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FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
Either way it's the last Blizzard game I will buy!
Look ma no hands
You cannot just key off someone else's name like that. If your game is good, invent your own name and identity. Knock-off 'free' versions of commercial products are unimaginative, and a business *must* protect its trademarks, or it loses them.
Vivendi Universal is the owner of Blizzard. Vivendi Universal hates the free software movement, why? Because its assosiated with the Mp3/FileSharing movement.
I think people need to consider certsain media companies to be a threat to open source, and a threat to our personal fair use rights, Vivendi Universal is one of these companies.
Microsoft takes alot of heat, but I think even more heat should be given to companies like Vivendi Universal who sue anyone and everyone who is a threat to their monopoly power and business.
They sue file sharing companies who create new ways of distributing music, they sue open source companies who create new ways to play games, they will sue you and I if we use these networks, even if they dont know why we are using them.
Its not about piracy anymore, its about competition, if they cant own all the code, and all the distribution companies, they sue.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is a bit different. It's one thing to pass a file using P2P, but it's another thing to patch it and make it evolve. How to you replace the old version with the new one and track changes?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a games programmer...
Why didn't the project team just:
1) Change the name of the project, removing the source of the confusion with the Blizzard titles
then
2) Remove anything which looked like it might directly infringe on Blizzard's IP (I'm guessing there's things like similar artwork here, since gameplay mechanics cannot be copyrighted).
This would leave the cease-and-desist without a legal leg to stand on, as the grounds it had been sent under were no longer valid. After all, plenty of people out there clone other games, it looks like these guys just cloned *Craft a bit too closely and have annoyed someone with a lawyer...
Game dev and music blog
There are? I can think of CrystalSpace, and Quake II as the only decent open-source FPS engines (and none of them is that good, compared to the likes of DoomIII, HL2, Halo2, etc), and Freecraft was the only decent RTS engine. Is there some secret 31337 open-source engine repository I'm missing out on?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Only an idiot would start a project to produce a RTS with a name that's only a few letters away from an established line of RTS games.
I have ZERO sympathy for these people. It takes about 30 seconds to realize that maybe the name + genre was a bad idea. But hey we get folks starting projects all the time based on TV shows without permission. Then they come and cry months into the dev cycle when they get a C&D.
Coyboy Neal & Co, how would you feel if YOU were Blizzard and someone was trying to ride on the coattails of the brand you worked your ass off to build?
Will you all remember this when the next big blizzard game comes out? Or will you all just run to the store to buy it, just like Warcraft 3?
Me and my friends, who have bought every game Blizzard has produced (all the way back to Blackthorne/Lost Vikings), use PVPGN. Why? Because its nice to host your own servers, to have your own games, to not have to worry about who is on there, to have total control. It's a nice thing to have, and to play around with.
Of course blizzard shut it down, because you don't need an "official" key to use it. The honor system has become suprisingly worthless nowadays.
Galactic Civilizations decided to (*gasp*) TRUST their customers and not put SafeDisc or any other type of copy protection on the install discs. A lot of people have problems with these types of anti-piracy methods and generally it just hurts your end user, not that pirates who can get around it with various cracks/hacks/or cd copying programs. Its this kind of trust who now, unfortunately, seems to the be the odd man out. id software did the same thing with Quake3. It was either the first or second patch that took out the cd check, because it annoyed the user more than it actually helped anti-piracy.
I think the worst part is that Blizzard now requires you to buy a "gaming site license" for any gaming venue in which you charge a fee to enter, even if every user has their own, official, bought and paid for copy. This is just sad. You don't see Valve having a fit over Counter Strike players and their LAN habits, yet Blizzard needs more and more cash for reasons that just don't make sense.
Here's the irony: Blizzard is owned by an asshole, very profit-driven company (Vivendi International, AFAIK). The developers have generally been very cool, and sometimes even listen to the community at large (they ignored War3 beta testers, but seemed to actually listen when I participated in the Frozen Throne beta). Even though they might be great people who make some really nice games, this is like PR hell. Give the gamers something great, then stab them in the back once you have their money.
They can't cry "we're just a small developer!" anymore. Not with millions upon millions of sales, and huge development houses around the country.
I say screw this "Don't blame Blizzard, they've got a bad parent company." No, if the Blizzard heads really wanted to dig their feet into the dirt and stand their ground, they would. If they got fired, and worked the press releases well enough, they would start another gaming company and all those brilliant minds would go there, instead of suffering through this idiocy in the name of cash.
Sigh. Dare to dream, folks.
Is it just me? or is freecraft a blatant ripoff of warcraft. I saw a screenshot that could have come from warcraft. Little green orcs, harvesting gold and lumbar. There was even the building with the telescope in it. It's not hard to start a computer company, it's just hard to start a company called "Mikrosoft".
Make up your own damn game. Don't remake someone else's.
FreeCraft was a threat, a threat to their trademark. If you don't defend your trademarks, then you stand to lose them. Thats why you can't open a small coffee shop and call it Starbucks, or a courier service called FedEx.
