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Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content
An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm."
Coca Cola did the same last year by ripping off "Ninja" by Joel Feitch (the guy behind Rathergood.com)
Two weeks later it was reported that Joel Feitch got well compensated for it (exact amounts were not disclosed as part of the agreement).
Read all about it here, with accompanied footage.
They actually re-used the code, not just copied it. From TFA:
I'd also like to point out that this is not just a clone of my game. They didn't see my game and set out to make a similar game. They actually stole my game. I'll say it again:
The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).
Ummm... what? Did you read the article? It specifically does exactly what you say it does not do. It includes screenshots to show that many of the graphics are stolen (pixel for pixel exactly the same, not an approximation). And it includes text from the creator of the original game, documenting how he reviewed their game code and discovered that it was completely stolen, not clean-roomed. From the article:
I'm pretty sure that if the game the Olympics is using contains sound files that are basically leftover stubs from his other games then that's pretty damning evidence.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Seems there are duplicate files in the SWF files of each. So although the code might be new, the content isn't completely.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I would suggest that is not sound legal advice. Maybe it would be, up until the bit where you say they should use Olympic copyrighted stuff. I think that would result in only the lawyers getting any money out of this.
It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?
You are looking at two different uses of the word 'copy', or rather, at two different levels of copying. Scrabulous copies the rules of Scrabble in a game developed by different people, and if there was a lawsuit for every internet game that - to put it mildly - took a great deal of inspiration from another, none of us would be able to move for the boxes full of litigation papers. This, on the other hand, is different, because it copies actual code and graphics from the original. You cannot legally protect game rules, but you can legally protect code and artwork.
There is also an irony issue here, in that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always gone after people even vaguely infringing *it's* copyright with all the teeth-baring viciousness of a rabid attack dog, so to have a website associated with them involved in blatant copyright infringement is more than a little amusing, but that takes a back seat to the difference between the actual legal issues of the two.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Here y'go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Trade-Related_Aspects_of_Intellectual_Property_Rights
Note that China is a participant in TRIPS (follow the link at the bottom t'see all participating countries). Software copyright is addressed (it is treated as a literary work under this agreement), and fair use is very limited.
The author of the 'orignal' claims that he has decompiled them and that the games use identical resources, even down to resources that the original author accidently left in but isn't actually used in the game.
If true that's beyond coincidence or imitation.
...it looks like the Sailing game (http://en.beijing2008.cn/funpage/game/sailing/index.shtml) is a ripoff of a game called Arctic Blue on orisinal.com (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/arctic.htm)
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
You don't decompile flash, FYI. It's code and play, no compilation needed. I've grep'd the sources for both, they're nearly identical.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.