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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.
why not just change the name?
Blizzard doesn't hold the rights to the whole RTS genre, if that was the case then C&C and AoE and lots of others would be in trouble..
~~~
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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.
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Sorry if this is a stupid question--but which one of these was the open source game, and which were the Blizzard games? I can't ever keep them straight.
What did they expect? It's like starting a company called 'Appel' to sell a photo editing prodocut called 'ifoto'.
Mod point free since 2001
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
C'mon guys, here's where you have the advantage because you can do something that big-shot software companies can't. Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game. re-release it as a "different game" and under a different company logo if you have to.
the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.
fly like a butterfly....
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Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Yep, here it comes. I'll cease and desist downloading this right now, of course...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Be kind to it, only fetch if you're going to do something useful with the code. Some of the real mirror sites are still up (wayback is your friend) and may be faster if you're in the USA or Europe. Of course, if you're hitting my ISP from WAIX then ArachNet won't care about bytes, so go for it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Another project that frankly I'm surprised has made it this far is FreeVo - obviously a name in the same thought process as FreeCraft. I fully expected TiVo to crack down on them too.
I'm still unclear however. Was the main problem the name? It sounds like it, and if so, it was just a move to protect their trademark. If you don't defend your trademark (and those that may dilute your trademark) you lose it, so this Blizzard and their parent companies had to do this.
What isn't clear is why they didn't just change the name like Blizzard et al wanted and go on with life. Everyone is making it sound like Blizzard shut this project down, when it just looks like they wanted the name changed and the FreeCraft shut the project down all by themselves.
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
Some personal projects I may have to rethink:
BarCraft - Can you restore the broken supply line of ale for the underaged teens lurking in the carpark outside?
DartCraft - The expansion pack for BarCraft. It's RTS darts, with uh... resources and stuff.
ParCraft - Play 18 holes of golf while repelling invading loons in golf buggies.
FarCraft - Like a regular RTS, but it'll take 3 and a half days to cross the map.
RarCraft - You have to play with all game data (gfx, sound, etc) still in compressed form.
LoreCraft - Get the Law School upgrade on your Fortress to produce a phalanx of patent-happy lawyers.
BoreCraft - The only unit is a peasant. Buy the expansion for female peasants!
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?
happypenguin.org is struggling to come to terms with Slashdots own form of Cease and Desist :)
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I made some very minor contributions to this a couple years ago; it's pretty much playable these days.
:(
OTOH, I always thought it would have made more sense to build it as a generic engine, with at least one totally original theme, than a 100% clone of Warcraft mechanics. (In fairness, I think the plan was to move in that direction eventually).
But like a lot of these, probably 70% of the code was written by one guy, I think, so if they've chased him off the project is toast.
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?
I am not a lawyer, but on the surface this case looks similar to one the Supreme Court just decided recently in which Victoria's Secret sued a sex-toy company called Victor's Secret for trademark infringement because of the soundalike name. Victoria lost---the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name. The CBS news story is here.
This post is dedicated to all of those
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!
Perhaps if you spent some of this money buying or donating to Freecraft not only would we have better games, we'd have free games. Free games would hurt Vivendi Universal and Blizzard more than anything else. Free Games that are good would kill them.
Why, exactly, does the purpose of supporting a game/company need to be to hurt and kill another?
Even if you hate them personally, or they (or their parent company, more likely) do nasty things sometimes, admit it- Blizzard makes kickass games that LOTS of people love. Starcraft is 5 years old, and yet there's still around 10,000 people playing it on Battle.net at any given time.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Starcraft Battle Chest: $20
Diablo II: $20 each for the main game and expansion.
Warcraft II: $11.99
Battle.net: Completely free.
Yep, they're sure being greedy alright.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
So you're saying that games without monthly fees are outdated? Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough monthly fees to pay already.
Theres dozens, theres a few that are pretty good, no they arent as good as Doom3(until ID releases the source) or Turbines engine, but they dont have to be, they just have to be good enough to make PS2 quality games.
Most of these games would look better than anything on the PS2. There is an open source game repository but are you willing to donate money to make these games good? Or will you complain about quality when you dont pay?
Well here are some engines.
Genesis3d
Nooface
WorldForge
Reality FactoryM
Ogre
Obsidian
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"Others steal toilet paper from their work place, others steal ideas from popular games. Toilet paper thiefs go to Hell, idea thiefs to sales charts, especially if they are as good as Blizzard with Warcraft"
Obviously, the game before Warcraft was Dune II from Westwood.
When should we expect to hear about Netcraft being sued?
Obviously, netcraft is Blizzard's next hit, wherein the few remaining human loyalists valiantly defend their networks from the hordes of Zerg viruses. Those survey folks are just confusing people.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
No, Blizzard was an extremely litigious and scammy company right from the start. I remember an interview in boot magazine (circa 1997, before they were bought by anyone) where people complained that their games uploaded tons of information about their computer to battle.net without their permission. Supposedly, it was a tactic to stop pirates. They later stopped doing it after being criticized by virtually everyone in the gaming community.
