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Hasbro Wins Against Arcade Clones
Masem writes "Hasbro has won a number of settlements in a pending lawsuit with
numerous game makers. According to commentary in the newsgroups, most of the games here were "direct" clones of classic arcade games that Hasbro has the rights to, such as Tetris, Pac-Man, and Astroids (Some of these aquired when they bought Atari). "Direct" here being nearly the exact same gameplay, with possibly different titles and graphics, but it's hard to confirm these beyond word of mouth or titles. "
I seem to recall a lawsuit Ataari had brought up against Sierra On-Line over Pac-man. Sierra had created a game called "Jawbreaker" which was a rather obvious knock-off of Pac-man. In the end, it was ruled that Atari could not enforce it's copyright over gameplay, however, Sierra was forced to change the graphics and level layouts as part of the ruling. I read that in some book a looong time ago. Wish I could remember where...
Is this the first "look and feel" copyright suit in which the plantiff actually won?
/updated/ versions of the classics, but they all suck. They usually wind-up adding "new" features and destroying the gameplay. (Worst updated game: Lode Runner - why they added ANYTHING to that game is beyond me. They didn't even have a "classic" mode, and worse yet it ran like a dog on a computer 100x faster than my trusty old Apple //+)
I'm also a little surprised that Hasbro/Atari is suing people *now*. Not 10-15 years ago when Pacman clones were everywhere, and more importantly, on competing platforms.
True there are
Tom
This has to be some kind of joke. What's next? ID Software claiming every first person shooter with different weapons is an exact rip-off of Quake?
And what about the hundreds of cloned games made over the years by public domain and shareware authors?
You'll have to excuse me, I'm off to write the most general game possible and take everyone else who has ripped off my game to court.
Not "hmm, they could be similar..."
It seems the graphics are different - which isn't so bad. If it's an exact clone - then I can certainly see their issue.
Raise your hand if you haven't ever programmed your own version of Tetris, PacMan, Asteroids or Space Invaders some time in the 80's ...
Was it complex to write? No. Why? Because the
design of the came was not very complex in the first place.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I thought someone found a copy of it, with the second verse, from a date that makes the entire song in the public domain. Iawm archive
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
case closed.
--
And Justice for None
--
And Justice for None
If they wrote their own source code, then by definition they created something. This harkens back to the old Apple vs. Microsoft and Lotus vs. Microsoft "Look and Feel" lawsuits of the late '80s and early '90s. BTW: Lotus and Apple lost because the courts determined that a "look and feel" cannot be copyrightable, only the actual source code.
So, now that the DMCA anti-circumvention measures are in place while UCITA looms we're seeing IP "look and feel" lawsuits winning where only a decade back they would have lost. That Hasbro is updating their old codebase is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
We all agree that copying original source or a binary is a copyright violation. So, how is writing one's own variation on a popular game a "rip off"? Is xgalaga a "rip off" of the arcade classic "Galaga"? It doesn't share any codebase with the arcade console. It doesn't share any original graphics; it just looks similar. Is this a direct "rip off" and if not, then how are these other clones "ripping off" Hasbro? If xgalaga IS a rip off of Galaga, then how do you reconcile this opinion with the legal outcoms of the "look and feel" wars between Microsoft, Apple, and Lotus in the late '80s and early '90s?
. ... .
but not even they can kill your 'tris clone according to t his page (google cache, original won't work) But who knows if whoever wrote that is right.
Thought you might want to know. Maybe you were looking for "cellophane", which unlike kleenex or xerox, doesn't have an alternative equivalent in the English language and therefore is no longer Dupont's trademark. It's not enough that a trademark be commonly adopted as a general term -- it also has to be the only term available.
I totally agree, these games have been out on the market for years. Hasbro shoudl not be allowed to sue over people doing things with these games. I mean really come on, they are what? 15 - 17 years old.. maybe only 10, but anyway, there are principals which people shoudl abide by. If you were to ask someone who makes Pac-Man, do you think anyone could tell you? Probably not, it's kind of like if the person who wrote HAPPY BIRTHDAY suddenly started sueing everyone who was singing it for copyright infringment!!
You can't really 'win' a settlement, you just get it. It means the other person gives up. This dosn't have any barring on future cases like this.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The linked article doesn't mention Pac-Man and I thought Namco owned it?
-jfedor
Then you aren't looking hard enough. I was down at a local book/video/software store yesterday and saw an Atari Arcade pack for windows. Had Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest, Pong, Breakout and something else that I can't remember.
If only that were true. However, that only works with trademarks. (IANAL, yadda yadda yadda.)
Nope, they'll be paying multi-million dollar judgements to Nintendo and Sega for appropriating the idea of horizontal scrolling games in the Commander Keen series :>.
Thanks--that's in the post :> (last sentence, first paragraph) except for the lost the war part).
Whether they're improvements or not is a matter of opinion, but Hasbro has released updates of Pong, Battlezone, Asteroids, Missile Command, and others.
The people making the knockoffs were probably just small-time profiteers that didn't create anything--slime that are best driven out of business anyway.
I was involved in a game that has been severely affected by this lawsuit.
Not directly mentioned, but it has completely made sales my our title impossible.
That said, I think your missing the broader picture. VERY VERY few of the games in question where direct rip-offs, but rather extensions of the originals. Theres a very hard question tied up in this, "What constitutes a 'rip-off'"?
The measurement is very hard. Is simply replacing the graphics enough? Clearly the inclusion of a particle physics system changes the game in some way. While the game is still similiar, it's not exactly the same. At what point do we cross this line?
Compare unreal to quake, for example. Is it fair to call Unreal a 'rip-off' of quake? Is it a derivative work? Are they completely unrelated?
My point is, that the line is nearly impossible to draw accurately. Derivative works are very important. The ability for anyone to improve on a basic concept is important.
Lets apply this to another genre, the Web. What if I take a webpage design (we'll use slashdot as an example), and change the design a bit..add some functionality. Am I slashdot ripoff because I started with their site? Or have I IMPROVED on the Slashdot design enough to make it my own?
Hard question to answer, and this settlement seems to lend credence to the idea that a company can own broad sweeping copyrights on entire models of gameplay, not specific games. That's dangerous, and not something to be taken lightly.
You may wish that was the case, but this issue was decided something like 15 years ago in various "look and feel" decisions. No common code is required for something to be considered a derivative work, and infringing under the copyright law.
A court would have to decide how significant the changes were. Actually, the changes you describe probably wouldn't be enough--they are pretty much the sort of thing done for the game "Jawbreaker," which was ruled to infringe on Pac-Man.
