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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."
These are Summer Olympics, that game is called "Snow Day". How could it be a copy?
they are not the same! that is some other website you are looking at! we pushed those flash games into the swamps! *coughlawsuitcough*
Knockoffs from China... What next? Lies from the WhiteHouse?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.
The are not knockoffs, they are the same games but with the resources changed. Have you played them or even looked at them properly?
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.
It's not a clone, i.e. they did not see the original and thought "Hey, we can make something like that".
It's a byte-perfect copy of many of the elements in the game, sound and graphics. So it really is a copyright violation.
It's simply re-skinning some elements and publishing it as your own. Like taking Windows, make the default background red, and selling it as your own operating system.
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).
Sound, better movement (both character and ice blocks), rankings.
Furthermore you seem never to run out of time in the copy. I hate games that try their best to make you win.
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.
Follow the link given in the Summary and then read what was written by the original author of the game.
Seriously RTFA.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
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.
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
i wonder if the website is being routed through their knocked-off copies of cisco equipment too?
i'm just waiting to find out that their athletes are clones of americans, but with cheaper parts and crappy build quality, that say strange things due to mis-translation of the manuals.
Why is the character in the Chinese version 'Fighting winter' by making the clouds snow?
Disregard that the games is similar. The reality is that the music, the clouds, the ice cubes, etc were STOLEN straight out from it. Not a bit changed. This is akin to somebody lifting 100 pages out of 120 page book. Copyright is designed to prevent just that. How did you get modded up?
If you actually read the article, he downloaded the swf of their game, and it still pointed to sound files that are used in his version but not in the Olympics version.
He also mentions that the Olympics site contains games very similar to those wonderful Ferry Halim games from www.orisinal.com - of course, they might be licensed from him. Anyone asked Ferry?
Any lawyers out there fancy taking on the Chinese Olympic Committee? Might not be a good idea...
Seriously, can noone else see this game as a hilariously ironic commentary on China's futile attempts to lower pollution in order to have blue skies for the Olympics?
Of course this: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8874472Economist article seems to not be loading right now, but they even have a blue sky monitoring scale which counts days without brutal amounts of smog, and are trying to figure out if they can somehow control the weather.
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?
It's not a clone. They decompiled the swf and changed some of the graphics. It's obvious from a hex dump. If you bothered to read TFA you would have known that.
The chances are that the Chinese will ignore the mail and the court claim.
Put up some copyrighted Olympic stuff to the advantage of your business, have a link explaining what you are doing.
If they sue in China: ignore them.
If they sue in your home country then join your court claim to theirs.
I'm sure no one would notice if we copy this game and change some graphics.
Slashdot: Where the sig outsmarts the comment
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.
Oh that's a near copy. But a tad different. So where to send the take down notices.
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.
If you RTFM, you'll see that they allegedly copied the SWF file and made minor tweaks to some of the sprites and wording, and of course the author of the game.
He even says he decompiled their game and found remnants of code that he reused from other games he made which have nothing to do with this one.
So it's a lot more than just a knock-off. It's an alleged derivitave work without permission.
-David
This is especially ironic since many of the Olympic Committees sue anyone using the word 'Olympic' or press governments for legislation protecting their precious name. For instance a few link samples:
US: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15360
CA: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1777/125/
UK: http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/2008/02/06/olympic-tussle-over-a-name/
Given the IOC and each local Olympic committee's approach trademark ownership, they should have no problem removing the game.
This is unlikely because, they will not treat other's work the same as they want theirs enforces. Hypocrisy at its finest.
That still makes no sense. Copyright does work like that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You have posted nearly half the comments to this article. All in defense of the Olympics. Was it you that developed this for them?
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.
From your link:
Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright lawThis is China. Not United States. If you post a relevant link to the Chinese copyright laws and their notion of fair use, that would be informative and interesting.
c++;
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?
Hey G, can you change the permissions on those two txt files. 403. Or, is that the point?
.
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?
Summation 2
goodluck trying to get china to do anything about it
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.
Hi All,
I agree that this game is an obvious copy however at least they went through the trouble of changing the characters and giving folks the choice of character which is "different" than the orginal game. Since the origainal game is FREE and the copied game is FREE nobody is losing or gaining here so I don't see a big problem with it.. There are MUCH bigger problems to worry about than copyrights... tell me you've never copied an image from google's image search for a website or powerpoint presentation!
(1) an idea they like and make an imitation of it? Shock, horror
(2) Unless they actually copied exact content then there's no copyright issue I can see, just lack of creativity.
Mod score +Five Insightful for the two individual concepts.
Mod score -TwelveBazillion Didn'tReadTheFuckingArticle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I hope there are no vulnerabilities in Flash.
