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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!
Google it!
Say, have NAMCOman eat the developing brains of college students while being chased by the ghosts of creativity. Then NAMCOman can eat a copy of the DMCA and kill off the creative spirits one by one.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
because some kids had recreated Pac-man from Scratch
Perhaps if this was the sentence the NAMCO lawyer had read, oh wait, things would have gone down the same.
part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"
And part of our collective foots should be up NAMCO's ass.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
If the empires of the past sought to control physical resources for their own gain, I don't think it takes too much imagination to see what the future holds for the information economy.
Also, I'm looking forward to all of the sci-fi book recommendations. Can I get them on my Kindle?
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.
It is sad that one of the oldest gaming companies in the world has become so shortsighted as to punish a group of students using as inspiration one of the best games ever made, by a bunch of students that want to honor "Pac-Man" by recreating it on Scratch. Not to sell it but to learn. Shame on you Namco (and your lawyers), too bad non of your games now are worth even pirating otherwise i would wish that to you.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
This page is a detailed history of Pac Man, including history and information on the different ghosts move algorithms and speed changes... I find it interesting... Read it while you can, its hosted on comcast.....
http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html
One down, about 1620 more to go.
Is there a parallel here between seeing a piece of art and recreating it in a new medium. That new piece is like the old piece but created with your flair and in your medium. Isn't this exactly the same, just with programming?
To me that did not sound condescending - think of it from the lawyers point of view, they were actually attempting to give what they saw as really good advice! I know it came off kind of arrogant but I don't think that's what they were going for.
It's really true that part of an education is in fact realizing that some people have IP that they will vigorously defend, and that you need to perhaps think more about creating something truly original in order to avoid this issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://kotaku.com/5315632/grand-theft-auto-and-pac+man-the-same
The trick is, don't make it look so similar? Since calling out the similarities doesn't seem to be a problem..
They are probably within their rights if the game is advertised as "pacman" because they will own a trademark to that. I don't know about the images of pacman; if they bothered to file these as a trademark too, they got a second leg to stand on.
Just rename the game as "Pingus Hunt", replace the pacman with a penguin, and the monsters with Bill G's, and no one can complain about their project.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
There really is a good lesson about intellectual property to learn here. No, it's not exactly the lesson Namco wants these students to learn, but in this overly litigious society, it's important for everyone getting an education in computer programming to learn about patents, copyrights, and trademarks, both in terms of how they work and in terms of what their limits are. After all, you can create a Pac-Man-like game without treading on Namco's turf, and programmers should take some time to learn just how to do this sort of thing.
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?)
Should include what's broken with current IP law, so that when you get out of school and become a member of the voting public you can be sure to ask you congressman to fix it. Or run for office and fix it yourself.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My sons primary school teacher sometimes organizes the kids into a game she calls pac man. Its basically Tag with kids organized on a grid in the playground. Its real pac man in real life. I hope they don't get sued.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Pill-Man
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It may infringe on trademarks if it used those...
But you can't copyright an idea. It's unfortunate that it appears to have been taken down
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The reason answers exist in the back of math textbooks is not for cheating. They are there so you can check your methods and determine if you are going about things the right way.
One of my first programming experiences was making a tic-tac-toe game on the TI-83 my high school gave me. I knew the game already, I knew how it was supposed to look and work, and therefore allowed to me to concentrate on the method only. I had the answer, I just needed to figure out how to get there.
Scratch is a learning tool, aimed at elementary students, perhaps going into high school bit. Maybe the students (assuming they're students) shouldn't have posted the project online, but I encourage them to rip off every game they need to until they're comfortable enough to make their own.
They are being a bunch of whiney crybabies because somebody copied an *IDEA* that they had... Ideas are not copyrightable.
If the person had actually copied any of Namco's original Pacman code to make the game, then there would be copyright infringement. But that doesn't seem to have happened here... somebody just recreated it (no pun intended) from scratch.
Admittedly, there is still the trademark issue of "Pac Man", and it's only on that premise that they should have any claim whatsoever, but I notice that they didn't go after the other projects on the site that use the trademarked term (and at least one of them even uses the trademarked logo).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Somewhere in the federally-declared disaster area I call an apartment, I have an old programming book that details remaking various arcade classics...on the Commodore 64. I'm not sure, but Pac-Man might have been among them. I guess times change.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Because I personally feel like retaliating. Thats bullshit NAMCO!!!
Boredom is bliss.
Modded as troll...oh well. I was just pointing out that making new things is a more enriching experience, but read it as you want then.
