Information Center's resource, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States” (January 2015 edition), works published in the USA without copyright notice prior to 1978 are now in the public domain.

• The US Copyright Office publishes Title 17: Copyright Law of the United States. According to its §304 “Duration of copyright: Subsisting copyrights”:

  §304 (a) (1)(A) Any copyright, in the first term of which is subsisting on January 1, 1978, shall endure for 28 years from the date it was originally secured.

  followed by clauses allowing term extensions, none of which appear to have been used to extend any copyright in Colossal Cave Adventure.

So based on those resources, I think the answer is: the original publication by Crowther and Woods is now in the public domain in the USA, and has been since 2006. Hooray!

Thanks to Martijn's answer laying out many possibilities and directing me to the Cornell University resources.

Answer 3

This game has been released as open source by Eric S. Raymond, claiming that he has permission of the authors. It's on gitlab.com as announced today in an article on slashdot.org.