Slashdot Mirror
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."
Unfortunately, if my assumption is true, since this is hosted in china there's not much the author can do. Eric Baumer has stolen more shit then this cinese olympic site, and as far as i know, hundreds of flash developers never got their money's worth from him, so the owner of snowday is outah luck too.
Even if you don't make a bit-for-bit copy of a game, you can still be liable for infringement. See also K.C. Munchkin. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, and whether a copy of that expression happens mechanically or at the hand of a person, the result is still either direct copyright infringement or the creation of derivitave work (which is also copyright infringement).
However, they clearly did decompile the original Flash file and just swapped a few (though not all) art resources. The clouds aren't suspiciously similar... they're the same. The snow, mechanic, ice art, launching art, health bar, etc aren't just similar, they're identical. The tuning seems to be the same, with the same launch times, etc.
It's true that the Chinese are known for copying things. And that flash games get copied a lot more than they should. But the olympic games are notorious for enforcing their copyrights over the slightest infraction by others. Having the Olympics casually steal other developer's work in this fashion seems extremely self-contradictory.
The ______ Agenda
Here ya go.. an extremely enlarged view of the icecube images used in both flashes
cubes.png
You can look hard you can see the gamma is a little different between them, but how are they not the same image?
Are you willing to tell me that these are images made by two different persons that just happen to make it look exactly the same?
A friend of my father-in-law's owned for many years a hotel in France called 'Hotel d'Olympique'. He still owns the hotel but it is no longer called that as he was sent a 'cease and desist'-type letter by the IOC.
FWIW I am not interested in the Beijing Olympics. Any lingering interest in the event has been soured by the appalling way that Chinese citizens have been treated by their government and, by extension, the IOC. No sports event in the world is worth evicting, beating, imprisoning and killing your own citizens for.
I'm calling bullshit on that... it uses the same fonts in many places, the graphic for the bar on the side is identical, pixel for pixel, as is the sprite for the clouds, among other things. And if you actually follow the link and RTFA, you'll see that there are several resources in the olympic edition that PROVE the link, including the splash screen for an earlier game made by the same person that he forgot to remove when he re-used the engine.
In a nutshell, "Fair use" means taking another's copyrighted material for academic or critical purposes. Instead, this (assumed) copyrighted material has been taken for neither of those purposes - instead, it is used to make a website more fun for kids.
And furthermore, 16% of a document/book/program likely goes far beyond fair use for even academic, scholarship, or critical use.
If these "copyrighted materials" had no value, then the developers should have simply included their own materials instead of someone else's content.
FURTHERMORE, to say that 16% of a book, movie, song, or other work is "small enough" to be considered fair use is simply ludicrous. The percentage of material is irrelevant to the copyright. A film is made of over 100,000 still images, yet a single 35mm photograph doesn't have 1/100,000th the copyright protection of a film.
Copyright works precisely like that. Maybe if you didn't shoot your mouth off so quick you would have noticed that the article is talking about theft of assets, not code. And then maybe if you knew anything about the history of copyright you wouldn't have tried to claim "fair use" on the art assets because of their byte counts. The inclusion of unused assets from the original demonstrates beyond any doubt that this whole game is a derivative work. There's a reason why legal reverse-engineering is done with two sets of engineers and a spec handoff.
This is good old-fashioned copyright infringement, with no ambiguity at all. And not only are you wrong, you're being a dick about it. What do you have against the author of the original game?
I mean, think about it -- in the Chinese game, your goal is to make the clouds *go away* so you have blue sky.
So, obviously, you hit them with ice cubes. And they go away?
NO, they start snowing on you.
The fact that they didn't even change that detail from the original game -- and it would have been a fairly trivial change! -- looks pretty bad to me.
Don't forget that copyright is ridiculous when it applies to the RIAA and MPAA, but it's incredibly important when it applies to flash games and the GPL.
This isn't the first set of blatant hypocrisy around these parts.
Interesting.
Comment 1: That's not how copyright works. No explanation of why.
Comment 2: Really? How so?
Comment 3: Bad summary.
Comment 4: Actually, copyright does work that way.
Comment 5 (your comment): I have nothing to say, but I'll try and take you down a peg or two by making an inane comment.
The bottom line is: you haven't actually contributed anything yourself. Reread your own comment - it's not exactly full of information - interest or insightful.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Let's try that argument out again, with a small difference:
Let's say the original show is "Firefly." I create a work called "CowboyNeal in Space." I shoot some of my own scenes with their own dialogue and characters, but for the most part "CowboyNeal in Space" still uses scenes, music, dialog, CG from "Firefly." Some of those copied scenes reference things that don't even exist based on the "CowboyNeal in Space" scenes (e.g. referring to the captain as "Malcolm Reynolds" instead of "CowboyNeal").
Am I gonna get the living #$*% sued out of me if I upload it to Youtube? Faster than Mal can say "shiny." I've done exactly what the website has done - taken an original work, tweaked a few things to make it fit my needs, forgotten to tweak some things causing continuity reasons (the presence of snow and ice cubes), and posted it.
