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Infogrames Serves Civ3 Fans With Cease and Desist

Posted by chrisd on from the bad-europe-bad-no-civ-for-you dept.

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."

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. I think one of the problems by friday2k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    seems to be that the game is not yet available in Germany and that the effort going on will cost Infogrames a lot of money (the heise article, which, btw, is here says so, too). Also there will be issues with support. And it is there intellectual property. So, by altering a closed source program without permission they stepped over some border line. Wouldn't it be prosecuted here in the US under DMCA?

    - Just my 0000010 cents

  2. Sorry, But Tough by torqer · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, I hate to be anti-open source. But CIV3 is copy-written. And one guy (or even company) cannot modify closed source. Even if it isn't for profit. Sid Meier has the right to make his money. And I wouldn't want the German Amazon.com taking my money either. I hate to be capitalist but tough nuts.

    It's a nice gesture to offer to work with the official translation team, but they are probably (hopefully) have the entire process planned out. So it wouldn't be of much help to have some random guy "helping out."

    Besides, even if I had to wait I'd rather have a real version instead of a hacked up patch that comes with no guarantee.

    1. Re:Sorry, But Tough by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Informative
      • But CIV3 is copy-written

      Translations are derivative works. There is a specific exemption for these in most countries, Germany included, and this appears to be a straight substitution of text files.

      Mind you, this didn't stop the German fans translating Harry Potter being served with cease and desists, so I guess we're back to the old argument that access to lawyers allows you to (practically) dictate what the law is.

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      If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  3. Compare with Harry Potter in German by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know of two unofficial fan translations of Harry Potter books into German. This high quality, multi contributor one was torpedoed before completion. However, this one man effort hit the web early, and was allowed to stay up by a court because it was inferior to the official translation.

    And there's the problem. A translation can be treated as a derivative work with enough original content to protect it under copyright laws. It doesn't have to be worse, it can be better - it just has to be different. However, if the copyright holder (in another language) has not yet done a translation, it becomes problematical to prove that your translation is substantially different.

    As this is a civil case, it'll come down to a judge deciding what is (here comes that word again) a reasonable delay of the official version before translators can take a shot at it. A three month delay is probably reasonable, a three year one probably unreasonable, but it will be decided on a case by case basis (at least in the UK, I'd be interested to hear if there's a specification of duration in Germany)

    So, if the translators waited for the official CivIII German version to come out, then produced their own resource files that differed from the official ones, that would be allowed. But they can't force the copyright owners to hurry up.

    What a tangled web we weave.

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    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.