Infogrames Serves Civ3 Fans With Cease and Desist

janolder writes "According to multiple articles on heise online (German only), the leader of an effort to localize Civilization III for Germany, Kai Fiebach, has been slapped with a cease and desist letter, including $500 lawyer bill from Infogrames Germany. A grassroots effort to help Kai and tell Infogrames off is forming." "Background: Most European versions of Civ3 are late. With a slated release for March 2002, Kai and a group of Civ3 fans decided to translate portions of Civ3 to German and to make the result available as a set of files to be applied to the US on time for Christmas. Kai informed Infogrames of his effort and even offered to join forces with their localization team if only the game would be released sooner. Sadly, Infogrames reacted by sending Kai a cease and desist letter, alleging copyright infringement. The home page of the translation effort has already been taken down.

The reason for Infogrames' reaction seems to be that Infogrames Germany doesn't make a single penny on the US version of the game sold through Amazon Germany and other vendors."

Comments

Why it Doesn't Really Matter

[Greyfox]

It's not like the entertainment companies have to worry about alienating their fan base. It's pretty well been proven that they can fuck their fans over without vaseline or K-Y and the fans will still line up and pay them for it the next time something comes out. And doing that is fine but please, a little less whining the next time they get the giant legal dildo out and tell some part of the community to bend over. We seem to feel that being mildly entertained for an hour or two is worth the price of having to bend over for that dildo, so I don't think we have the right to complain when they stick it up our collective ass.