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NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project

Posted by Soulskill on from the chasing-ghosts dept.

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.'"

11 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Play for free? by brainboyz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oh no, anyone can play Pac-Man for free!

    1. Re:Play for free? by fractoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You never made burgers or chips in Home Ec? You never made a spice rack or a dustpan in Manual Arts? You never wrote a version of Tetris or Space Invaders (or Pacman) when you were learning to program?

      We're monkeys. We learn by copying what others have done. When we fully understand what's already been done, we add our own little bit and then someone else copies us.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    2. Re:Play for free? by Eraesr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The whole thread that sprang from this post reeks of sadness. Look at all these nerds worship Google. Everyone just look at some AC's post a bit up the page. There's a copyright notification for NAMCO Bandai in the Google page. It makes it kind of obvious that Google licensed Pacman from NAMCO Bandai.

  2. what about the business majors? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:what about the business majors? by couchslug · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because business is war, only restrained by law, and free of morals. Conventional morality is a liability in business.

      The goal of business is profit, and if we would shape its behavior that must be done by imposing fear of punishment as a deterrent acts which we sufficiently disapprove. People respond to fear even if they are amoral. Be ready to inflict pain upon those you would have behave themselves.

      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
  3. Standing on the shoulders of giants. by WoollyMittens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/

    1. Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants. by EdIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. If Pac-Man was 3 or 4 years old and still sold on store shelves I would have infinitely more understanding and sympathy for the IP owners.

      Over 20 years old, during which you had the opportunity to profit from your work, I have no sympathy at all. In fact, it goes from sympathy to loathing for all the reasons you outlined.

    2. Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants. by westlake · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. If Pac-Man was 3 or 4 years old and still sold on store shelves I would have infinitely more understanding and sympathy for the IP owners.

      Pac-Man is 30 years old and still on the shelves.

      Google shopping returns 8,000 hits for licensed Pac-Man games and related products.

      Namco sells $3000 full-sized replica Pac-Man Arcade Games for the family room.

  4. "concern" by Josh+Triplett · · Score: 3, Insightful

    part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others

    Sounds like a good idea; they should learn to find intellectual property deeply concerning. These students already have, the hard way.

  5. Re:No, they don't make a good point. by hyphz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Do not see that as condescending by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Without patents, we wouldn't have a large portion of the innovation of today;

    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).