The fact that "Firefly" was free to watch (when it did air on Fox; obviously watching it on DVD or Sci-Fi Channel meant you had to pay for them) doesn't mean it's okay to copy it. The value of the asset has nothing to do with whether it's protected by copyright. If you put it in the public domain and waive all copyright protection, it's free game. If you use a very small portion for limited academic purposes (or other fair use purposes), you shouldn't be sued, but it depends on the amount of the original work used and in what context. But free != public domain. Unfortunately the internets propagate this myth.
Until someone stands up to the Chinese and hands down some pretty serious penalties for this sort of behavior, this ripoff bullshit is going to continue. Let's see what would happen: China would refuse to send us cheap/lead-riddled garbage to sell at WalMart, we'd actually have to fire up some shuttered American factories to manufacture what they're no longer sending us, people would have to actually go to work...How could this be a bad thing? Personally, I don't think any of the emasculated world leaders could pull this off. This includes Hillary. We'll leave the discussion of whether she falls into the emasculated camp for another day.
Odd that the variable names are the same in both scripts. What's the possibility that two different programmers working independently and exclusive of one another, would come up with the same abbreviated variable names for the same functions and same elements in two games that appeared to be same and played the same? What are the odds?
Odd that the graphics are just about all the same in both games. The differences are trivial.
Looks more like someone purposefully made the scripts different, so that they could point and say "Lookee, it's different. See? It's not the same at all. Look at the code. Different." As if they knew ahead of time that there were potential copyright conflicts, and were trying to make an end run around copyright law.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
You can make accusations of hypocrisy when you have collected some statistics that show that the majority of Slashdot posters hold both the contradictory views you mention. Shouldn't be too hard to prove, if it's that blatant.
Right. Because when the IOC sues you, "they did it first" is a perfect defence.
Please name the posters that have demonstrated this hypocrisy. Fiding posts FROM DIFFERENT PEOPLE that are inconsistent is not unexpected when there are upwards of one million members.
Normally I would agree, but in this case it's the sincerest form of hypocrisy. Whatever corporation runs the olympics is notorious for it's heavy-handed approach to IP, so one would expect them to respect others' IP to the letter. That they don't is being quite hypocritical.
Don't forget that copyright is ridiculous when it applies to the RIAA and MPAA, but it's incredibly important when it applies to flash games and the GPL.
Right, because you can point me to a story where:
* The FSF has lobbied for laws tightening copyright laws or introducing new ones like the DMCA.
* A GPL copyright holder has sued individuals for distributing a GPL piece of software without source code over p2p (preferably for billions of dollars) (as opposed to a commercial company violating the GPL).
* A link to comments where the same person has claimed that copyright shouldn't exist when talking about the RIAA or MPAA, but also claimed that copyright should exist when talking about the GPL.
And see my other post - there's also the hypocrisy of the IOC to consider. Grandmothers sued by the RIAA usually haven't spent their time suing everyone else left right and centre about usages of words.
1) With the GPL - you will provide the source code so that others may customize the product, and send changes back the creator so the product can be improved.
You CAN'T take the source code, rip out the author's information and publish it as entirely your own.
2) The RIAA and MPAA have copyrights, and I'll acknowledge them. The problem I have with the AAs is the fact that they unfairly litigate and punish people using a broken law. Then they try to tell me that I can't copy my CD to my iPod without buying the song again. Oh, and goodness help me if I want to make an MP3 copy for my car's MP3 CD player! I'm not stealing their music and turning around at telling people that I made it.
So I guess what I'm saying is: Damn right. The dude who made that game and copyrighted it should at least *get credit* for writing it. I'd bet even a special thanks, or better yet *permission to use the game* would've been positive steps.
And screw the AAs. They're too busy trying to screw me for me to care what they want.
The cost for commercial use of a work, even if that work is freely provided for non-commercial use, is whatever price the author decides on for a differently-licensed copy. Look at the business model used by Trolltech -- do you think that the availability of a GPLed version of Qt makes the commercially-licensed one somehow less valuable? Likewise, if $20 is in fact the market value for use of a flash game on an average commercial web site (which I don't accept -- look at how much Disney pays for the games freely available for children to play on their websites), do you seriously think that most licensors will leave that price in place if the customer wishes to rebrand their product and remove all acknowledgements? Those changes cost money -- as acknowledgement is valuable in drumming up future business -- and this claim of a $20 market value is ludicrous on its face.
In this case, no pricing had been published or offered for commercial use -- but surely that information would have been available on request.
And Rupert Holmes ripped off Jimmy Buffet when he released the Piña Colada song...
C'mon there is a difference between stealing someones game and tweaking it _without license_ and writing a game that is somewhat similar in game play but completely different.
Dear Slashdot,
Please note that we are a major corporation or something. Laws exist to protect *OUR* copyrights and trademarks. As a major entity, we are allowed to do whatever the hell we want.
Thank you,
The IOC
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