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."
These are Summer Olympics, that game is called "Snow Day". How could it be a copy?
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.
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).
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Hey G, can you change the permissions on those two txt files. 403. Or, is that the point?
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Decompilers are few and hard to come by (and one which was open source years ago has gone closed... though some of us still have copies of the OSS code), but flash disassemblers are plentiful. Folks may have a pre-license-change copy of the Free decompiler that went closed (sorry, don't remember the name, would have to check the hard drive on a separate machine that's turned off right now to find it), or they may be using a disassembler and describing it badly. Does it matter?
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.
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.
Remember, you can't copyright the rules of a game - not even in the US of A.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
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!"