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Hasbro And Game-Design Lawsuits
Athyra writes: "This is chilling news -- Inside Mac Games is reporting that Hasbro has been successful in their attempts to get a number of manufacturers of classic-style games ("taxman," "Missile Defender," etc), claiming that Hasbro owns the gameplay concepts used in these games. Considering how most games are built on just a few stepping stones, this could have a chilling effect -- will the designers of Gran Turismo be sued for ripping off Pole Position? Will Broderbund have to pay Myst's profits to the folks at Infocom and SAGA? And what happens if someone can prove ownership of 3D action games? No more Quake sequels?" Update: 04/20 12:23 by E : It should be pointed out that the companies settled out of court for money, and a promise to not sell the offending titles anymore - no legal precedent was set.
Looks like they did an out-of-court settlement, and as such this does not serve as a legal judgement by a federal court, no? So nothing is decided yet...
The Demon ISP case in the UK was settled also, no precident was set, but see what it's doing to the ISP industry in Britain anyway.
Just because no legal precident is set doesn't mean it won't have a chilling effect, very few computer game companies have pockets deep enough to fight the Hasbros of the world in court.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Ok, maybe this comment was meaning someone else proving ownership, but if not, then the only worry is Quake clones.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
*g* check the quality of your crack, man, I think someone is cutting it with rat poison, Drano, and ergot fungus ;)
Wouldn't they have to be almost exactly identical for it to be a copyright violation? If the code is significantly different, could it still be a copyright violation even if the games look similar? I'm not sure I even understand what the hell copyright is anymore. It's getting all bent out of shape.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"many" of Willy's are based on prior work? Isn't it all of them except, awe, nuts, I can't remember the name. The last one, on the island, in which he knocks the other playrights of the time? Oh, yeah: Tempest.
Nothing original about the stories he wrote; it's the *telling* that he did soe well . . .
Agreed.
Hasbro claims "Hasbro has a long history of building great game brands. This suit is aimed at ensuring we can continue to deliver the high-quality, high-value games that consumers have come to expect from Hasbro Interactive. If we succeed, our development and licensing partners succeed and, ultimately, the game consumer wins."
Yet is it in the consumers' best interest to have fewer choices? What if the officially available version of a given Hasbro game is riddled with bugs or missing features? Wouldn't it be more in the consumer's best interests to have alternate versions competing with Hasbro - if not to provide those missing features then to at least force Hasbro to give attention to what consumers wish for, for competitive reasoning. Classic games, by definition, are not areas of innovation! Thus they are very succeptible to the problems inherent in monopolization.
Well I will tell you what I think: We need to have more Free games, with the source code available for customization and enhancement. And I'm not just spouting opinion here, I've running a net project to develop and promote Free games, both big and small. There is lots to do, and we could use help.
Actually, it's funny... this already sort of happened years ago, before the buy out. TSR shut down all fan-sites, taking all of those items (including GPL'd software) and relicensing it, without permission. (still there, see ftp.mpgn.com).
They threatened to sue people who were producing anything in anyway related to TSR materials. (They'd claim trademark infringement without ever publishing a list of exactly what those claimed trademarks were.)
The claim is that "rules" are a representation of "the idea of a particular game". Thus the rules themselves (and thus any game using those rules or rules derived thereof) are protected by copyright. So anyone producing a D&D knockoff gets sued (even the guy who *invented* D&D got a lawyer pummling for producing a similar game).
But that was long ago...
These days, WotC (aka Hasbro) is claiming that it will be putting out D&D/3rd under an open source license. Hmm
Feh, our games seem to be getting less Free year after year. This is bad.
Hasbro's up and coming games.com site!
3 guesses why they're now starting to crack down on clones, and just one guess what they'll do to all the out there. Hint: Hasbro::WotC::TSR has done it before.
Better snag shareware games while you can, and Napsterize them down to the underground. ;-)
point of the day :
hasbro owns WotC owns TSR.
can you see the same thing coming in pen & paper RPGs?
i knew you could.