Ahem, whatever.
But even if you are creating a new game, general basic mechanics like jumping, firing, steering a ship, etc, all have logical results that are, as the example you provide, just needing to figure how to get there. Even if doing something complex like material systems for items, movement of particles, or dynamic lighting, you do know the ideal outcome, allowing to get there equally. That you might need to research how to achieve such result, is exactly the same. A game is after all, the combination of several subsystems working together.
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
Correct, and I did my share of imitating other's games when I was learning. However, I didn't use the same name as the original, and I didn't take copyrighted artwork or music from the originals.
Using the same name is a clear trademark violation, and NAMCO has to tell them to stop, or they risk losing their trademark here.
As far as copyright goes, you can't copyright the idea of a "be chased around a maze while gathering prizes, and have power-ups that sometimes let you chase the monsters" game. However, there are a lot of ways to express that idea in a game, and copyright protects NAMCO's particular expression. There's plenty of room left for someone to do a similar game, but different enough that it incorporates no protected elements. From the descriptions i've read from people who played it before it was taken down, they did not stray far at all from NAMCO's particular expression.
A damned good case can be made that learning how to imitate the idea of something without copying the expression is an important skill that any professional or serious programmer should learn.
Intern to troll the interwebs for "violations": $40
Information infrastructure to hand it to a lawyer without thinking about the consequences: $20,000,000
Lawyer to send a nasty letter: $400
Telling MIT how to teach: Priceless
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Dang guys, you can't be doing this, I am a devoted fan.
I love Tekken, Soul Calibur, Even Ridge racer is still kind of cool.
NOT COOL GUYS, NOT COOL!
I am still mad at SF4 x Tekken(and vice versa), But I can deal with it.
I dropped capcom for all the stupid crap they have done.
Don't go pissing off your fanbase or we will spend our money elsewhere.
Love it! So going to do this :P
While I always enjoy a good round of DMCA-abuse-bashing, it seems like parent is spot on, and that in this particular case, NAMCO is not overstepping the boundaries of decency. In other words, move on people, nothing to see here.
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>
I would argue yes, actually!
Because maybe I'm projecting here, but I think that in the heart of most computer programmer nerds is the memory of how they started programming. So automatically the kid gets some slack, just because most us immediately think "haha, that reminds me of the time I tried to make _____ in BASIC, god my version sucked. Taught me to program though...."
So while I have some trouble imagining a scenario where a budding programmer accidentally violates the GPL or something, I think at the very least that many slashdot readers would be more inclined to say "wow, smart cookie of a kid!" and kindly tell him/her what they did wrong, rather than send a threatening legal letter.
Or at least that's how I hope it would go down?
1) The non-commercial use of a trademark for educational purposes shall not invalidate said trademark
2) The limited use of copyrighted media in a classroom setting consisting of low resolution pictures or video and music clips less than 30 seconds in length for educational purposes shall not be construed as a violation of copyright
3) Any copyrighted book, magazine, DVD, or computer code, that has been out of print or removed from sale for at least 5 years may be duplicated
for non-commercial,educational, and/or archival purposes.
nowadays you need to pay them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually, I'm trying to make a serious point. IP laws don't just protect big, greedy, lazy corporations. They also protect everything under the various GPLs, the FreeBSD license, etc. That's the reason that Microsoft can't take Linux kernel 2.6.xx and call it theirs, or use it in a way that its license does not permit. You can't destroy one entity's copyright rights without damaging them for everyone.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Except Linux is OSS, so it's not possible to infringe its copyrights and licensing by studying or reimplementing it. So the question wouldn't exist.
Dilbert RSS feed
Except of course that the true purpose of all the "intellectual property", as the mega-corps and their paid-for politicos envision it, is to prevent exactly that and to ensure that no innovation is possible without it "belonging" to one of the "gate keepers" of all future progress
Come on. New ideas, new worlds (especially in gaming) are made all the time! Where are the scary boogity boo gatekeepers that blocked Doodle Jump? Or Braid?
I agree that the world would be better served by using the original term of copyright, to let old ideas have new life. But the long term grasp the huge companies have on said ideas simply strangles what they have; it simply does not preclude a vast world of new ideas from being born and seeming all the more fresh to a world that craves uniqueness and the unusual.
