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How To Judge Legal Risk When Making a Game Clone?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"
By any chance are you the guy running PlanetMULE?
Even better, instead of just getting a lawyer, get a lawyer AND make original games! Sounds crazy, but seems to work for some...
Assassinate the copyright owners, then wait 70 years?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I sell FUD insurance. It's not clear now if you need it, but it would be very bad if you do turn out need it and don't have it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
No, they don't. Atari as a company ceased to exist in 1996. The name was picked up by Hasbro in 1998 and then by Infogrames in 2001, but apart from the name, logo and ownership of a truckload of copyrights the organization currently calling itself "Atari" has absolutely nothing in common with the company Nolan Bushnell founded back in 1972.
This isn't a question of Theseus' Ship sitting in the harbour at Athens and being slowly replaced board by board until there is nothing left of the original, it's more like Theseus taking his ship out to sea for a wild party, dousing it with gasoline and burning it to the waterline, only to have Menelaus build an entirely new ship in Sparta with the name "Thezeus" on the prow two years later and then sailing it to Mycenae and selling it to Agamemnon who turns it into an amusement park where people pay large sums of money to play on half-finished rides and be beaten with sticks when they complain.
The modern day Atari is the ship that Orestes built after termites destroyed that one. And it has trouble floating because he ran out of wood before the job was done. The Mycenaean QA department insists that the boat is good and that there is no need to patch it as any sinking problems are clearly the fault of the end users.
No, this is either TediousAnalogyGuy or PretentiousAnalogyGuy.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard