Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content

Posted by kdawson on from the do-as-I-say dept.

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."

4 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bullshit. by RenHoek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Probably off-topic but what the hell... by Harold+Halloway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Fair use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Which is 16% of the original work, and the majority of that is the song which was used in neither the original work, nor the derivative. Wrong. Clearly, you have no idea what "fair use" is. You should look it up.

    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.

  4. Re:Copyright doesn't work like that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?