So I say, let Disney have the mouse for a billion trillion years. They can dance with that hoary skeleton until the end of time while the rest of the world moves past them, and they wonder why they in turn cannot come up with new ideas that work like Pixar can (yes I know technically Disney owns Pixar). And in time of course Disney gets it's own comeuppance, since it can no longer borrow liberally and freely from old treasured children's stories as they, too, are protected forever...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So automatically the kid gets some slack, just because most us immediately think "haha, that reminds me of the time I tried to make _____ in BASIC, god my version sucked. Taught me to program though...."
I'd like to think that would have been okay. But, once you start posting this stuff on the web, rather than just enjoy it yourself, or among friends, you're inviting a C&D.
So while I have some trouble imagining a scenario where a budding programmer accidentally violates the GPL or something,
Yeah, I wasn't trying to think of an actual, specific situation, just a hypothetical reversal of the situation.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
That's quite different from what you said before. Next time, make sure you're done foaming at the mouth before you post, ok?
<sig> </sig>
The point isn't whether these students could have ended up infringing Linux, but rather that copyright protection is a double-edged sword. Without it, idiots and their lawyers wouldn't be able to pester students whose goal is to learn and play, and Linus wouldn't be able to stop Microsoft from stealing his code.
IANAL, or an expert on the GPL, but let's just imagine the students had instead created a Linux distro in binary-only form, and didn't offer the source code as well. Or maybe they ripped off part of the kernel, mashed it into a binary and called it their own proprietary kernel, and relicensed it under new terms. Theoretically, I'm sure there's some way of constructing a contrived scenario that would illustrate the point.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Dear NAMCO,
You are irrelevant, and your Pac-man brand is dead (your bad, evolve and keep releasing, or die). No one is trying to rip you off, nor does anyone want to. Get over yourselves.
Sincerely,
Everyone
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Eh, considering that there are dozens of free alternatives besides this one, I'd say not really.
So, where does Pacman come into this then?
Instead of developing Pacman, think of your own character and game, if the thing is meant to be public at all. Find an artist who is desperate for exposure (read: all of them). Make something really unique instead of Just Another Pacman.
Don't advertise for people that would attack you. Just let them fade away since that is apparently what they wish.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That would only show complete lack of concern for the intellectual property of others...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You are violating the intellectual property rights of the first "first post" poster. Expect a C&D letter soon.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
AFAIK it's completely legal to copy old art, even in high quality, as long as there's no chance that the copy may be confused with the original, and you don't claim it to be painted by the original artist (e.g. you shouldn't put the original artist's signature on it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Other than the name, which is a trademark, not intellectual property, what are NAMCO claiming they own? the programming language, the program, presumably all the graphics, were all created by the students
It's a bit harder to infringe on Linux copyrights considering the whole shebang is licensed under the GPL.
would have liked to see the pacman game, the other I tried looked like the ones we made in public school.
Yup. My company finds this very useful. We use a binary only version of a modified Linux kernel, taking advantage of the clause in the GPL that says that you don't have to accept the licence since you haven't signed it.
The game the Scratch user 124scratch made used graphics ripped off the pacman roms. It is IP theft. Of course, it's questionable if NAMCO should have sent the take down notice, because it's quite silly; this scratch game is not gonna keep NAMCO from profiting from pacman.
What NAMCO should have done is to require 124scratch to put a copyright disclaimer and a link to NAMCO's pacman games' site, encouraging them to try to mimic other NAMCO games.
Wahhh why can't I copy stuff and put it out on the Internet for free?
You can code up pretty much any copyrighted works you'd like. Once you start becoming a distributor of that software then you run into other companies and their work and they can get pretty upset with you stealing something they've worked to cultivate and promote into a viable source of income. So yes, sure, you can code up space invaders and pacman and whatever when you're learning to code. Don't 1.) Try and distribute it and definitely don't 2.) Fail to acknowledge the sources. Rewriting a clone of something and then distributing it for free isn't "Fair Use", it's just dumb.
Anyway, you're not learning much about writing code from putting your code up on a website anyway, are you? If you want to do that maybe you should just take a few days, add a banana cream pie that lets "Cap-Nam" shoot lasers at the little ghosts or alter the terrain, some other random additions and modifications that change the game from being a "clone" to being a "-like", and there ya go. Learning how to copy things that exist is probably half the goodness of programming. The other half is dreaming up new ideas.
Recap: Code, yes. Distribute, no.
If you call it "Ghosts and pills", and don't use any of the original artwork, can they do anything at all?
I used scratch for a while when it first appeared but I abandoned it when I couldn't get some of scratch's features to work properly (some things work in the offline version, but once you upload them and play them from the web site they fail)
Here's my first attempt at a Pacman demo.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/darkmuse/9082
I did draw the maze and sprites myself though.
If Linux copyright owners sent a takedown notice to some students even if they were violating the GPL, I would think they were assholes too. Fortunately, most copyright violations of the GPL are handled amicably by the FSF and other groups, even when it's a large company violating the copyright.
http://questioncopyright.org/copyright_and_open_source
Dilbert RSS feed
Why not learn about IP and fair use at the same time. Change a couple of things around astheticaly and claim fair use. I realize this isn't the best way to handle it, but I'm a dick and this is how I would respond to assholes.
Check your facts:
http://scratch.mit.edu/users/124scratch
See what they've got on there. Basically pixel-for-pixel identical games from the arcade. They probably even used the original graphics/ROM's in order to get that "authentic". And they call them Pac-man or Donkey Kong. It's not the only one they've done and they call them all by their trademarked original names.
Welcome to real life, where if you directly steal other's work, distribute it, calling it by its original name, and get caught, you end up in trouble or at the very least with a cease-and-desist.
The kid can use it, they can make their own pet project, they can use the original graphics (hell, most programmers will substitute existing images in prototypes in order to get a feel for how it looks), but the second you start distributing it, it's no different to a school coursework which includes an MP3 of a chart hit (even historical), or a photographer's image without their permission, or huge excerpts verbatim from a still-in-print book. Yeah, a lot of people would just let it slide but NAMCO are well within their rights here, the kid didn't get sued or harsh punishment (just a "don't do that"), and if he'd had the brains to just call it a clone, not use only the words "Pac-man" in describing the game (even "Pac-man clone" would have been okay), and hadn't ripped-off graphics pixel-for-pixel, then nobody would care and it would be like the other 10 million Pac-man clones lining the web where people DID have the sense not to copy to this level of detail.
Nothing bad happened, nobody went to court, nobody demanded money (and NAMCO had to PAY to instruct their lawyer, don't forget), they just wanted the game taken off. It's happened a million times in the past, will continue to happen, and people KNOW it's not right.
I used to follow OpenTTD until they dismissed off-handly the fact that they were telling people to download a free, full copy of Transport Tycoon's graphics from an abandonware site in order to run their clone - and that was from one of the founding members. Disassembly of the original? No problem. Reliance on the original graphics? Great accuracy for me as a gamer, no problem. Pointing people to direct links to questionable abandonware sites for a file that can't be legally distributed, on the main wiki pages of the project and refusing to take them off while simultaneously chastising people for mentioning it on the forums? Just asking for trouble. Microprose does have a successor-in-interest somewhere and that attitude from some of the project leaders was just intolerable to me, so I stopped contributing. Who knows what else they've got inside their preciously-licensed and lovingly copyright-daubed code if they are just willing to infringe the author's copyright wholesale while pretending to maintain an air of respectability. I have original copies of TTD. Several years ago I made the code in TTD that verified the GRF file used was the original file because I had the DOS and Windows versions still sitting on a shelf. I used my CD to provide the original graphics and sound long before any "graphics replacement" projects existed. But I was disgusted by the attitude that you could just encourage users to download an absolutely, cast-iron, illegal copy that was required to run your clone project.
There's programming, there's cloning, there's even emulation (MAME is 100% legal don't forget), and then there's just outright copyright ignorance. This is the latter, and nobody got hurt, except NAMCO's legal budget.
You're joking, right?
For the record, I mostly run Debian-based systems, occasionally Gentoo or Red Hat. I've been meaning to play with Mandrake lately, but haven't gotten around to it. I also have a couple Solaris boxes I haven't lit up in a while.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Relative difficulty is not the point. It is certainly possible to infringe on the GPL, although the particular example of students hacking code would more likely be embraced rather than opposed. But I'm saying that the same copyright laws that protect Linux under GPL protect software other licensing schemes as well, whether we favor them or not. If we want others to respect the GPL and other OSS licenses, we should be prepared to respect their restrictive licenses as well.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Well no, I wasn't - what you said still seems like a completely different thing to me (and I still get the idea that you were looking for an argument). However, it was childish of me to call you a troll, swear at you, and accuse you of "foaming at the mouth", so I apologize for that. I'll try to stop being an ass.
<sig> </sig>
No worries, no harm done.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
And if I came off trollish, I didn't mean too. Sorry there.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
For copying her DNA!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The hard part comes at the end of the day when you have to explain why some of the kids ate some of the other kids.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Still bullshit.
Boredom is bliss.