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.

Comments

I let bnetd slip...

[heXXXen]

Bnetd pissed me off for a little while, but this is just rediculous. Especially since a group of friends and I had started developing a strategy game on the engine!

I was going to buy Frozen Throne, but nevermind that. Not that it matters, it'll be the fastest selling expansion pack of all time anyway.

Re:Just to set some things straight

[Decado]

This reminds me of the time I wrote my first book, Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls (Wizards Balls in the U.S). I read the first Harry Potter book hundreds of times, studied it until I knew it backwards, then went and sat in a room and rewrote the story using an entirely different cast of characters doing the exact same thing. I even included instructions so that if anyone had the Harry Potter books, they could use the names of the chars from that and just interchange them with my own character names. I even had a device which would scan the original book for names and if it found them print over the names in Larry Snotter. And I have to say I was equally amazed when I was told I couldnt release the book. "Look", I screamed, "I do not use any of the trademarks, and there isnt a single sentence the same, I just wrote the exact same story in different words how can they not see that it was a legitimate thing to do?". But no one would listen and so Larry Snotter and the Thinkers Balls was never published. But seriously, I never used FreeCraft but I am betting that it did not require the CD to be in the drive to play or validate CD keys, or make sure that only one copy of the CD key could be used online at once. Assuming either of these was true then the program was no different than the No-CD cracks and the Keygen programs, it removed the copyright protection mechanisms that Blizzard built into their games, the only difference was the level of difficulty involved in doing it this way.