Questions about the GNU GPL

[thesimplecreator]

Ok, me and a friend want to start our own mmorpg similar to runescape with lower quality graphics.
We are both starting college so we plan to develop it as a hobby with all the programing we will learn in college.
My question is, can we use an open source game engine like Arianne RPG,
Arianne RPG | Get Arianne RPG at SourceForge.net
but keep the content protected, like graphics, settings, and stuff like that.
What additions to a game engine to create a game would have to be open source?

any help would be appreciated, this will determine whether or not we have to write it from scratch.

[GNU-Fan]

I am not quite sure what you mean by "protected".

As long as you keep a copy of your work as backup in a safe place, nobody can break your copy. So yes, it will be protected against damage.

If you claim copyright for your work by writing the proper copyright, date and name line as well as adding the GPL license notice in each regarding file, it will be legally protected by copyright law via means of a well tested software license. As GPL is a copyleft license, the work will then be quite protected against software hoarders who just take but don't wish to pass on the liberties they were granted themselves.

They might be licenses more appropriate for media files like the Creative Commons, and in most cases the GPL'ed software doesn't imply certain requirements about how media files are to be distributed.

[thesimplecreator]

by protected i mean the content, not the engine itself, being under a different license then the engine itself.
what im asking is, do i have to release media and settings/configuration files under the GPL.
because if everything is open source then someone else might just take the whole game and go start there own server.

[GNU-Fan]

by protected i mean the content, not the engine itself, being under a different license then the engine itself.
what im asking is, do i have to release media and settings/configuration files under the GPL.

No, provided you create them from scratch.

because if everything is open source then someone else might just take the whole game and go start there own server.

And you think a proprietary license for the media will prevent this?

[elija]

Well, Wildfire Games has jus released 0AD (linky) under the GPL with the aim of getting it finished!

Rather the code has been released under the GPL and all the graphics have been released under a Creative Commons. So dual licensing is definitely possible. That was a new release however so the situation is slightly different to yours.

I suspect that you will be OK as long as you release your code under the GPL.

[thesimplecreator]

And you think a proprietary license for the media will prevent this?
No, but if the media was under a proprietary license all they would have to work with is the engine like we will probably do. Im not going to make media so some other guy gets ad revenue off my work.