DeCSS,Riaa,Mpaa,emulators,Lars,domain jumpers,copyright laws,any number of the silly laws with the words "software" or "communications" in them,Al Gores Internet,Janet Reno and her merry fascists,Clintons Clowns,Ive had it!
I would literally be easier to LINE UP ALL THE LAWYERS(judges too)AND MARCH THEM INTO THE OCEAN.
The People demand SLACK and we're GONNA TAKE IT!REMEMBER ITS STILL ABOUT US!NOT GOVERNMENTS!NOT CORPORATIONS!US!THERES MORE OF US THAN THEM!'course they can still hang out if they dont make any trouble,BUT ITS TIME SOMEONE GOT A DEEP BEATING!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Now, I realise you were being flippant, but it is fairly obviously the case that there was a pretty large chunk of innovation that went into making Diablo different from its influences. It's certainly worlds away from copying Pac-Man verbatim and merely changing the name of the protagonist.
How exactly are computer games any different from other IP? No-one ever seems to think that it's unfair for song-writers to get royalities when other bands do cover versions of their work. It's an analogous situation here.
-Pete
Ever heard of paragraphs?
-Pete
I'm not sure on the others, but on Angband, the currect copyright is:
Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke
This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research,
and not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement
are included in all such copies. Other copyrights may also apply.
The license isn't open source, as open source's popularity wasn't widespread when it came out, but it is effectively so, since you can get the code for almost any version of it easily. The current maintainer is also in process of trying to get the licence switched to a dual license with GPL, and wants as many people who've contributed to Angband's code over the years as possible to e-mail him giving permission.
If you've contributed any code to Angband, you might check at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org/ope nsource.html
--Arcum
...and Capcom would later sue DataEast for their SF2 ripoff Fighter's History. Fighter's History was a fairly lame ripoff (I played it once in a pizza place just to see if it was as bad as it was made out to be... it was); pretty sure Capcom won that one.
The companies in question settled. No court ruled in Hasbro's favor, no precedent was set.
There's still a bit of money to be made off these games and Hasbro, according to the courts, has the exclusive right to do so.
Not necessarily. The companies settled, so there's no way to know whether the courts would have ruled in Hasbro's favor.
Capcom did get sued by DataEast, makers of, I think it was called, "Kung Fu". DataEast won. I don't know the specifics of the case. I think it was more specific. Something like Kung Fu had two buttons, punch and kick, and SF1 copied but as I said I don't know.
I do think it's clear there are some direct ripoffs. Just changing the graphics or number of asteroids should be sueable IMO.
-g
By my understanding, it works as follows. Its a derivative work if I take the code for the game and modify it. If, however, I just like the gameplay and build something similar, its not necessarily a derived work... I'm afraid I'm not incredibly clear on this. For example, most fanfic is a derived work, but a piece of fiction set in a similar universe wouldn't be.
-RickHunter
Indeed if this didn't happen the entire music industry would probably fall apart...
Well, yeah. How long has it been since you heard an original song? ;-) But seriously, it wouldn't be a problem for the RIAA. They can probably use their contracts to wrench permission out of their artists. And I suspect they would just roll over any independant artist who objected.
-RickHunter
Actually, it seems to stem from an almost global lack of understanding of the ideas behind copyright. A work inspired by a copyrighted work (not directly modified from, that's a derivative work) is fine. If I were a composer and heard a catchy musical sequence, I could build a variation on it into my next song. But it looks to me like now too many people are buying the "Intellectual Property" arguments. Copyright does not inherently equal ownership. It is just what the name says. Copying rights.
Perhaps if we get the Greeks/Hebrews to sue the American government for "imitating" the form of government invented by their ancestors, we'll see some clueing-in? ;-)
-RickHunter
1. Spin around
2. Shoot stuff
3. Don't get killed
And
4. Pay up.
sig fault
OK, I'm a bit puzzled... exactly which part of copyright does this fall under? They are certainly not "unauthorized duplication" (exact copy of binary), "reverse engineering" (figuring out how the code works), or "deriving" (since none of the original work (code / art) beyond the idea has been used in creation).
I thought it was established in a case of Atari vs. Sierra On-Line in the 80s regarding Pac-Man and Jawbreaker - where Jawbreaker was the same "idea" and gameplay, but the maze and graphics were altered - that ideas are not copyrightable.
Given the simlicity of most "classic" games, claiming owner ship of the idea of shooting rocks that break apart just doesn't sit well with me. Where is the line? If I'm admittedly using another work as a "frame of reference," at what point am I infringing on their copyright, and at what point am I off the hook?
sig fault
Are ideas copyrightable? I was under the impression that they were not.
Creations are protected under copyright. Ideas are protected under patents.
Copying a song is also fundamentally different from imitating a computer game. Music can be broken down into a set of simple instructions (musical notes) which can then be used to replicate the music. If you use essentially the same notes in your own song, you've copied the song.
Computer programmers don't work like that. There is a set of instructions that tell the computer what to do. When someone clones a game, they create an entirely different set of computer instructions that do not even vaguely resemble the original. This is the part that companies copyright, and if this part has not been duplicated, then I don't see where the violation is.
The music example is an intiguing one. If I have a song represented as a bunch of notes, I can remove sections, move sections around, move a section up or down by a series of semitones, and still be in violation of copyright. But, if I move each note independently, I can convert any song into any other song. So, by the court's logic, the creator of the first song holds the copyright on every derived work.
Who the hell invented Rap or Techno? They must still be alive, I want to buy their rights (I think I have a dollar around here somewhere...) and sue the ass off everyone currently violating their "idea."
sig fault
Just had another thought:
Isn't the recent PC release of Asteroids more a rip off of Astro-3D than Astro-3D is of the original arcade Asteroids?
Who should be suing who here?
sig fault
Suppose the game added a few new features (such as Pac Man being able to pass through walls). I feel that these changes would make for a different gaming experience, and would warrant a separate copyright for the new idea. If the style of play hasn't changed, then credit should be given to the original copyright holder for the use of the original idea (for freeware or open source projects), or licenses to use the original idea should be purchased (shareware or commercial software, GPL or no GPL).
The precursor to Nethack - d&d.