Umm... dude, reread your two posts before that one. They're about as choc full of content as kdawson's head.
I hate printers.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
You obviously didnt RTFA.
They didnt strip out a lot of the unused resources.
Many of the original game files are still in there even when they arent used.
It doesnt take a genius to realise that many of the graphics and sounds are identical as well.
It appears like they did rewrite the code but its still a blatant copy.
They based it from the original swf, they didnt start from scratch.
Wow... seventy-nine posts, most of which attempt to debate the subtleties of Chinese copyright law, something about which none of the posters know anything.
Now we know why the Chinese government built the Great Firewall...
Three Squirrels
Nope. Ever heard of advertising revenue? How about non-free items included with the free ones? Ever hear of a company called Red Hat?
The nature of the copyrighted work is that it is trivial and has about a $20 valueThat's about the value of a music CD of your favorite band. Now, someone remind me, what is the fine for illegally redistributing copyrighted material?
and in a Chinese court the case would be thrown out.Would it?
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 funny thing is that the chinese source code looks cleaner than the original. If I had to choose a company by looking at those two samples I'd probably go for outsourcing in china.
:)
Smells like trouble for the US job market
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.
...pirates have no respect for copyright. The holders of copyrights apparently only respect their own.
They demand that others respect their copyrights and then turn around violate others. How many times have we seen stories where this happened? I've lost count.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
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.
errr... what the fuck?
Here's an idea... you go do something meaningful, you fucking wanker. Then come back and bitch. You make me sick.
This once again confirms that copyright only work one way... always TOWARDS large corporate interests.
Nevermind the vagueries of copyright law and its applicability to Chinese-hosted site, what matters is that this is likely to be a visible loss of face for the ROC Olympic Committee. Given the Chinese proclivity to punish moral crimes on a spectrum that ranges from extreme public humiliation to summary execution, I'm curious if the I-only-reused-16% developer will have 16% of his/her body mass removed for reuse after the execution van comes for a visit?
I think not...(*poof*)
If you want some schadenfreude check out these articles where that same proclivity for cheating cost the government billions due to tax deductions from faked business receipts.
The sad thing for China is that unless this culture changes, it's going to be a very long time before products of any kind coming from there will be accepted by the rest of the world with the same kind of lax inspection standards ones from the West enjoy. Thus, on a per-capita basis, China will never catch up.
You reap the whirlwind....
...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?
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.
Ok, true... but a single frame of a film can be copied under fair use while the film in its entirety cannot.
Your description of fair use is also incomplete (it's not just study or criticism, it can also be time-shifting, transient copying for certain purposes, backups of software and a few other things). I'm tired though, so I'll let someone else explain all this.
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
Has anyone though that maybe they got permission to make the copy
Not anyone who read the fucking article. I mean seriously, no one has mentioned it yet because the author of the original says:
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.
So like, no- they didn't get permission.
And runs on an older version of the flash plugin.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
What Flash de-compiler do you use? (Google search)
Closed source flash tools lists only one decompiler. The Open Source Flash Projects list has no decompilers.
Never mind, they seem to be using the same code and graphics. That's a blatant ripoff.
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
Wouldn't waste your breath, GP is a known troll.
I remember him threatening to beat up anyone who bought an iPhone, then denied that he was morally wrong to do so.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just an added thought to you question:
What's the possibility that two different programmers who presumably speak different languages working independently and exclusive of one another,I find it absolutely hilarious when Americans get all upset about other countries not following trade agreements.
What goes around comes around.
No there ARE graphics that are the same. The "power up" bar is exactly the same and behaves the same way, as is the piece of ice it throws as an example.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Quantum, I think you forgot to log out and post anonymously before trolling, or perhaps you have some sort of split personality. Please explain what you're talking about.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Hey asshole...nobody cares WTF you did....NOBODY> The author here is clearly having his work ripped off and deserves compensation. You on the other hand dont deserve anything but a good ass kicking you stupid fuck. OH and unless you Bill fucking Gates you havent done shit...you little punk kid....in 15-20 years you will still be working at McDonalds...that does not count as feeding millions. FUCKTARD
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
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.
Veering Further OffTopic -1
Sunday Afternoon -1
Bonus rantiness modifier -1
---
I would find it more hilarious if it wasn't so culturally imperialistic.
Americans:
"We do it our way. They do it their way. Their way gives them an advantage so it must be a subsidy. They will have to do it our way.
Yes, as the de-facto world government, we would like foreigners in their own coutries to do things our way. It's the American Way."
The American way: auction to the highest bidder, and winner take all.
The Canadian way: set fees
Watch out, Canadians! The current government is experimenting with auctioning things (radio spectrum?) so they can get along better with their American buddies. Can stumpage auctions be far behind?