Its called "dilution" when the infringing title is similar. There was a famous case where FedEx sued a NY State coffee shop called FederalExpresso for trademark dilution. I think they won, (That was a far-fetched case, obviously).
IANAL, but I think the law requires them to do this. I doubt they can stop FreeCraft from changing their name and continuing development though.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
FreeCraft did not only have a similar name, but similar gameplay, ui, units, etc.
It was trying to be an exact clone of warcraft. You could even play it with the WarCraft graphics.
It you replaced the graphics with the WarCraft ones it was the same game.
I can understand why Blizzard or Vivendi would be upset.
Anyhow it just shows how unimaginative FreeCraft was.
I thought that freecraft allowed me to, having bought the warcraft 2 cd, play warcraft 2 (well basicaly warcraft II anyway) under linux/unix, and thus could be considered an ineteroperbility product which I belive the DMCA actualy allows explicitly??
or has everyone forgotten about the Open Source alternative to battlenet?
That's why I'm STILL not buying Blizzard anything.
BTW, does no one get the cocaine reference in 'Blizzard"?
That was the origin of 'Blizzard of Ozz', the insiration for their name.
Buncha damn powderheads.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
This wasn't supposed to be the ideal of Open Source -- it's not to make mediocre and blatant copies of commerical products, complete with a "punny" name like FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Lindows or ...
We're supposed to be making better, faster, original stuff. Either just plain better (compare the GNU Unix tools against the Solaris versions) or new and better, leading edge stuff like emacs (which was amazing when it came out; although I prefer Vim :-), perl, tcl, python, ...
And, damn it, pick a name that doesn't attempt to ride the coat tails of the commercial version so you get free marketing name association. If you're too lazy to market it yourself than you deserve to be ceased and desisted.
Yeah, now only the people with original ideas will be able to compete! What a crock of shit!
Seriously, will OSS ever produce an original idea, or will it all be about copycat-ism?
--sdem
Aren't you overestimating the influence of Slashdot just a tad? The overwhelming majority of Blizzards customers don't even know Slashdot exists and even the ones who do don't always agree.
Take me for example. I'm a Blizzard customer and a Slashdot user. But I hardly ever agree with the Slashdot groupthink. I see nothing wrong with Blizzard's actions today and will remain a customer for years to come.
Why?
Because I like GOOD video games and Blizzard makes em. I don't want to have to wait 2 to 3 years for an open source half-assed equivalent to come out. Some of the very BEST open source games look like something that was first introduced 5 years ago. And before anyone goes off on a rant about how GOOD games don't always need the best graphics well I agree. But that doesn't mean I also want to be a second-class citizen on the video gaming front.
For the love of GAWD can't you pedantic nerdy geeks keep politics out of ONE realm of your lives? Folks just want to play games not stand on idealogical grounds for or against something. Whatever happened to just appreciating good work without an alterior motive?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Attention moderators, this guy is just plain wrong. Worse still, he's pure FUD. Must work for Blizzard.
The purpose of the FreeCraft project is to create an open source WC2 implementation that can be played on any platform. If you own a legal copy of WC2, you can use the datafiles from the CD for artwork, music, and so forth. If you do not, there's a rather low-quality substitute that is entirely free for anyone to use. This project is great because you might own WC2, but you may not be running Windows (anymore). Wouldn't it suck that your money would have to go down the toilet just because you chose to run a differerent (superior) OS? That's bullshit. FreeCraft is interoperability software and it's perfectly legit. I could see an argument on the name, but there's no reason they can't build a clone of the engine.
If anything, just stop and think about the basics of the situation. You have a group of volunteers creating a program for free who are being shut down by a greedy mega-corporation. Do you really think the FreeCraft project is so evil and Blizzard is justified?
Join Tor today!
The difference between open-source projects and closed source projects like this is that the self-destruct process is just as public as the code is.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is it just me, but why don't they just change the name of the game?
After all, the "ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2" argument doesn't stand on its own; almost every RTS released since WarCraft 2 contain similar design ideas...
Given that Blizzard is using the trademarks "StarCraft" and "WarCraft" in this very specific market (realtime computer strategy games), their claim that "FreeCraft" infringes on their copyright is reasonable and very likely winnable in court.
So, no problem, just rename FreeCraft to a unique name that clearly isn't derivative of Blizzard's product. And don't be mad that they asked you to do this, because they have the right and obligation to protect their copyrights.
On the other hand, unless you've physically ripped code or content out of StarCraft or WarCraft and put it in your game, any claim that your game is "too similar" to theirs seems absurd and almost certainly has no basis in copyright or trademark law. If you ignore them on that issue, then they are almost certain to go away.
And if they don't go away nicely, the resulting outrage over their persecution of the open source community would almost certainly force them to go away ashamedly.
But if you just cave in, and you fail to stand up for your rights when presented with this sort of threat, then you are certain to lose your rights.
If a person asks you to get out of his seat, you move. If a bully asks you to give up YOUR seat, you fight.