The precursor to the unspecified "multiplayer conquest game" - Diplomacy
mazewar - paintball (a bit of a stretch, but pretty close)
So let me rephrase a paragraph or two of yours:
So, it seems to me that open source game programmer collectives are making non-proprietary games out of proprietary, often copyrighted, games. They add a bit of graphics, modify the gameplay somewhat (often dumbing it down due to hardware limitations), and do a pretty crappy job at packaging. When the original inventor of a game does that, I don't have a problem with it, but most of these collectives are generations away from the original inventors
Should they get the kind of protection from prosecution that open source hubris provides? I think not. Their slick, non-commercial implementation of copyrighted ideas deserves prompt legal action. In the give-and-take of ideas between proprietary and non-proprietary games, IMO, open source programming collectives have been doing a lot more taking than giving.
That's an entirely sarcastic passage, btw. But my point is, the open source people draw just as much inspiration from the world around them as the commercial "evils" that surround them.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Too many pranksters were changing the first letter of the name "Puck-Man" on the cabinet. "Pac-Man" sounds a lot nicer than "Fuck-Man," don't you think?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Namco licenses Pac-Man® from Hasbro. But that doesn't stop you from making "Janitor" in which you are a vacuum and are picking up paper wads (that look like white dots on your low-res screen). Or does it?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Happy Birthday is still copyrighted and generates royalties of $1 million per year.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is xgalaga a "rip off" of the arcade classic "Galaga"?
Yes (Galaga is a trademark) but a quick `mv' can change that.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
...but lost the war on appeal.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Only trademarks must be enforced to survive. Your legal term "abandonment of copyright" means "releasing into the public domain" which requires an action on the copyright holder's part.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wrote up a piece on the Sonny Bono Copyright Theft Act.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
...the people get slack.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The rest of the world manages to create new content everyday without ripping off other peoples ideas.
Does Puff Daddy create original content?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't think I'd call it a clone of Frogger; it's derivative but theres some significant differences. (no sideways action)
What my dilemma has been for a while is that I would love to make one of the games in question - exactly like the original - and put it on my site. It would be a good challenge to make my version as close to the original as possible... teaching me all sorts of valuable skills I need in order to make my own games later. I would also like to give complete credit to the history of where this game came from and why I love it. Basically, if considered in terms of journalism, I want to take a quote from Atari and credit the source. I'm talking about simply quoting the work of others and giving them credit for it, while integrating it into a part of a greater work. I have no problem putting in my footnotes and bibliography, as I should.
The problem I see is this: you clone, then you make public the fact that you cloned, then you are wide open to one of these wonderful lawsuits because you were honest enough to say that you did it.
What I do instead (along with others, I imagine) is what I see to be much sneakier and more deceiptful: we make a clone and then start changing the things we think might tie us most directly to the original - the name, art, sounds, a slight tweak to gameplay. Then, we claim that the game is ours, "not connected to the game you're thinking of," we try to prove.
In the end, what started as a quote... has become plagiarism.
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
From my perspective, here's how it all goes: these old arcade games are so deeply ingrained(?) in many minds that they are very obvious choices to develop. For me, it's a beginner stepping stone to learning programming, as well as a lot of fun. For my site's visitors, it is an immediately familiar way to get into playing a bunch of games right away. I can churn out a handful of clones for people to play while I work on my original stuff. I'm not cloning the work of my current competition, but I am cloning what seems to be (yeah, I know.. it's not smart to do something based on a "seems to be", but that's the way it goes...) old games that are a part of a public domain mindset. In other words, they've been around for so long, they're part of the psyche of almost any game player who has been around long enough to know what they are.
This may not be coming across right, but making a "Space Rock Shooting Thing" seems (there's that word again) like making a poker game or a billiards game. Now, since my site is free and I'm not selling copies of anything, I'm not sure at this point where I stand in this issue. I do intend (God willing) to get enough traffic someday to finally get paying ads and ad revenue from the site, but I'm not selling the games directly. Of course, this may mean that I'm the same as someone who clones a game, changes a few things, and sells it outright.
I agree completely that these ripoffs are mostly people who are just having fun. I also feel like I'm helping to preserve the memory of the old classics, to some extent. (Now I'm stretching a bit, prolly... :) Either way, I won't feel bad about making a version of an "old school" game as long as Hasbro is abandoning the classics in their classic form. The only reason I'm making a "version" of the game is in fear of copyright violations. As far as I'm concerned, I wish Hasbro was still making/selling upright arcade machines of the old Astroids game. I'm having a hard time finding one for my garage.
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
The above applies specifically to all works created on or after Jan 1, 1978. Most other work from before that date was brought under the same statute of life plus 70 years or 95/120, as well, although it also specifies that no work from this category will have its copyright expire before Dec 31, 2002, and for works published on or before Dec 31, 2002, the copyright will not expire before Dec 31, 2047. Works created before Jan 1, 1978 usually get a 75 year copyright protection.
Apparently, there may be some other exceptions. The United States Copyright Office (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/) has full information.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
A First Person Shooter could be compared to a text adventure (Zork). You enter a room. You have a description (although you dont have to read about it anymore). Your exits are obvious. You have a set number of actions you can take. I wont even go into the similarities between FPS-A and FPS-B.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
or rather....I have that and a bridge to sell you....I hate being distracted while i type. :)
The anti-salmon
The precedent already exists:
Atari sued Phillips/Magnavox over "KC Munchkin" in the early 1980s and won, establishing that a game doesn't have to be a 100% clone to infringe your copyright.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
...hmmm.... somewhere around here I've got a 5 1/4 real floppy diskette with the version of Tetris® shortly after it came out of Russia® (Does Hasbro own the rights to that, too? :-)
So if I try to auction it off (collector's item dontcha know), do I have to pay some sort of royalty to His Royal Hasbro-ness?
Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast (which bought TSR a year or two ago) is owned by Hasbro...
Sorry, I wasn't very specific. Yes, some of the games are available for Windows. I use linux, a palm pilot, etc. also...and especially my palm pilot I need small games that don't take a lot of time, such as pacman, tetris, etc. Since the games have not been officially released for the palm platform (I am not aware of them being released anyways) I get clones...the same goes for linux. Sometimes you need a break from xbill. :o)
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
They haven't released them in any way that I can see, and there's no Hasbro endorsed version of Pacman that I can buy, so why not let these other people do it? We like those games, and I want to play them. If Hasbro isn't going to do anything with them, then there shouldn't be a problem.
