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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?
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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)
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