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Treading the Fuzzy Line Between Game Cloning and Theft
eldavojohn writes "Ars analyzes some knockoffs and near-knockoffs in the gaming world that led to problems with the original developers. Jenova Chen, creator of Flower and flOw, discusses how he feels about the clones made of his games. Chen reveals his true feelings about the takedown of Aquatica (a flOw knockoff): 'What bothers me the most is that because of my own overreaction, I might have created a lot of inconvenience to the creator of Aquatica and interrupted his game-making. He is clearly talented, and certainly a fan of flOw. I hope he can continue creating video games, but with his own design.' The article also notes the apparent similarities between Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games). Is that cloning or theft? Should clones be welcomed or abhorred?"
Starcraft is one example. I would rather play Starcraft than C&C.
at its finest. "This is plagiarism!!" No it's not, you tool, it's conversation. Your attitude is exactly what is wrong with the world copyright has built. You don't own that idea, it belongs to the ages.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Saints Row 2 (haven't tried the first) is actually much better and IMO more in line with the GTA philosophy than GTA IV. I was surprised how good it was. Bring on the clones. We don't have to play the crappy ones.
which is totally what she said
First, there's no theft. There could possibly be copyright infringement if somebody is using somebody else's graphics.
Second, there doesn't seem to be any copyright infringement, since as far as I can tell nothing is being copied. Copyright only applies to copies of the original material. Making your own graphics that look a lot like something else is not copyright infringement.
There could possibly be trademark infringement, but that's most definitely not theft.
And what's the big deal, anyway? For every successful game, there have always been a few clones.
Why did someone write Linux when Unix was already out there? Why was Mario created when there were already other platform games out there? It's going to get harder and harder to come out with original ideas, e.g. look at any game released in the last 10 years, you can count truly innovative ones on both hands. But yet there's still games that come out, using a tried and tested formula, that are better than the rest. If there was no cloning, we'd have very few new games coming out ever.
The reason is that no clone brings any innovation or evolution. Another problem is developers who confuse cloning and inspiration, thinking both equate the other. There are some who view any game inspired by theirs as a clone, but far more common are developers who straight off clone/plagiarize something and then claim it's inspired by as well as innovation blah blah, and it's not just game developers who are guilty of that. In fact, just look at development in various open source areas, and you'll see that they are more busy plagiarizing functionality and then spouting off some PR about innovation rather than actually engage in innovation. GIMP is one, the Linux project has a fair amount of it too. The various BSD's have also done this, but to a lesser extent.
The FSF may claim that it somehow fosters innovation, but that's disingenious at best. Innovation is, when you get down to the root of it, to say "Who cares if others think I'm wasting my time, I'll do this completely new thing". Plagiarization fosters laziness and incompetence.
First, it's copyright infringement, not theft. And no one can "steal" your idea because ideas cannot be owned.
Second, it's infringement if he infringed on your code, art work, or music. If not, it's not infringement.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"Is that cloning or theft? Should clones be welcomed or abhorred?"
Easy. Clones should be welcomed.
1) They put innovation pressure on the original, benefiting everybody.
2) They put price pressure on the original, benefiting everybody.
3) They may create a better platform, a better product than the original, benefiting everybody.
Everybody wins. Except when you look at the motivation to create original products in the first place. Will the clones lower the reward and make it less beneficial to be original?
Hardly.
1) A truly original and inovative product will take some time to clone -- there will be a lead, in which user base/fan base/multiplayer communities should create critical mass.
2) Playing it right, the original *will* have goodwill. In other words, all things being fairly equal, people will likely stay with the original.
3) Originality is a scale, not a binary concept. Games are more or less original. Per (2) above, clones will need to compete in originality just like their inspiration did. When each clone out of many tries to be a little more original than the next, they may arrive at a quite original game, per Darwin. This could happen even though they started off at a lower plateau of originality than the concept originator. Think StarCraft.
4) In this sense, everyone is (or must be) original to be relevant. Originality is not at risk.
I hope that didn't sound too confusing :-)
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
There's a difference between "never gets bored" and "easily amused".
You are welcome on my lawn.
There were plenty of scrolling non-platform games, e.g. Zaxxon and Defender. I'm pretty sure there were vertically scrolling Donkey Kong clones as well.
it becomes trivial to sort through all the crap out there and skim the sweet delicious cream from the top of the Intarwebz (ewwww....)
For many things it's not trivial. For instance, have you tried locating apps in the App Store lately? To say that it's tedious doesn't do it justice -- way way way too many choices that aren't relevant. I recently looked for a free painting program and after trying various forms of paint, draw, edit image etc I eventually had to use the term "sketch" to find what I was looking for. It was just dozens of pages of crap, many of which had nothing to do with painting / drawing. For my purposes these were synonyms yet to the search engine they were not. And yes I tried Google also, and again there were so many hits, many outdated, that finding "real" content was a problem. So many dupes that I couldn't easily tell what options I had.
As another example, commonly-used terms such as OpenOffice's Calc or Write -- try searching for those and see what you get. Or OO Draw. How about tips for MS Paint?
We need a semantic web because so many of the content is based on keywords which are either inexact or are also commonly used words. We need to be able to grep the web in a more efficient manner.