By the way...isn't there a law that should help against this? I seem to remember it being legal to make something in a way that it hasn't been done before...I want pacman on my palm pilot, Hasbro doesn't release it, so someone else makes a clone. It sounds perfectly fine to me. Oh wait...that same law was supposed to be used in the case of making a DVD player software for linux...oops.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
The problem is that Hasbro is re-releasing many of these classics with a new? graphics and a few pathetic bells and whistles that make these machines stand out in the arcades for their lack of ... 90's technology. I've played the new Arkanoid 2000 or whatever year they're dreaming about now, and although it's as entertaining as the original, it's certainly a vivid anachronism to have it sitting beside Virtua Fighter 3. A little further you'll find a 3-in-1 featuring DigDug and a few other simplicities in both original and remixed form.
Hasbro is obviously coughing up cheap remakes of their old software in an effort to renew their grip on the copyrights to software they didn't even make in the first place. Didn't they use to make Light Brights back in the days when we were all pounding our QuickShot joysticks into our lap striving to finish yet another 100+ level of Asteroids ? The whole point of video games is to provide cheap and easy fun that doesn't involve a bunch of underage girls and grocery-brand wine. The vast majority of game programmers don't do it for money (because there just isn't any), they do it for bragging rights and simply for the challenge of writing their own game start to finish. Hasbro is hurting everybody from the coders to the gamers, and gaining absolutely nothing but a bad image.
"I coded Stackup and Stackup 2, and I even had to pay for this lousy T-Shirt."
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's much better than piracy.
They're actually creating their own code and graphics. They're actually improving (albeit in small ways) on the original. They're bringing a dead game back to life on modern computers. That's not piracy.
-John
--
Namco licenses Pac-Man(R) from Hasbro.
BZZZT! Wrong answer, thank you for playing.
Pac-Man was originally created by the Japanese company Namco and released on October 10, 1979. (I happened to be at the 20th-anniversary celebration at last year's autumn Tokyo Game Show, where the game's creator honored the guy that got the "perfect" score earlier in the year). The game was in fact initially released as "Puck-Man", alluding to the Japanese sound-word "puck-puck" imitating a mouth opening and closing, but was later changed to "Pac-Man"--maybe it was too easy to change the "P" of "Puck" to an "F"?
At any rate, Atari icensed Pac-Man from Namco, and Atari was later bought out by Hasbro, or something like that; ultimately, Hasbro now has what I assume are the rights to distribute Pac-Man in the U.S. However, Hasbro does not own Pac-Man--they only have the rights to distribute it.
<wishful-thinking>Presumably Namco could pull those rights if they didn't like what Hasbro was doing... </wishful-thinking>
...will be just fine...they are emulators i.e. no code was changed...either way they aren't selling Mame to make a profit....Hasbro still sucks though Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
....they own Wizards of the Coast also i.e. Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons.....I hate to see what crap they are going to pull with this "third edition" AD&D (we need more money so lets change the rules so people will buy the same books again)
There is a war going on for your mind.
Almost every fantasy adventure game I can think of is (in some way) based on the original AD&D rules by TSR hobbies (Now Wizards of the Coast I believe) Some of these game publishers are making BIG bucks from someone elses idea. Should they be sued as well?
Is there anyone who has a formal copyright on any of the classic rogue-style games, like Rogue, Amulet of Yendor (aka Hack), NetHack, Omega, Moria, Angband and so on? Come on, let's sue Blizzard for creating Diablo. It's a bit like that, isn't it?
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
I for one am sick and tired of all the knockoffs that the gaming industry is doing. PacMan and Tetris were original ideas doomed to find their way to Charlie Chaplan land. Twenty years from now there'll be a resurgance, for sure. I agree with Hasbro on this one. If someone wants to update the games with features, perhaps they should license it, like they do with films.
Did I say anything regarding Open Source? My post had nothing to do with open source. My bitch was about outdated/outmoded copyright laws which protect content that is no longer profitable. I also have a problem with litigious corporations who purchase dead companies for the sole purpose of sueing someone who is mirroring some 20 year old game. The sad thing is that Atari corp officially decalared the 8-bit technology 'dead' back in 1992. This is simply a case of coporate greed, like it or not. It is just a shame for them that these clones will never be removed from the internet, and that MAME will continue to flourish without making these corporate fire sale buyout goons a thin dime.
It does not matter what you do, it's wrong.
This is just becoming the way of the world. In fairly short order you won't be able to do anything without violating some sort of patent/copyright/trademark. And who are the breadwinners? Attorneys of course. This is another disgusting example of a litigious company who has no intention of reviving the classic gaming market (at least that is what is demonstrated as of this point), but wants to scam money from classic game revisionist writers. Honestly, I believe that is the only reason that Atari was purchased. All of this can be attributed to poorly written copyright laws (Life plus 70 years? On software? In the immortal words of John Stossel - "Gimme a Break"), big money lobbiests, and voter apathy. I for one will simply refuse to purchase any Hasbro titles. Somewhere, somehow, this lawyer driven mess has to be cleaned up. The only way to do that is to vote with the wallet
It does not matter what you do, it's wrong.
And don't forget that Apple got the idea from Xerox for a GUI in the first place.
AP Wire (9/11/00): In a surprise move today, Hasbro has sued slashdot over ownership of the game Tetris, claiming that /. has "violated our patents, trademarks, and copyrights." Opponents said that Hasbro mentioned all three because they can't tell the difference... (snip) Hasbro says the lawsuit is in response to a person, only known by the alias Evil_Way, posting an ASCII tetris game:
|*|
|**|
|*|
||
|*|
|***|
|____|
Note to the humor-impaired: It's humor.
Thanks for the explanation. If I understand you correctly your saying that you took the opertunity to shake hands and walk away from the fight for now.
"Astro-3D" isn't anywhere near a direct clone of asteroids. It's a first person asteroids game, where you are an intersteller garbage collector. Now if that isn't stretching it I don't know what is.
I wonder if the DaVinci estate shouldn't be getting paid for all the mock-up'd Mona Lisa's sold the world over? I think its time to become a lawyer and go sleep with the enemy to poison them from within. And given the IQ of most lawyers, I think a double degree in CS/LAW is going to be the norm in the future. -duck
As an author of an 'Asteroids'-like freeware game this kinda scares me. Actually I made the game more as a homage to the original classic and not as a rip-off. So can Hasbro stop people like me who invest a lot of time in a game and then give it away??? Guess the world is really turning ugly :(
In case you wanne know about my game : http://users.skynet.be/teamc3/driftzone
Good! They can give it all back to Hasbro! See the History of Pacman to Quake II.
Does my bum look big in this?
It could be argued now that the first BIOS clone made by compaq violated a copyright, as it duplicated the functionality exactly.
And this was Sony's arguement when they went against Connectix and lost (one judge had half a clue)
However, the extent of copyright/trademark infringement depends on what is being infringed. IANAL, (and you should find an _informed_ lawyer) but gameplay is not copyrightable. Similar trademarks probably infringes on their tademark, and they should try to defend that. The graphics are copyrightable, but if they are significantly different and have the same gameplay, then that's ok.
My guess is that these companies that were sued by Hasbro got a "sweetheart deal" to cease and decist (maybe even Hasbro said "we will ask for just $1.00 for infringement, but you gotta keep this secret). The companies, even though they made valid "non infringing clones" probably said to themselves "you know, we would lose more money in a protracted legal battle with these guys than we would earn off the game themselves, so it's a better business decision to fold".
I believe this is the scenario that played out. Because look at what Hasbro got back in return - the ability to strike fear into every "clone" maker, whether this fear is justified or not, which is worth far more than the peanuts they would have gotten from these guys. (They got peanuts anyway!). Look at the confusion in all the different posts here. Fine example of FUD purchased.
But it's not just Slashdotters who are confused about copyright - everybody is. Including, which is very depressing to say, our lower courts. So we are in good (bad!) company. The erosion of our public "copyright" has reached the point where we have been put in a "virtual prison", and have by illusion have lost all our rights given to us by our constitution. I say by "illusion", because companies want us to believe that we don't own the work that they sell us, that we just "rent it".
The startling fact of the matter is, and some of you are going to have a hard time believing this is - but it's true- that copyright owners do not "own" the work that they have a copyright for. They own the right to copy only, not the work that they have a copyright for. See the link below to understand this (and before you email me in a huff). So the notion of "intellectual property" is not constitutional. Only the "right to copy" is constitutional.
Congress has sold us down the river Big Time. So even if you go to a lawyer now, you may not even get the "right story" about what your rights are under copyright law. If anybody wants to have _any_ right to fair use in the future, we have to get organized. Whatever shreds of public access to the works of authors, both past, present and future - we _must_ protect. It's so bad that nobody knows what those rights are any more, and especially what they should be . You must read this to appreciate fully what's going on here. And to understand that Congress has enacted unconstitutional laws at the bequest of companies, and nobody has noticed until now. Please email me if you are interested in organizing to reclaim our public rights, and that goes for anybody reading this post. It's going to be long, hard, and boring work. But it has to be done. I'm looking for coders (Java and C) and non-coders.
If you really love this game, then this is what I would do. Purchase a "legal copy" of the game. If its an arcade game, purchase the machine, even if it's non-working (look on ebay - alot of the old ones show up). Then you have a right to "fair use", meaning that you have a _right_ to copy it for personal reasons. Don't let anybody tell you FUD to the otherwise, even a lawyer. Then, make your "exact" clone.
When you got the game to be exact, change _all_ the graphics and sounds, and give it an _entirely_ different name (something that these guys being sued by Hasbro failed to do). Then post _that_ result to your website for good gaming among friends (and happy strangers who pass by!). And most importantly, post with a clean conscience, because that's what you should have.
And one more thing, send me a copy.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I saw some of those games, and in the ones I didn't, the title alone made it obvious that they were direct ripoffs. I have to side with Hasbro on this one.
However... ATARI *DID* declare their 8-bit line obsolete in 1993, so I'm not entirely sure Hasbro (as the current owner) could express interest in the *8-bit versions* of the games.
I wonder where emulators like MAME stand now in Hasbro's view.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Maybe that's why Clinton backed off from the National Missile Defense System. They were afraid that Hasbro would sue them for infringing on Missile Command!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
If the company making the derivative work did so without ever seeing or copying Hasbro's code, then it should be legal. This is not something that should be enforced by copyright. This seems more like a patent issue. It's extremely ridiculous by any standard though. This is almost as bad as "business model patents."
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
DeCSS wouldn't have come about so easily if the author didn't study the encryption mechanisms in Xing's player. That's not nothing.
Otherwise, I agree. It sounds like the ability to destroy another company for using some fundamental concept (such as scrolling left to right, using cascading menus, shooting falling objects from a stationary target, editing text with a keyboard, arrow keys and pgup/pgdn and soforth) is directly proportional to the size of their legal department.
These Hasbro clones on the other hand used the Hasbro games and the strong similarities of the name of the Hasbro games to market their products. If Tetris were called "Blocks" I could understand the re-use. Microsoft certainly couldn't sue for people using the word "Word" in the name of their wordprocessor (which is MS Word compatible, and edits text...with a keyboard, menus, dictionary, etcetera).
There has to be a line somewhere... There is a company which owns the use of the word "Ethical" in the context of Mutual funds. Whenever a company creates an "Ethical" fund and calls it "Ethical" the legal department is engaged. On the other hand, their own funds need not necessarily be "Ethical".
I suppose my point is that it is just as dumb and confused outside the computer industry as it is inside.
Yes, I'm babbling.
As only a couple other people have pointed out, this really doesn't change much.
IANAL but...
You can't copyright the rules to a game; thus, anyone can make a game in which a user-controlled sprite runs through a maze, eliminating neutral sprites which it overlaps, and pursued by hostile sprites. Rules can be patented, but they never were, and I think that it would be too late to decide to do so twenty years after the things were released.
Additionally, you can't copyright the name - that's a trademark issue. And the trademark on some of these games is probably pretty worn out by now; who can really tell the difference between anything in the gigantic Space Invaders genre? It's a generic term now, like kleenex or xerox.
Finally, there's no legal precedent that was set; the companies settled because they didn't want to persue a lawsuit. But I think they'd've had a strong chance of winning if they had.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well, Apple once claimed that all GUIs were direct rip-offs of the Macintosh interface, but they weren't too sucessful with that... How is this different?
Then you haven't seen Atari's first game, Computer Space. Check out this picture of the very first (and very mod) arcade game. If the ugly word "rip-off" has to be used, CS is near the front of the rip-off line -- it's Spacewar for the arcade.
However, in an era where games quite freely, er, "shared" elements, Asteroids was rather novel at the time. I would certainly say that the gameplay, independent of the fact that it was a space game, was a revelation (of course, Robotron later took that gameplay to a new level). Check out the articl e about Asteroids from Microsoft Arcade.
So let me get this straight.
Some games companies are taking the orginal idea of something and improving on the outdated games that haven't been touched for years.
The current owner of the "original games" sues the creators of the new games. To get a shitload of cash.
Hasbro won't be releasing any new improvements on the old classics.