The concept is even older. The original Ultima game for the Apple II featured a first-person perspective as you walked through a maze killing monsters. The program was written in Applesoft BASIC, and the maze was drawn v-e-r-y v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
:-)
I'm really dating myself here. Who remembers playing Eamon?
How literate IS /. nowadays? First of all, they settled out of court (for you dummies means a judge didn't make anyone do anything) and all they asked for was these companies not produce obvious rip-offs of games Hasbro now owns. If someone came out with AlwaysQuest which was so much like EverQuest consumers couldn't tell the difference, any smart judge would throw the book at AlwaysQuest, if it even got to that. Get a clue people, even the GPL doesn't allow crap like this.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Didn't we already hash this issue out when Apple sued Microsoft for copying their gui design? Microsoft won that case, and now Hasbro won this one... That strikes me as a bit of a contradiction, but not entirely surprising. It's tradition in America that the richest always win. Microsoft only lost its recent court battles because of the shear force of money against them. Need I even mention O.J. or the MPAA.
Politicians yammer and clammer (both are real words) about campaign finance reform, but what about legal system finance reform? How is anyone who isn't a multibillionare supposed to survive in such a system without caving in to the whim of every large corporation?
Read the article, not the headline. Two of the defendents settled, there was no finding of copyright violation or judgement handed down.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
That would fall under 'trademark'. The name is too similar to the trademarked 'pacman' name.
Copyright only gives you the rights to an original work.. not other things that 'look ' the same.
Correct me if my impression is wrong but the megacorps seem to entering a cultural shark-feeding frenzie in trying to stake out a market stomping ground. It seems that the "best" tactic for "owning" a loyal cult following (whether game or movie show) is take a scorched earth approach to similiar genres. It's equivalent to Doyle claiming all rights to detective stories just because his Sherlock Holmes pioneered the style. Or Disney claiming all cat and mouse stories just because it would clash with their beloved Mickey. Now claiming a cultural franchise with guarenteed audience to sell do-dackies and merchandising to may be profitable in the short-term but how clued is the fan-base to stand for it? One wonders whether creative gaming souls will then become another version of street musicians being squeezed by the music distributors? Afterall, you learn by imitating your peers and predecessors and it would be nice to eat while doing so. Curtailing this outlet for younger souls to practice and demonstrate their talents seems a short sighted goal, if not outright illegal under anti-competitive practices. A company is entitled to protect their stuff developed over the years but attempting to fence in a culture commons will only hurt the public in the long term by depriving them of alternatives.
IMHO, mental monopolies are just as damaging as physical monopolies. Someone needs to get out a cluebat for the MBAs running the show.
LL
Sorry, my brain is fried today, I meant to say that about pac-man, as tetris was obviously invented by the russians. Anyways neither game, was an original idea of atari.
Well accually I believe Atari was only licensed to make the console version of tetris, by Namaco, So Hasbro in no way owns the concept to tetris, but I guess they didn't realize that. But I could be SERIOUSLY wrong.. who knows :)
Copyrights are granted by the government because it was decided that some protection of written works benefited the public by encouraging authors.
This protection is enforced by the justice system, paid for by the public, if they don't get eventual access to the copyrighted material, why should they bother paying to protect it?
IMHO, any copyrights longer than 25 years are unconscionable. You're asking people to pay for copyright protection that will extend for upwards of four generations, and by that time, will almost assuredly have been extended. They're paying for something that not even their great grandchildren will reap the benefits of.
I'd say that 25 years from the date of creation is pretty good.
If that's not good enough, perhaps trademarks and copyrights could be merged a bit, to prevent the use of trademarked characters even once the copyrighted material goes public. That way, Aladin, and Beauty and the Beast would both be public, as would all the content in a Mickey Mouse cartoon, except the image of the mouse. But you could replace the mouse with another character and display the work.
I really don't see why we should bother protecting copyrights when they last so long.
And if someone's family needs to eat, they've had 25 years to do something about it.
