Dear Dr. Delmere,

Thank you for your efforts to settle this matter civilly.  All of us who
work on the gnocatan project are grateful to Mr. Teuber for his creation
of the Settlers of Catan game, and we have absolutely no intention of
infringing your client's rights.

Your claim of copyright infringement is a serious charge.  To our knowledge,
all of the artwork or text included in gnocatan is original and was not
taken from the Settlers of Catan game; and all of the program source code is
original as well.  If you have reason to believe otherwise, please provide
us with a list of those elements which are copyrighted by your client so
that we can remove them from gnocatan.  Of course, we're sure you are aware
that whereas a text which explains a game's rules can be copyrighted, game
rules in their abstract form have been found to not be copyrightable in the
United States and in several countries in Europe, so we assume this is not
what you're referring to.

As to the trademark claims, it is our belief that the name "gnocatan" is not
confusingly similar to any of your client's marks, and, at least in the
United States, the name "gnocatan" has been in continuous use since before
your client filed for the registered trademark that he currently holds.
Nevertheless, we have no interest in a protracted legal battle to assert a
claim to this particular name, and accordingly we are in the process of
changing the name of the Gnocatan project to Pioneers.  With the exception
of the webpage addresses themselves, which we have asked the SourceForge.net
admins to change for us since we cannot change them, we believe that this
rebranding will be completed by Jun 30.  This decision to change the project
name does not in any way constitute an admission on our part that the name
"gnocatan" infringes your client's rights under trademark law, but is rather
a gesture of goodwill towards the author of this beloved game series.

To your further requests regarding the disposition of our documentation, we
do not recognize that we are obligated to secure a license from your client
for any other element of this work, for either commercial or non-commercial
purposes; nor do we recognize that trademark law gives your client standing
to restrict descriptive uses of either Mr. Teuber's name, or the names of
the games in the Settlers of Catan series; and therefore we do not believe
that these requests are reasonable and proper.  We reserve the right to
refer in our documentation to Mr. Teuber and to the board games on which
this program is based, and we do not agree to state in our documentation
that distribution for commercial purposes is not allowed.

If you have any other concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
Jeff Breidenbach
Roland Clobus
Hal Eisen
Andy Heroff
Roman Hodek
Steve Langasek
Matt Waggoner
Bas Wijnen
The Gnocatan Developers