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.
No, this will kill FreeCraft, as bnetd was choked to death under the same situation.
Bnetd was a promising Battle.net clone server with additional capabilities that Battle.net did not provide. In the last moment of bnetd development, bnetd developers were implementing their *own* protocol which will enable multiple bnetd servers to communicate to each other. As a former Bnetd Free server administrator, I was anticipating for this feature but it just had to die out.
What Blizzard did with Bnetd project was simple. They just *threatened* to sue the main developers. Actually, they did not sue anybody. But the threat was enough for the developers to give up their projects because they were not legal experts, nor did they have enough money to hire lawyers.
Did they do anything wrong? Absolutely not. Blizzard would have lost the case if both parties had gone to the court.
In fact, Blizzard could have participated in the Bnetd project and run their second-tier Battle.net servers with bnetd. That's the good thing with opern source. However, Blizzard just killed the project, thrasing all the efforts and achievements with it.
I am afraid the same thing will happen to the FreeCraft project. I haven't played it, but I am sure FreeCraft has something different or even enhanced from the original WarCraft. Does Blizzard have the right to kill these features too? I don't think so. If Blizzard wants its copyright respected, it must honor other's.
We run this game all the time, and here's how it goes. For this game to be worth anything you HAVE to own one of the WarCraft II cds. Then once you have one of the cds you use a tool for the game that extracts the maps, graphics, and scenarios from the WarCraft II cd and skins the game to make it look and play very much like the original WarCraft II. I don't see why Blizzard has a problem w/ this considering the original WarCraft II doesn't work in many of the windows operating systems, and people still have to buy the WarCraft II cds from Blizzard. So those people using unsupported operating systems gets to play, and Blizzard gets to sell more of it's game...how is this a problem.
Also this game adds a lot of features beyond WarCraft II. There are a few additions to the actual game, like the ability to pump out critters from farms, but they have also dropped the original warcraft II network system(that involved using ipx and then kali to emulate tcp/ip) and gone straight to tcp/ip. The game also allows more people for network play, from the original 8 to now 16 and the map size has gone from 256x256 up to a possible 2048x2048.
We tried for quite a while to get WarCraft II working on bootable dos cds so that we could run our operating systems of choice and then boot up a cd to play warcraft, but dos netcard drivers suck. This is the only way we could easily set up WarCraft II for network play, and yes we own many copys of WarCraft II and the expansions.
It's sad to see Blizzard attacking such a good program. I hope that the people behind freecraft just put their foot down, don't rename the damn thing and just keep doing what they do well and contribute more code to the project. If worse does come to worse though they could just rename the game and actually get some usable artwork. Either way, when Blizzard shutdown bnetd i said I would never buy another Blizzard product, and I haven't...now I'm to the point where I just want to take MY WarCraft II cd, make an iso, and put it up on kazaa or gnutella....which I think I'll go do.
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?
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Witch Covens around the world are in a state of confusion after receiving threating "Cease and Desist" letters from Blizzard's lawyers for their product known as "WitchCraft"(c) which may be confused with "StarCraft"(c) or "WarCraft"(c).
When a coven leader was asked how they planned to respond to the threat, she replied "We are split between a rare disease and swarms of insects, though a natural disaster at Blizzard headquarters is not out of the question. Oh, the lawyers won't be a problem, they work for for the same guy (putting hands to each side of her head to make a symbol of horns ) we do."
In other news, Blizzard's CEO mysteriously hired a n exorcist to make a house call. More details at 11.
I can't afford a sig!
You can still get the full source for a fairly recent version here (remove the space between freec and raft):n /f/freec raft/freecraft_1.18.orig.tar.gz
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/mai
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
I've been somewhat involved in the project for a month or so now so I have slightly more insight than the average person. As far as i can tell their is no fucking letter. This letter was sent to an Xdeveloper who has not shown it to anyone. This same Xdeveloper owns the freecraft domains and as soon as he wasn't involved with the project any longer he put them up for sale... hmmm
Its all bullshit, there probably is no fucking letter. Any other project would have debated this and they would have posted the letter as well, i personally watched them just quit without discussion and fucking everyone else who was working on the project.
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...
I know every time I see one of these these lumbering down the road I get confused and think maybe its a roving Blizzard expo, or promotional thing for the next installment of the tired ol' RTS genre.
I wish Blizzard et al would go after Starcraft RV too to protect me and all the other mindless drone comsumers from the risk of confusing two obviously different products with each other... what about Mastercraft boats, Chris*Craft boats, etc? Blizzard sure has a lot of work to do, I'm glad they are looking out for us easily confused consumers.
On a serious note, I think I'll stop buying Blizzard products all together. My entertainment dollars will go to a company with less intellectual property fascists on staff.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
In a short press statement, Blizzard also announced that they had sent a cease and desist order to all American airlines, requesting that they no longer refer to their vehicles as "Aircraft", but recommended that they use the term "fossil fuel powered heavier than air flying machine" instead.
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.