Damn, that's a good business model.
Money for nothing.
I bet they are trying deperately to find some similarities between other old classics that they aquired (shit, they didn't even develop these games themselves) and quake 3...
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
I was under the impression that Namco owned Pac-man...
Namco owns the rights to the Pac-man arcade game, which they wrote.
Atari owned the rights to home versions of the game until they were bought by Hasbro a couple of years ago.
The beautiful Pac-Man clone for ZX Spectrum from the year 1982?
:)
I wonder if they'll sue for that too.
-jfedor
This is a VERY bad precedent. It's not much of a stretch from writing a clone of a game, to writing a clone of ANY program!
Thankfully, this appears to have been a settlement and therefore does not set a legal precedent. Also, I think there are actually contrary legal precedents (Apply trying to sue Microsoft over the original Windows interface). I would guess that these little game companies gave in simply because they didn't have the money to fight the suit.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I personally feel that these games (as with almost anything this old) should become public domain.
The problem is that the length of copyright has been going up and up.
Actually, it seems to stem from an almost global lack of understanding of the ideas behind copyright. A work inspired by a copyrighted work (not directly modified from, that's a derivative work) is fine.
Except in places like the USA where there have been fairly draconian laws against creating "derived works" for some time.
If I were a composer and heard a catchy musical sequence, I could build a variation on it into my next song.
Indeed if this didn't happen the entire music industry would probably fall apart...
From mvpsoft...
, 256-color graphics, explosive digitized sound, and a sizzling original musical score add up to make this the best Desert Storm arcade game of them all! Dump the sand out of your boots, strap on your helmet and let's go! Requires 286+, VGA,
Talk about retro!
The games in question were blatant rip-offs to the point where the authors should be completely embarrassed at their lack of original thinking. If you really liked Asteroids, you could start with the Asteroids gameplay, but go off in a different direction. How about helicopters that broke into parts (debris) when shot? Maybe the cargo could come out too, and you can collect it by running over it (say, pieces of mail or packages or suitcases). Or you could do the reverse and have lots of little piece of, say, plutonium, floating around, and if the collide they combine into something more dangerous. Or you could involve different materials, and they react in different ways when they collide: sometimes they create bonus objects, sometimes they create an extra-strong bad guy, sometimes they explode and damage everything within a 5 meter radius. All of these ideas start with Asteroids, but the rapidly change direction. As the designs are fleshed out, they become further and further from Atari's game. In fact, this isn't cloning at all, but starting with a germ of an idea and running with it. This is called "game design."
Contrast this to what some people did that upset Hasbro. They wrote Asteroids, added a few powerups, spiffed up the graphics, and released it with a name like "Asteroid Attack." Or they added ray-traced graphics to Missile Command and released it as "Incoming Missiles!" Now, really, what do you expect here? "Hey, I just wrote a book about a boy wizard named Larry Kotter, and can you _believe_ that some people think I'm ripping off those books by Rowling? She's such a bitch, trying to say I can't do this." Would anyone think this person was anything less than a complete fool?
I never did any of these, but I did write TRS-80 versions of breakout, karate champ, and yie-ar kung fu.
Breakout was especially simple. I wrote it in just a few hours. I was ten years old at the time. And the version I wrote had some cool features that the original lacked.
Karate champ and yie-ar were a little more complicated, but still nothing that would take more than a couple of days to write.
I agree that trivial games like these should be public domain. Both the gameplay and how to make it work on a computer are not that complicated.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I'm talking about direct rip-offs, including graphics
Does, for example, the csh/bash commandline in GNU look any different from the csh/bash commandline in UNIX?
and game-play
The bash syntax is the same as the sh syntax, or at least as similar as the game clones were to the Hasbro originals. And the POSIX functions are the same too.
as well as things like calling parts of the game the same thing.
ls, cd, rm, etc. are exactly as they are in UNIX®.
You know, a DIRECT rip-off.
A direct rip-off of UNIX was RMS's goal when he started the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation:
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wasn't the Lotus v. Borland case reversed on appeal? See also Tetris Under Fire.
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Capcom lost the Fighter's History suit.
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Every known NES ROM can be found at Tobbe's.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
other companies said "woah, good idea" lotus tried to sue them for incorperating "lotus-like menus". Fortunatly Lotus lost, or the suit was dropped or something. (I forget which)
Lotus won, but it was overturned.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
One other question...what kind of precidence does this set for a game like Arkanoid? I know there are litteraly hundreds of clones like Breakout and SuperBreakout on the market.
Breakout was an Atari (now Hasbro) game before Arkanoid, even before arcade games ran on general-purpose 8-bit microprocessors (Taito's Space Invaders was one of the first). Arkanoid (adding very nice graphics and loads of powerups) was from Taito.
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Will I retire or break 10K?
The difference is Leonardo Da Vinci was copyrighted before perpetual copyright, while Hasbro's works were copyrighted after perpetual copyright, which started on January 1, 1923.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
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"If you want to play our games on OS/2 or Linux, please purchase and install Microsoft Windows Me and reboot your computer when you want to play our games."
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
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TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. (There was a /. story on this.) Hasbro, as a TETRIS® licensee, is doing what it's contractually obligated to do: defend the TETRIS® trademark.
So download freepuzzlearena, a clone of Tetris for Linux, DOS, and Windows 9x.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Pinocchio's rant on The Tetris Company has moved here.
Now, answering your question: Hasbro is a Tetris Company licensee.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
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does this include versions of games developed for platforms that never had the "original" such as an(for example) asteroids clone for OS/2?
I'm sick and tired of all the knockoffs in the clothing industry too. I mean, look at it, guys in America only seem to wear one of three things to cover their lower extremities: pants, shorts, and jeans. These clothing items are getting way too old. I think it is time that Levi's sued every company that makes jeans so we can get on with our clothing life and come up with something new. I mean, why _shouldn't_ we all be wearing MooMoos or Saris? The people in other countries do it without problem, and to the best of my knowledge a Sari is a semi-religious piece of clothing, so there should be absolutedly NO copyright infringement there.
:Cue:Cat before they can be legally worn, just in case. ;-)
It's about time that the jeans knock-off companies who add more pockets or new colours paid Levi's for licensing their original idea, just like games.
And, to further that matter, I also think that all pants manufacturers should be paying their royalties to the Amish (or whoever invented pants).