As we grant wider and wider protections, so that any talking mouse with big ears is a violation, and so that any game with the same basic gameplay is a violation, we limit the scope of what people can do without stepping on the toes of the corporation that snapped up some old IP, not for its direct value, but for its value in blocking any material the competition could make.
Anyways, I think it's fairly obvious that the only entities really server by 100+ year copyrights are corporations. I personally value the rights of people over those of corporations. Perhaps my off-the-cuff ideas aren't the best, but something needs to be done to change the IP laws to help the people, not the corporations. To some degree helping the corporations helps the people, past that degree, the people begin to lose these benefits and eventually suffer. Some reworking needs to be done.
Hasbro IS still selling these games.
They're mostly bargin bin/3in1 compilations under the title "Atari Clasics".
a 2600hz tone used to be able to be used to let you do all kinds of things to the phone system when you pumped it into a phone line, and let you 'hack' the telephone network (called phreaking). You can't do this anymore, AFAIK, but there used to be a lot of connection between the hacking and phreaking movements in the 1980s.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Interesting that you mention Final Fantasy, since Squaresoft has attempted to PATENT it.
0 5649862__
http://www.patents.ibm.com/cgi-bin/viewpat.cmd/US
I don't remember the year, but Philips used to have a game for their P2000 computers called 'Happelaar', which was also a pacman clone. They did loose however, even though the graphics were different. Not that you could ever get quality graphics on a P2000... Happelaar probably never made it to the international market, just the Netherlands.. must have been the name too, which is not exactly international.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
On the first screens, you have a copyright notice with the year usually. I'm pretty sure Galaga and all those old games have them.
And copyrights last a long deal longer than patents also (I think it's something like 25 years about the death of the author for books).
If it was based on a patent, they'd lost because they didn't make any move to protect those patents earlier, if you don't want them enough to try to protect them, the courts ain't going to give them back to you years later when you finally wake up.
But here the companies didn't loose, they just decided to settle to get Hasbro off their back. If the lawsuit would cost you more than those game would give you in 10 years, I understand why they would want to settle as well. This doesn't mean that every Tetris clone is illegal, though it could encourage Hasbro to go against them in court of law as well now that they settle with those two.
Just look at the 'Mac Man' screen:
a c_man.gif
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jimg/pourri/m
Hasbro has a case here, a rip off this close deserves to be punished. Though, the ghost design is pretty neat.
A couple years ago, Hasbro bought up several classic titles to have software companies rewrite them in all the modern 3-D splendor that wasn't available to the orignal designers.
A few years ago, I was a programming intern for a game programming company in Gaithersburg, MD. We worked on Centipede there and Hasbro was the publisher, they had brought the project to us. For those who never played (quite a few), the main game wasn't like the old one, it was given a plot and a hero (Wally), and 3D Scenery, etc.. An action game with an objective to stop the evil Centipede Queen. Well Hasbro had plans to work on several more classic games ("retrogames" as they called them..). They asked us (and probably any other developer working on one of their "retrogames") to make sure we included a classic version of those old games which was supposed to be the exact same game as the old one only with 3D graphics.
Now Hasbro is tired of paying royalties after purchasing the titles so I guess now they have successfully argued they don't have to. This won't stifle modern game design, it doesn't have to. Modern game design, according to most publishers, not just Hasbro, is retrogames. Not just retrogames, but sequels, and just more of the same. Publishers want to be sure that they will get a return so according to some boardroom line graph, new game ideas never sell. I mean cmon, what works for EA Sports has to work for everyone. Look how Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy haven't changed since the last time you played em. There are some publishers out there appreciate orginality, probably the most daring one being Gathering Of Developers, but their problem is that they don't have the financial backing companies like Hasbro have, so they only put money behind very few titles, and their requirements are strict. Our company couldn't put a game out with them because one of their requirements is to have _aready_ put out a succesful game. Others, like id Software (even though Quake 3 is another fps, it was an untested idea that #1, you need a 3D Accelerator to play it, and #2, the big one, that there is really no single player), and Bungie with Halo, and Sierra when they put out HalfLife (valve was the developer, and I still give them credit for putting out the greatest game of all time) and a couple others who put out quality software. They have the money to do this tough..The solution? Support small-time games, support shareware games, and find out before hand that sequels and retrogames suck. Play something fresh.
karma whore.
