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NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project
An anonymous reader writes "The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It's one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT's educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but 'part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"
Oh no, anyone can play Pac-Man for free!
why aren't they being taught to respect the rights of others (fair use, etc)? why aren't they being taught that they can't have an indefinite free lunch in a free market? why aren't they being taught that broken business models propped up by government do everyone a disservice?
A vital part of human culture is that every generation of people can build upon the innovations of the previous. This is how we got from living in caves to reaching for the stars. Greedy corporations are systematically destroying this mechanism for their own personal gain. This must be stopped or our civilization will have no future. Lawrence Lessig dat a much better job at explaining this than I do: http://remix.lessig.org/
Sounds like a good idea; they should learn to find intellectual property deeply concerning. These students already have, the hard way.
There is another PACMAN in scratch if you search you'll find a dozen of them.
One of the key differences between those and 124Scratch's version is he used the original sprites from the game. Using those game sprites is a gray area when it comes to fair use (there are like 3 or so basic sprites, hard to copyright such little IP). But the real problem is trademark. NAMCO has a trademark on the PAC-MAN and the ghosts. They license those trademarks often. And in trademark it is protect it or lose it. Every poor student they ignore is a wedge for a some cheap ass software company to use as cover in a court case. Imagine every cheap cell phone with an identical rip-off of pac-man on it, except junky and hard to control. We expect the NAMCO PAC-MAN brand to be a certain quality (although the 3D ones pretty much sucked in terms of gameplay, so maybe not anymore).
Anyways trademark is there for a company to protect their brand. Establishing a brand costs money and maintaining it costs money, it has value and therefor should be protected. And as soon as a company no longer cares about their brand it ceases to be protected. It's a fairer system than the copyright system, in the sense that it actually ends. (copyright lasts like 10,000 years now?)
Well, I've taken a look at the site.
What it APPEARS has happened here is that NAMCO have _assumed_, based on the appearance of the site, that what's running on the site is actually a Java emulator running the Pac-Man ROM. I say that because a) the loading sequence that Scratch projects show when invoked via the web looks just like the startup for such a Java emulator, and b) there are still lots of pac-man games on the Scratch site that haven't been affected.
Alternatively, it could be the case that an evil-minded student rival reported the page to NAMCO. See, letting people infringe on your copyright just by turning a blind eye is ok; but if there's an actual paper trail proving that you _knew_ about the copyright infringement, you HAVE to take some legal action to enforce it - otherwise, your copyright can be overturned.
There is definitely something deeper here than what has been reported, and it may be worth reserving judgment until we know what it is.
That is merely an assertion of the "intellectual property" would-be landlords, in fact it is easily disproved: progress existed long before patents, in fact patents were present for something like the last 1% of recorded human history. And before you start talking about how fast that last bit developed, that has nothing whatsoever to do with patents but with easy access to and free exchange of information between scientists and inventors, the very thing that is now being restricted, combined with a critical mass of population density and transportation capabilities. Patents were simply inconsequential, having accounted for only a tiny part of the industrial output of that period, not to mention the fact that some industrial powers (I am looking at you USA) developed precisely because they ignored patents claimed by their former bosses (Britain in this case).
If the empires of the past had guarded their "intellectual" "property" so jealously as these money-grubbing little cunts, we'd all be shitting in open trenches today.
Speaking of Google, I googled for user 124scratch, and found more of his evil deeds. If you thought NAMCO's response was bad, wait until Nintendo finds out that their beloved Donkey Kong has been reimplemented (a.k.a. pilfered!) Nintendo is on par with Disney for being protective about their copyrights.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/124scratch/1217451
It's buggy to be sure, but it has the foundations of a very good port. Which in this case, is a bad thing.
I'll stick with Atari 2600 coding, where the graphics are so primitive that modern video game companies couldn't even recognize their game has been ported. Hopefully I'll have Crysis 2600 ready in time for Christmas.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Yes, troll. If Tux the Linux penguin was trademarked, and they made a game involving Tux, nobody would give a damn. Shut up and quit trying to be an ass.
<sig> </sig>
Which, according to the True Believers in the "free market" religion, can only be an all-encompassing, boundless, unstoppable and never satiated greed that burns within one's belly like a fire ...
Of course most scientific discoveries were made out of a desire to discover and understand, not even a single penny entering the equation at any time, other then to fund the research with. Most inventions were made because some difficulty or need annoyed the inventor, not because he wanted his thing featured at late night infomercials. In fact greed is a very poor motivator because it tends to lead to "inventions" whose only purpose is to somehow make money, irrespective if they actually work or have hidden side effects.
Yes, lets consider this company which supplies utterly useless crap, "demand" for which is manufactured wholesale by attempting to brainwash the unsuspecting dupes that "jewelery" will somehow improve their self-esteem or if they do not get it, they will be seen as "lesser" by their peers. The term "parasites" comes to mind.
Given that you equate "motivation" with greed and the crap peddled on the late-night infomercials with "inventions" and "progress", further discussion is likely to be a waste of time.
The fact that the "intellectual property" crowd has not yet achieved their desired goals completely does not mean that they are not in the process of doing so. With every 100+ year copyright the field of possible gaming ideas that are not covered narrows since there is a finite number of fundamental variations on the interaction with a game and claims of "significant similarities" become more and more viable to pursue the "derivative works" tithe collection strategy.
You clearly do not grasp the scope of the copyright. Any work even remotely similar can be attempted to be acquired by a mega-corp via claims of it being somehow "derivative" (subject to wholly subjective and utterly whimsical since no scientific formulae exist for this - and highly bribe sensitive - opinion of a judge) and no indy studio is going to withstand a multi-million legal assault by a Sony, a Viacom or an Electronic Arts. The only reason these two-bit gaming productions are not molested is precisely because they are precisely that, beneath the contempt of these mega-corporations. Little cockroaches feeding on the crumbs that fell unnoticed from the feast table.
You defeat your own arguments. Disneys of the world are doing quite fine, thank you, by ever expanding their control over the popular culture and by acquiring rights in perpetuity to anything that can be a base for further creations, in fact these very children stories are also being acquired by the likes of Disney for their "portfolios" of "intellectual property" and so they are the only ones to gain from it, to the detriment of the humanity at large.
Except, of course, the counter-rotating blades do nothing whatsoever for sparks as they are the result of friction that does not disappear magically because you got two, three or twenty blades (advanced saws use fluid coolants and lubricants for that) and fire-fighters use hydraulic-operated cutting jaws because they allow for precision cutting without exposing victims to flying bits of metal and rotating blades. Also, fire-departaments do not buy anything from infomercials. Ever. The target audience is the gullible public.
Late-night infomercials were the traditional domain of con-men and scammers since the first day they were broadcast. In fact the only serious product I could imagine being sold there would be a stamp with which you could stamp your forehead so it could proclaim to the world "I am a homo-idiotus, a specimen of a TV-stupefied 'consumer' whose wits were stillborn and whose gullibility is infinite. I buy stuff from infomercials! No brain within." That way we could easily tell at a glance whose "opinions" to disregard before he opens his mouth.
Come to think of it, the infomercial victim crowd is very likely composed of the same people who make all that email spam profitable. More of your kind of "innovation".