Maybe the entire idea of clothes is outdated and we need something new. Perhaps a nudist law allowing people to only wear new items as "clothing"? I think there should be no problem whatsoever with people walking naked on the streets. I mean, it takes time to come up with a new clothing idea, and once it's been in the market for a few years and the person no longer manufactures it, you have to think up a new one, right? And while you're waiting you're not gonna have anything to wear.
And to ensure that all the items you wear as "clothing" are original or are royalty-paid knockoffs, the government should force you to scan the DMCA approved encrypted barcode on the pocket of the clothing item with a
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I would have to disagree with Habro on this one. Just looking at the case, it looks like a case of piracy and copyright issues....but I think that these games are so old and so well known that hasbro is not losing any money off of them. Everybody knows what pacman is and can tell a ripoff when they see it, but really...these games have been around for years, and hasbro is not going to be able to sell them. Personally, these "ripoffs" are just people having fun. Hopefully, no self respecting person would actually pay money for a copy of pacman or asteroids......if anyone is looking for a fresh copy of pacman...I have that and a bridge to see you.
The anti-salmon
It reminds me of going into an un-named store and seeing a knock off of a Sony(tm) boom-bax named Sonic. The packaging was completely identical to Sony packaging, except for the name.
now in an arcade, players are less concerned about such details, since if the games plays well, who cares? It is the owner of the game who paid out the big bucks.
Another example of "which way do you want to go in trademark/copyright law?" .......
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Online Scrabble clubs have been driven underground, because of Hasbro. According to Hasbro, if you play Scrabble online without using their (expensive, Windows 9x only, graphically bloated, slow) version of the game, you're breaking the law. So now what happens is that the freeware Scrabble program (I won't mention the name in case any suits from Hasbro are reading this) can't be put up on a web site for long; it has to be passed along between people by DCC or something of the sort. Along the way, people have decided to not bother sending all the files, so it's lost some features such as support for multiple languages.
The way the newest version of the Scrabble program attempts to be legal, incidentally, is that you can switch configuration files that control how the game acts. By default, it plays this almost-Scrabble game with certain changes, such as 8 tiles on your rack, squares where you can't play, 4x Word Scores in hard-to-reach places, different square colors, etc. It just so happens that it's distributed with a different configuration file that makes it act like normal Scrabble.
Hasbro's control extends to other good games, too, such as Boggle and Monopoly. Again, if you're going to play them on a computer legally, you have to use the bloated Win9x games. This makes things like bsdgames/boggle (which comes with Debian) illegal. (Hey look, a legal issue you can worry about after KDE.)
I despise what Hasbro is doing to these games. I think about any game that I like to play and there's a 50/50 chance that Hasbro has bought the rights to it. There's something wrong with having a monopoly on fun.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
By your logic, if the GNU/Linux® System is a direct rip-off of the UNIX® System, then it's no better than piracy...
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Long ago, in the deep dark history of video gaming, there was a company called Atari. Atari not only popularized the idea of video games in the US, they also invented many of the classic games (such as Asteroids) which are apparently still being played to day. Other popular arcade games that they did not invent (such as PacMan), they spent substantial money purchasing the console and computer rights for.
After many years, Atari was nothing more than a shell of itself. It didn't create video games anymore, it didn't do anything. But it did have this enormous copyright and patent portfolio that they had spent millions building up in the glory years. So, they went about licencing their games and suing companies that had infringed on their early patents. Atari became a "intellectual property" concern, that's all.
Now, when Tramiel finally gave up on video games, he went looking for a buyer, and found Hasbro. Hasbro paid a piddling $3 Million for all of Atari's intellectual property. Only $3 Million! for the rights to produce the most recognizable video games of all time. (The gamers of the world should have started a fund to buy this stuff and put it in the public domain.)
Hasbro got a deal, but to capitalize on it, they now have to play the same intellectual property games were playing. So, this sort of this thing is not any different than what Atari was doing in the early 80's (when they sued Maganavox for a PacMan clone on the Odessey II) or the early 90's (when they licened games to Microsoft), or the mid 90's (when Atari tried "3D" rehashes of classic games on the Jaguar).
All of this well enough known that it shouldn't be a problem. Activision came out with a Frogger clone called "Chicken" and never got sued. Likewise with dozens of sorta-close-to-PacMan games. These games still do have value: The local CompUSA has two or three "game packs" with clones of old games for sale for $15. Plus MAME is still a very popular use of people's time. The problem is that you *still* either need to pay off Hasbro/Atari, or make a different damn game.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Download 'em (while you can) and decide for yourself:
http://www.mvpsoft.com/soft-arcade.html
http://www.webfootgames.com/newindex.html
http://www.egames.com/_asp/ egames.asp?nav=home&con=home
---------
The truth is out th - oh, wait, here it is...
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
So, it seems to me that game companies are making proprietary games out of non-proprietary, often open source, games. They add a lot of graphics, modify the gameplay somewhat (often dumbing it down for the masses), and do a pretty good job at packaging. When the original inventor of a free game does that, I don't have a problem with it, but most of these companies are generations away from the original inventors.
Should they get the kind of eternal protection that game patents give for that? I think not. Their slick, commercial implementation of ideas deserves copyright protection (and, at that, it should probably be more limited than current copyright). In the give-and-take of ideas between non-proprietary and proprietary games, IMO, commercial game companies have been doing a lot more taking than giving.
I personally feel that these games (as with almost anything this old) should become public domain. We're talking about games that are virtually monuments in gaming circles....no...modern life.
;-)
Raise your hand if you haven't played Tetris or PacMan...ok - the bolivian in the back of the room can put his hand down now. - But in all seriousness. These games have become so popular over time, and have been so played - and recognized that, while there is still money to be made, Hasbro (or whomever at this point) should be benevolent enough to just let people do as they will. Will someone PLEASE follow ID's lead with Quake (yes kids - there were two made before Q3A) and just (basically) give it away. (Of course, this need not turn into a thread about the economics of Qcrack
One other question...what kind of precidence does this set for a game like Arkanoid? I know there are litteraly hundreds of clones like Breakout and SuperBreakout on the market. I can't remember specifically which came first - but you get the gist.