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WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
I don't see how this could happen. There's no way to "own" an idea unless you copyright or patent it and I don't recall a galaga type patent anywhere. I see this as a foreshadowing of more crappy hasbro improvements to games that were great alreay, and invariably get worse.
Colm Atkins
Creating a new adaptation from an existing concept is always a risky proposition. The original creators lose their hold on a possible money-maker (Virtual Defender, or Space Invaders 2000, for hypothetical examples), if the image of the original concept has been hurt by cheap clones.
(On the shoulders of Giants =anagram>
... onto this dangerous shelf,
The foulness tarnish Good)
[
A lot of the gameplay ideas (and certainly the story lines) are Unique. At least, in my experience. Not that I do a whole lot of gaming, console or otherwise...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How come none of the games you link to are the versions under dispute? The games you link to are made by companies which did not settle any lawsuit with Hasbro. I believe that is called misinformation.
Exactly what does this mean? The games are the same, GT Interactive and Varcon are being sued for packaging them together and selling them. Secondly if you had read the article or my post you would see that GT Interactive and Varcon delisted the games as part of the settlement so the exact copies cannot be linked to because they no longer or on GT Interactive's page and I could only find this link for Varcon System's game pack.
The lawsuit is undoubtedly based on copyright law, similar to the look & feel lawsuit of apple v microsoft. And the "look & feel" of the game clones is so close to that of the origional games in these cases, it is very hard to tell the difference. Even the NAMES are almost identical, such as "Mac-Man" or "Patriot Command".
Also, this is simply an out of court settlement. GT interactive and one other just agreed to stop and pay an "undisclosed sum", probably a token amount. The companies acted in their best self interest, since it is not like these atari clones are making any significant money, and fighting it out in court would cost more than capitulation.
It is unclear whether this lawsuit could really win, it would undoubtedly come down to a case by case, game by game basis in court.
Even if Hasbro won some of the counts against some of the companies, it would not have the chilling effect that the prophets of doom may cite. You can't copyright concepts, and there are no patents on gameplay (yet). Under copyright or look & feel suits, Unreal Tournament and Wolfenstein 3D are so vastly different, you won't mistake one for another.
Yet how do you tell the difference between MacMan and PacMan?
Test your net with Netalyzr
#include <dos.h>
int main() { sound(2600); return 0; }
I'd post a binary at my web page, but I'm booted into GNU/Linux at the moment. But don't try phreaking with it: the phone company now has a "blue box" alarm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A man who goes by the handle 'Elendale' has been undergoing a lengthy lawsuit by Hasbro due to the proliferation of a computer game he recently re-wrote called 'Pong'. This game is owned by Hasbro who acquired the rights to it just recently. Hasbro's lawyers commented "This kid broke the law by distributing Pong through the net without paying Hasbro its IP fees, we must destroy this evil threat to humanity with extreme prejiduce. Oh, and we need a raise from $1000 to $1150 an hour."
Elendale was quoted as saying "This is just a warning from Hasbro. Soon they will charge royalties for everything, from D&D to the most basic game of 'tag'." He is also attempting to negotiate out of court unsuccessfully. Hasbro will settle for nothing less than $150,000 and his soul. Next on the news, Microsoft head Bill Gates seen grovelling at Steve Case's door. The Department of Justice thinks this is a ploy to give Bill sympathy, but is currently performing an in-depth investigation.
-Elendale (Now that i think about it that might just work... hmm...)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
If you read the article, the lawsuit was fairly limited in scope. They were only suing over titles that were obvious rip-offs. These games not only took advantage of the method of gameplay, but they also tried to invoke the legacies of those games which Hasbro has rights to. That's stepping over the line. It's one thing to make a 3D shooter, and quite another to make one called "Escape from Nazi War prison, with simplistic rectangular VGA graphics that will run on an 8088." Whether or not it's friendly, it's certainly fair, and as a business, they have to enforce their intellectual property rights. Either that or they could let it go until everything becomes a standard, and then demand royalties. *cough* Unisys *cough* That certainly didn't go over well. Come on, they're playing by the rules. They haven't even asked for retroactive royalties, merely a cessation of distribution of these ripoff products. I'm quite certain that anyone who wanted to make their own asteroids game could probably get licensing fairly cheap. Or, heaven forbid, think up something new.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
By this I mean could Steve Jackson games sue Activision for Interstate 76, after all it borrows heavily from Car Wars.
Wasn't there a law suit some years ago where Capcom sued data east for some sort of copyright infringement? I belive it was over the look and feel of street fighter and Data East's first fighter. (i belive the boss was karnov of nintendo fame) AFAIK the suit was dissmissed on the grounds that Capcom didn't own the rights to martial artitsts fighting styles'. Wouldn't this also apply in this situation? A concept as loose as fighting styles could also apply to 'similar to' as reported. Of course I could be a serious fighting game fan and be wrong.
The Atari game market (I'm talking strictly about the titles marketed at the atari.com web site) now seems to be nostalgia games, so it seems logical that Hasbro would want to shut down other nostalgia titles which "rip off" their trademarked/copyrighted titles.
They also market a brand of play-by-email games. Hasbro claims to have rights to some of the originals (X-Com and Scrabble are the two I confirmed, possibly also Clue), which means they might pursue lawsuits against knockoff-makers of those titles. X-Com you'd expect, that's a newer title than the Atari titles, but what surprised me was that they also aggressively protect Scrabble.
The board game has been around for ages, and after some brief poking around, it appears Hasbro is indeed requesting that people who author free knockoffs, well, knock it off. I've seen three or four web sites in the last hour or so with Java scrabble (and such) that have been shut down, usually with a note to the effect that Hasbro made them do it. This link to a FAQ for a scrabble-playing MUD seems to describe the line between knock-off and acceptable use reasonably well.
So after a little digging around, it seems to me that this instance (Hasbro bringing a case against other game manufacturers) is a little bit noiser than other similar legal actions by Hasbro, but that Hasbro is following a standard operating procedure of protecting its intellectual property.
Whether that's a bad thing or not... I don't know.
I've already patented the "wait for lawsuits" business process. I will not sue not-for-profits and schools, but will vigorously defend my intellectual property in all other circumstances.
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Does this mean we won't see a digital ripoff of Hungry Hungry Hippos?
Maybe we could port it to Linux, GPL it, and update it for today's tastes -- "Pimpin Pimpin Penguins".
Well, it looks like The Onion got the scoop on the government's response before any of the others.... kinda scary, actually...
(For those of you too lazy to go look for yourselves, the headline reads "Federal Judge Rules Parker Brothers Holds Monopoly Monopoly"--Parker Brothers did the computer game in conjunction with Hasbro.)
James-rt
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Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!
Let's look that this calmly, without going all nuts about big corporations and patents and the GPL and so on.
If someone writes a game that really is a clone of Asteroids or Pac-Man or Centipede, as is way too common among shareware authors, is there really an issue about whether or not they swiped an existing design? The arguments I've seen against this are from people who seem to think that they can write an Asteroids clone and claim it as an original they can make money from. Now we're not talking about games that are simply in the same genre, as Pole Position and Daytona are, but games that feature a ship that moves via thrust and rotate that shoots floating rocks that get smaller each time, the only things that shoot at the player are little spaceship things that come out occasionally, and the game ends when all the rocks are gone. Is that Asteroids? You betcha.
Legal and moral issues aside, I see this as more of a complete lack of creativity on the part of many amateur game programmers. There are endless concepts for games, just as there are endless concepts for stories (Orson Scott Card has given seminars on this topic). Starting with the basic Asteroids concept, you can go crazy in all directions. How about eggs instead of rocks and groups of creatures come out when you shoot an egg, instead of simply breaking into smaller eggs? How about making the rocks explode into showers of sizzling, trail-leaving pieces when they collide, making for great chain reactions? How about replacing the rocks with spinning flowers that throw seeds that can grow into new flowers? Those seeds can be collected by the player by running over them before they get fully grown.
All of these ideas are off the top of my head, and yet all of them are way more creative than any existing "Asteroids enhanced" that we've seen over the years. Perhaps the best example is Atari's own Millipede, a 1982 sequel to Centipede. This game included all sorts of great additions to the original game: DDT bombs the explode when shot, swarm attacks, an inchworm that kicks the game into slow motion mode, mushroom growth, a moving mushroom field, a ladybug that turns mushrooms into unshootable flowers. But look at what enhancements have been done to Centipede by oh-so-creative game designers over the years. Powerups, mostly. Higher resolution graphics. Digitized sound. That's not creativity, that's just out and out knocking off.
It seems likely that they're merely exploiting their position as a deeper pocket than most any video game company to win out-of-court through fear-induced settlement. Hopefully one of these conglomerates (with acquired copyrights to old games) will eventually come up against someone (a) large enough to defend the matter in court and (b) with a sufficient financial and moral motivation to actually do it.
In this particular case, they probably only own the rights to some games in some contexts (Pac-man is the Midway licence of a Namco game, for instance; AFAIK Atari only had the rights to home computer renditions, via the 2600 licence and later Atarisoft). Tetris was probably just the arcade version licence.
In any event, this sort of chill on new versions of old games might actually be invigorating; I've enjoyed playing retro versions of cool 80's ideas, but I'd always prefer to see a new idea, and those have been few and far between for the last fifteen years or so. Since the game market isn't going away and this sort of precedent also makes any *new* ideas that much more valuable (since you can shake down later derivative versions for, um, protection money), new innovative development becomes that much more appealing and valuable.
Gawd I can't believe I used the word "innovative".
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
To make a case that a copyright (not a patent) was violated, the people you're suing have to have duplicated almost exactly the program that it's claimed is being infringed. I don't believe you can claim you own an entire genre of games simply because you got there first (For instance, HalfLife and Quake are different enough that Id would have a hard time suing the creators of HalfLife.)
Your mileage may vary.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Apogee distributed the shareware trilogy of Wolf3D.
Id wrote the game.
John Carmack
Most hits rip other games' concepts. No, Nintendo didn't create the side scroller; Activision did in Pitfall for Atari 2600 (no connection with 2600). Alexey Pajitnov of Tetris® fame didn't create polyminoes; that was from the Romans. I think you might want to play some "infringing" games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is all rather ironic to me, as just before reading this article, I was driving home and talking with my dad (who is a trademark lawyer) about how themes of stories (shakespeare was the example) are not copyrightable, they are so basic and so representing of humankind that for every story there are tons others with the same theme. (I'm talking about theme such as 'guy meets girl..' or 'family feud, but one member of a family has fallen in love with a member of the enemies family aka Romeo and Juliet or West side story') This seems to me to be about the same thing, themes in games, themes in stories... why are they any different? Often a game is a story (zelda,etc..). Even Doom has a theme... something about aliens..;)
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/design/features/m akegames/page2.asp says otherwise.
From their page:
Something I need to mention is that when you make your Tetris game, you can't call it "Tetris". Tetris is a trademark of the Tetris Company who is owned by Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. It is his exclusive right to use the name Tetris, and I believe they may have won a lawsuit saying that you cannot make a falling blocks game with the syllable "tris", as it is obviously playing off the popularity of the of the name Tetris.
However, this means nothing to you if you call your game "The Sky is Falling", or anything without a "tris" in it, as they do NOT own the gameplay, interface, or idea of falling blocks. If you hear anything differently from anyone, tell them you can't own ideas, and if you require further proof you can look up information on this subject at the USPTO (http://www.uspto.gov/ ).
What I don't understand is why Hasbro decided to follow suit on these things. It's not as if Hasbro was attempting to sell these things currently. Like many have said this was ages ago.
If I develope a game and a month or two later somebody comes out with a near clone of my game then yeah I'll get pissed and probably take them to court. But come on, Pac Man is a legacy from nearly twenty years ago. Hasbro isn't loosing out on cash from the sales of these game packs.
What next, does some relative of some dead English Lord sue over PONG because it looks awfuly similar to Badmition or Tennis?
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"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Come on. You market a game that looks just like Pac-Man, plays just like Pac-Man, and call it "Mac-Man". The original game is not only copyrighted, but Hasbro is still making money off it.
If not for legal reasons, then for common sense reasons, they deserved to be taken to court.
This isn't a matter of a game being inspired by a classic. Mac-Man and the like are games with no creative process to them.
Besides, there is no legal precedent when the case is settled. The outcome might encourage companys to sue though. If a software company wants to sue when they are being so blatantly hosed, more power to 'em.
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Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
In 1982 (I think) Atari sued Sierra for the game jawbreaker, a Pacman clone. They lost when it was proved that the game was different and had different graphics. Also the suit isn't over yet, If what I read was correct they settled with two of the defendants. Story at: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2552 599,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01 Also see the Extreme Games LLC(one of the defendants) website at: http://www.xgames3d.com/ And one article by a game designer: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features /hasbro1/ If this suit is upheld it could kill the game industry. John Carmack will go from just rich to filthy stinkin rich(if he lowers himself to that level). John if you read this please don't.
About a year ago, I took a creativity class at school (yes, I know, someone will argue you can't teach creativity. Not the point of this post). One of our assignments was to develop a game -- any sort of game, board, puzzle, card, what have you. Our instructor claimed to have come up with several games himself, and sold them to companies such Mattel, Hasbro, Parker Brothers, etc.
Now, obviously, how much our games could be like other games was a big issue. It's hard to come up with something new, as most of the posts in this thread recognize. Apparently, the rule that has been agreed on in the industry at large (not necessarily computer games) is that your game must be "25%" different. How you figure what % of a game is alike and different is something beyond me, but our instructor informed us that court cases have been decided over this rule. It also explains the state of things to some extent; there are a lot of games that are somewhat alike, but maybe changed 1/4 (there are also complete knock-offs, but I don't think you find them so much in the market at large).
If this is all true (and I don't have any documentation or references, sorry), then I wonder how much of this might go over into the computer game industry...
Tweet, tweet.
The people that made Wolfenstein 3D must be jumping for joy.
Yeah! They could sue the makers of Doom, and then the makers of Quake and make a fortune!
Boy, I wouldn't like to be in those rip-off merchants shoes right now!
Acknowledging Microsofts rights to crashes such as HEAD ON, SIDE SWIPE, MEMORY LEAK and BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. "It's just a bunch of useless junk" said Joe of Joe's Salvage.
Joe's Salvage has agreed to cease and desist the use of crashed items based on these and other properties Microsoft owns or licenses.
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1) A bunch of first person gun game clones like House of the Dead.
2) A bunch of street fighter clones.
3) A bunch of racing clones all of which date back to the original Pole Position.
4) An occasional pre-1987 game. It's usually Ms. Pacman.
Console gaming is in slightly better shape. At least you can find some original concepts in the epic role playing games like Final Fantasy or Star Ocean.
It's a shame that distributing those ROMs is illegal, though. We're in serious danger of losing a lot of those old classics from back when game developers were still creative. I'd love to be able to show my kids space invaders running under MAME but that's probably going to be impossible by the time I have kids. Thanks, Hasbro and way-outdated Copyright laws.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I cannot say exactly what the legal ramifications of a cash settlement plus an offer to stop selling the disputed software will do to the industry as a whole but we must remember this: The disputed games were complete rip offs of the Hasbro games with graphics changed. Look at MunchMan, Mac Man, and Missile Defender which are three of the disputed games. I am not so sure that this settlement will translate directly into lawsuits based on game genre.