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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. "
- A.P.
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"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.
You seem to find nothing surprising about the notion that games can be owned by a corporation. Well, that's actually a rather new-fangled idea. For thousands of years, games have been non-proprietary. People experimented with them, tweaked the rules, and improved the game play. That's why games like chess, checkers, and go now are so exquisitely balanced and playable. Games are, in a sense, the original open source application. And the high quality game play of games like Nethack (unmatched by Diablo or other commercial games, IMO) are recent examples.
Games are an important part of our cultural heritage. They seem closer to language than to inventions. The idea that they should be protected by patents (which, for practical purposes, don't seem to expire for games) to me is very much something that can be challenged.
As an aside, the arrival of computers created an entirely new genre of games: large scale simulation games (war games, economic games, etc). Those simply weren't feasible before, and there were genuine pioneers in that area that were at best inspired. And, no, Diplomacy isn't a real precursor to those games.
Looks like they were just going after companies... I highly doubt any emulators would be targeted, since they're not ripping off someone elses games... they're just allowing it to be executed on a different platform.
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...
What if I took a riff from the song ?Under Pressure? by Queen and David Bowie and sang new words to it, like ?Ice, ice, baby?? Would that be copyright infringement? No, it?s fair use, a small snippet of a melody used as part of a larger whole.
But what would happen if you took a sample of lyrics, pretended someone else was singing them, oh and pretended to change a "right" to a "ride".
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:
<O
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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.
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Capcom lost the Fighter's History suit.
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Every known NES ROM can be found at Tobbe's.
<O
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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.
<O
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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.
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
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.
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
"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."
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
<O
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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.
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
Copyright on games (of all sorts) is a bit funny. Basically, sets of rules for games can be copyrighted, and the name of the game is to decide whether a clone has copied substantially all of the "rules" of a video game. Unsurprisingly, the only real specialists in this arcane area of copyright work for games companies, which is why it's best not to litigate against them.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
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...
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
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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