Oh well, i suppose this is a sad day for owners of the TI-82
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The problem with this kind of ruling is that it is extremely vague for what constitutes a "Direct clone". For example, suppose I played asteroids, loved the game, and decided to make a similar game. Suppose I then make asteroids, but instead of starting with 2 asteroids, I start with 3. Or give your ship a grenade launcher. Or add asteroid bases hidden inside some asteroids. Or whatever other improvements over the original I think are necessary. Under this decision (Which is thankfully a settlement and not a ruling) I might still be in legal trouble. After all, how far do you have to go from the original game to be safe? How do you even MEASURE such distance? Obviously changing the title is not enough. Minor changes are not enough... If interpreted liberally enough, you could even argue hasbro now owns the entire genera. Imagine if CAPCOM tried to argue this way, and said that Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Tekken, King of Fighters, whatever... ... were all in violation of being variations on their original Street Fighter game? Or Nintendo demanding that all side-scrolling platform games cease production, as they are clearly very similar to the original Super Mario Brothers? These is probably a bit less likely to happen, since those games have been out for a while, and the companies owning them are quite a bit better able to defend themselves. But think for a moment, how far removed are these (absurd) cases from the Hasbro case?
There actually have been cases similar to this before. Lotus, when they came out with Lotus1-2-3 had a very nice menu system, composed of heiarchical menus. When other companies said "woah, good idea" lotus tried to sue them for incorperating "lotus-like menus". Fortunatly Lotus lost, or the suit was dropped or something. (I forget which)
The thing that worries me about this decision is that it mirrors other very disturbing events a little too closely for my taste. Consider the similarities between this and the DeCSS trial: DeCSS has NOTHING stolen from anything copyrighted, it was an entirely original work. It functioned as a "black box", where given the same input, it would produce the same output as the DVD hardware. It was basically an emulator. The companies that Hasbro was going after had produced games that were also entirely original works; they shared no code with the hasbro originals. They just looked fairly similar, and had similar play styles.
A couple of years ago, judging from other precedents, Hasbro's case would have been tossed out. The siding of courts against vague, poorly defined "imitation" demonstrates a swing in the pendulum that I don't like.
I'm one of the owners of Webfoot Technologies, a company that was sued by Hasbro. For the past 6 months we've had to sit back quietly (advise of our attorneys) and keep quiet. I'd like to clear up some facts and offer some opinions. 1. Our games were made BEFORE Hasbro was in the software business. 2. Our games are not clones. 3. We did not admit to any copyright violation. This was not part of the settlement. 4. The settlement offer was too good for us to refuse. 5. We did not agree to any future restrictions on the types of games we may make. Our games were made 2 years BEFORE Hasbro's retro games. That's right. Hasbro wasn't even in the software business when we made our games! It looks like some large publishers may have saw all us retro fans finding a market, and decided to join in after we had tested out the market. I really don't know... all I know is that Webfoot was making retro games long before Hasbro purchased Atari. Webfoot has been making retro games since 1994, shortly after Atari announced it was abandoning retro. We made the games because we love these games, we grew up with them, and none of the big guys were making them at that time. It's specifically because the big companies had abandoned retro that we wanted to see more games made. Our games are anything but direct clones or rip-offs. I invite anyone to check out our games and see just how close they are to the Atari properties. Our games are so incredibly different, we are puzzled as to why we were sued while makers of exact clones still continue to sell their cloned games in stores. Here are links to a couple of the games involved in the lawsuit: http://www.webfootgames.com/catalog/3dgeo.htm http://www.webfootgames.com/catalog/3dfrog.htm If you just look at the screen-shots, you'll be puzzled as to why we were sued for copyright violation. The game play rules are different and massively expanded beyond any 20 year-old retro game. All the game art, levels, music, and sounds are original. Copyright laws do not protect basic ideas. They protect the unique expression of a work (the graphics, the program code, the sounds, the levels), but not the underlying game idea. Patent law would protect gameplay rules, but no patents are owned with respect to these games. If a patent had existed, it would have expired by now. But copyrights do not protect these ideas, and to this day we strongly believe no copyrights were violated in this case. Also, the names of the games do not belong to the developers. The titles are registered trademarks of eGames and the other publishers. That's why the trademark issues did not effect Webfoot. Our attorneys were baffled that we were being accused of copyright violation, since our games in most people's opinions who actually see them, clearly do not seem to infringe on any Hasbro copyrights (or 20 year old Atari properties). In fact, through the settlement agreement Webfoot does not admit any copyright violation took place. We absolutely refused to sign such a settlement agreement because we firmly believe that our games do not infringe. In fact, at one point Webfoot and MVP Software had dropped out of settlement talks specifically over this matter. We were comfortable litigating this matter, all the way to trial if necessary. We also refused to sign anything that would limit our ability to make any kind of game in the future. Most of the settlement text is public information. I encourage everyone to look at the settlement text and you'll see that it really wasn't a "win" for anyone, but a painful compromise for all parties involved, as is the nature of settlements. So why did we settle? Because we were offered with a settlement that was just too good to turn down. These games were almost 3 years old and were being removed from the stores with or without Hasbro's help. We were willing to fight for a matter of principle, but the last settlement offer was too good. No one gets rich making retro games (I wish someone had warned Hasbro about this in 1997). You do it for the love of gaming. Some people like FPS, some people like RPG, and some of us like retro. It's really just a matter of taste. I would ask that anyone posting opinions please take a look at the games before posting. It seems sometimes that corporations who are able to spend the most money spreading their propaganda are able to spread information that isn't factual. Please look at the games and look at the facts. Don't be fooled by expensive propaganda. Ask yourself why the games that are exact clones are still being sold in stores today? The answer may be that there is an intense turf-war going on between eGames and Hasbro over the drug-store market. It seems eGames has achieved a position as the sole distributor to many drug-store chains, including Rite-Aid and Walgreens. In fact, the CEO of eGames told me personally that the lawsuit was filed just days after a direct confrontation with Hasbro over the drug-store arena. Had this been a stunning victory for Hasbro, then eGames would have been forced out of business, all the defendants would have admitted to copyright violation, and massive restrictions would have been placed on us all. None of these things happened. In fact, the lawsuit is not over. Andre LeMoth of Xtreme Games will continue to litigate this case until the end. We wish him luck and a little more, since we're donating to his legal defense fund (www.xgames3d.com). I'd like to thank the development community for their incredible support. We were very surprised by the alliance created by this lawsuit! It certainly helped us get through a very difficult time knowing so many were offering their help and support. I wish all those great independent developers out there the best of luck, and for those of you who love retro gaming, let's hope it will always be our decision as to which products we wish to play. Dana Dominiak, President Webfoot Technologies, Inc.
I'm getting the rights to Solitaire. Then I'll bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby the US government to place a 100% tax on playing cards, in case they are used to play Solitaire, which I have the rights to. I will also demand Microsoft pay my 100% of the profits they made from Windows 95 sales - card games are all it's good for.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion