Does Freeciv violate any rights of the makers of Civilization I or II?
There have been debates on this and the honest answer seems to be: we don’t know. Freeciv doesn’t contain any actual material from the commercial Civilization games. (The Freeciv maintainers have always been very strict in ensuring that materials contributed to the Freeciv distribution or website do not violate anyone’s copyright.) The name of Freeciv is probably not a trademark infringement. The user interface is similar, but with many (deliberate) differences. The game itself can be configured to be practically identical to Civilization I or II, so if the rules of a game are patentable, and those of the said games are patented, then Freeciv may infringe on that patent, but we don’t believe this to be the case. Incidentally, there are good reasons to assume that Freeciv doesn’t harm the sales of any of the commercial Civilization games in any way.
