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The History of Videogame Lawsuits

Posted by Zonk on from the litigious-industry dept.

AsiNisiMasa writes "1UP is running an interesting piece detailing the history of lawsuits in the gaming industry. It reveals a bit about Nintendo's old strong-arm tactics, the origin of the third party developer, Electronic Art's employee abuse, and of course plenty of violent games being 'linked' to violent behavior. Jack Thompson gets an entire page to himself." From the article: "To show their appreciation, Atari took Activision to court, claiming that the company didn't have the right to develop Atari games. Atari lost, and more companies decided to follow in Activision's footsteps, creating the concept of third-party developers. It was a defining moment for video games."

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. IP Lawsuits Suck... by cypher35 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As someone who has personally been sued by a gaming company over intelectual property, i would say that gameing companies tend to be WAY overprotective of their intelectual property... http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/ 0347222&tid=211&tid=123 I owned and operated a website devoted to hacking and modding console games such as Soul Calibur 2 and Dead or Alive. These mods did nothing but add to the longevity of their games. It doesn't take much to muscle someone around with our court system and ridiculous digital copyright laws... Chances are if you don't have enough money to fight back (like myself, being a college student) they will get their way regardless of weather or not they have a legitimate case against you. -cypher35 [ninjazombie.net]

    1. Re:IP Lawsuits Suck... by Scarletdown · · Score: 5, Interesting
      These mods did nothing but add to the longevity of their games


      Isn't longevity something the game publishers, for the most part, do not want? After all, how can they expect to sell you the same thing over again, repackaged with the eye candy changed around a bit, if you are still happily plugging away with the game's previous incarnation a half a year or more later?

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  2. Re:Atari also won against Sega by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There's a very interesting lawsuit in the article:
    Not long after Donkey Kong became a huge success in American arcades, MCA Universal sued Nintendo on the grounds that the barrel-chucking gorilla was a ripoff of their own hairy movie star, King Kong. [...] The game manufacturer's lawyer, Howard Lincoln [...] discovered that not only did Universal not own the rights to King Kong, they'd won a lawsuit years prior declaring that King Kong was actually public domain.
    I wonder how many toy manufacturers, burger chains, etc. have paid big marketing bucks to tie-in with the current Kong release, not realising that it's public domain? I wonder if any are cashing-in for free?