---
Factoid 'o the day: Buttons spelled backwards is "SnotTub"
Specifically on the abortions. Also if they didnt force a 1 child per family system people would starve, i dont aprove of the abortions (if they happen, i thought they used economic sanctions), but better to kill one fetus than to have the child starve when the population booms. and has hundreds of other draconian policies to protect its power structure and closed society. You think it's going to give a damn about a global warming game? They don't and won't. Now thats what im worried about, not a crappy flash game, but unfotunatly the same argument can be applied to America.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Hm.. let's select a portion of the code you posted:
From China:
bonus_mc.bonusPtsTXT.text = score;
bonus_mc.bonusCtTXT.text = "X" + _loc5.length;
bonus_mc._alpha = 100;
bonus_mc._x = ice_mc._x;
bonus_mc._y = ice_mc._y;
From the other one:
bonus_mc.bonusCtTXT.text = "BONUS X " + cloudCount;
bonus_mc.bonusPtsTXT.text = cloudCount * 100;
score = score + cloudCount * (cloudCount * 10);
bonus_mc._x = xpos;
bonus_mc._alpha = 100;
bonus_mc._y = ypos;
Yeah, you're right, they aren't even close. If I got this in a CS class, I would fail someone.
Why would you bother ripping off the code? Any decent Flash jockey could re-write this game in an hour or two. However, any low-paid, entry-level programmer in another country could just take the code and decide no one will notice.
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.
Absolutely! Heck, there was an article submitted to Firehose just a day or two ago, about an Atari Game programmer's blog, where he got the job at Atari by coding from scratch a Centipede clone. He redesigned the graphics, and coded the entire game without ever seeing the original code, and while learning how to code. That was STILL considered copyright infringement.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Remember, you can't copyright the rules of a game - not even in the US of A.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
As long as you change the elements that are copyrightable (images, music, etc.), everything else is fair game. The gameplay can be the exact same.
If there were no copyright, copyleft wouldn't be necessary. If somebody were to try to take a Free program proprietary in a world without copyright, someone else would disassemble it, comment it, and post it to some comp.sources group.
But the record industry is a different matter entirely. Music publishers have successfully sued people for accidentally copying a couple bars from a proprietary song into their own songs. The precedent set by cases such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton ends up having a chilling effect on composers. It is possible to avoid reading proprietary computer programs so that you don't taint yourself with access to a work, but it's much more difficult to avoid listening to the proprietary music that a retail store plays.
You keep repeating that title. You're talking about Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., 672 F.2d 607 (7th Cir. 1982). The First Circuit looked at a similar case, Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc., and found the opposite: a process was not subject to copyright. This caused a split between circuits, which the Supreme Court resolved in Lotus v. Borland, 516 U.S. 233 (1995). Does Lotus, which was decided later in a higher court, overturn the precedent of Atari?
And does anybody know of parallel cases under Chinese law?
No, but you can copy artwork, sound and source code, all of which was blatantly stolen.
Again. RTFA.
It would matter... why? Raw assertion isn't all that useful on its own.
BTW, I believe the formerly-open tool I used to use (and may still have a pre-relicensing copy around somewhere) became the commercial product KineticFusion, which appears to have been sold to QMeCom and folded into their product line... somewhere.
"This is China. Not United States."
This is the official Olympic website for the Beijing Olympics. Therefore, isn't the International Olympic Committee the one that is truly responsible? I'm not sure here. This is kind if confusing. Is the IOC, who sanctions the creation of that website for promoting the summer games, responsible for possible copyright infringement or the Chinese government? The IOC seems to act like rabid dogs against anyone that is illegally using any Olympic graphic, logo, video, and even blogging about events, even the athletes!
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Here's the relevant clause of the Berne Covention:
Since they don't exactly give their own nationals very much in the way of individual copyright protection, the use of a foreigner's material is no more protected than their own people's - in other words, no protection: This is legal under the Berne Convention.Since they are giving his material the same protection they would give works by their own people ("if the gov't want to use it, they can by fiat or emminent domain"), they can copy all they want for any official Chinese agency. Not only is it not "theft" (remember - even member nations don't regard copyright infringement as theft), its legal.
Also, instead of just reading the article, try both of the games. The chinese version plays smoother.
Too many posters are going down the "copyright fair use" track, which is totally irrelevant to the discussion. Yes, the music and images, and *some* of the code are protected - but not for public use in China by the government or its' designates.
Also, under chinese law, he has no claim anyway, even if it was a patent or trademark infringement instead of copyright. He has to be in a minority partnership with a chinese agent/business.whatever or he simply can't do business under chinese law. Only businesses which are either majority or completely owned by chinese nationals are legal in China. - so he has no standing for damages.
"No cake for you, round-eyes!"
You are right, having the same rules is not a copyright infringement in itself. But in this case it's evidence that they copied the code of the original game verbatim and that is copyright infringement.
And under the Berne Convention, they only have to give foreign works the same level of protection they give works by their own nationals. In other words, the Chinese government or its' designates are free to copy code, images, and the song of foreigners to the same extent they would with their own people. In other words, they can copy whatever they want and still be in compliance.
Each of those files is protected by copyright. The Olympics version has copied 100% of icecube, 100% of cloud, 100% of splash sound, etc. That's not fair use.
How come you're making a distinction between art (media files) and code? Why is one an asset and not the other?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Yep, fuck them Chinese and their ripped-off gunpowder, umbrellas, kites, compasses, etc...
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Either you're being deliberately misleading or you're plain stupid. Given your other comments elsewhere, I'm guessing the latter. The conversation went like this:
QuantumG: Copyright doesn't work like that.
You: Oh? Why not?
QuantumG: Bad summary.
You: Copyright does work like that.
QuantumG: Like what? What are you talking about? If you want to have a conversation, state your freakin' opinion already.
Me: (To QuantumG) Umm... dude, reread your two posts before that one. They're about as choc full of content as kdawson's head.
My comment to QuantumG was referring to his first two posts, the second of which did not even contain a full sentence. I shouldn't have bothered jumping in, because the argument between the two of you had all the skillful intellectual swordplay that I would expect to see between two kids with plastic spades in a sandpit.
I don't know why you feel the need to jump in and defend him, but I think the only conclusion I can come to here is that you are just plain retarded. Not that that's a bad thing, there are great institutions to provide the kind of care and support that special people like you need. Don't feel bad, downs syndrome isn't the handicap it used to be.
I hate printers.
But as was I reading the posts and reloaded the link it appears to be redirected to the main page now. /. FTW?
qz
.SWF is the container for the Flash application. The code contained within remains the same. Have you ever programmed using Flash?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Code can also be a personal and unique creation. For that matter, drawings can be just as dry as dry code.[/trollfood]
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Here's an idea: why don't you bugger off and die. You added nothing to the discussion, and merely made things more confusing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Reconciliation is down the hall, room 2A. This is abuse.
I hate printers.
I'm certainly no expert on international IP law, which was why I made no comment about the legality either way.
I just think it's friggin' lame to not even bother to update the game logic enough so that the game is coherent.
They say the goal is blue sky. When I saw the snowing clouds, I wasted a lot of time trying to shoot them -- naturally assuming they were the next step in the game (maybe they require 2 or 3 hits to zap them?).
But no, they were just snowing because... it's a snow day.
Copyright does not cover game mechanics, only presentation. The only part of a game you can "steal" are its art and music resources. No part of intellectual property law covers the way a game plays, and both the copyright and patent doctrines are very, very clear on this point. If you want to catch the Chinese stealing games, go to a game portal. Cloning games isn't theft, even if it should be.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Right after we send our warships to the Pirate Bay right?
And the "cheap/lead-riddled garbage" you are talking about includes your harddrive, monitor and keyboard? You really think Americans are going to work for a few dollars a day in factories making the stuff we all take for granted? Well, we could have them, but we are too busy building a fence to keep hard workers out.
I've been to China, poverty here just doesn't compare. Especially with a population 3x our size, reality is far different from what American's are used to. I think we are better off preparing for much more of this (namely by focusing on open source) than saber rattling and going on about protectionism. In fact, you can look at China's own history to see the dangers of isolationism (in a cultural/economic sense).
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
.SWF is the container for the Flash application. The code contained within remains the same. Have you ever programmed using Flash?As I recall, the SWF file is a container containing various flash resources, including various types of image resources, button resources, font resources, audio resources, etc. One of the resource types consists of bytecode for the flash VM. This byte ccode can be extracted, edited and replaced, but it still is bytecode. As a source format, one can use a an assembly language, as is supported by flasm. However, the official Macromedia products use ActionScript as the language. That indeed is compiled to bytecode before being embedded in the .swf file. Looking into it, it looks like things may have changed some with Flash 9. I have no experience with that. My old flash 8 tools seem to have no problem with virtually all the flash files I've come across, indicating that flash 9 is not very popular yet.
Hmm... It looks like Flash 9 uses the Taramin VM, a general VM for implementing ECMAscript. It apparently still uses bytecode, so getting ActionScript back from it should still require decompilation.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I want to jump on the content-void bandwagon! Come on, everyone, let's all try to get the last word while pointing out each parent's uselessness! Parrrr-tayyyy!
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Welcome aboard brother, welcome aboard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.