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Decision, EA: Judge Reverses Multimillion Dollar Award To Madden Dev
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "A federal judge overturned a jury's multimillion-dollar damage award to the programmer of the original John Madden Football video game on Wednesday, saying there was no evidence that his work was copied for seven years, without credit, by the marketer of later versions of the hugely successful game. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco spared Electronic Arts Inc. from nearly $4 million in damages, plus interest that could have exceeded $7 million. The jury verdict also could have led to larger damages against the company for later versions of the game, which reaped billions of dollars in revenues, if future juries found that those, too, had been lifted from the work of programmer Robin Antonick." Also at Kotaku.
C'mon it's not that big of deal, no need to call her down to the basement at this hour.
Judges rule on matters of law, juries on facts of the case. If it's overturned by a judge, that means there was some legal problem with the first trial.
Learn to love Alaska
Judges rule on matters of law, juries on facts of the case. If it's overturned by a judge, that means there was some legal problem with the first trial.
In this case, the jury made a finding, that the Judge ruled the jury could not reasonably have made.
The Jury was claiming finding the later editions of the game to be nearly identical ------ without the jury having been presented for side-by-side comparison as evidence
here's a link to the decision.
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ca/...
The part relevant to the discussion here starts on PDF page 8, line 26.
It appears that the developer's attorneys presented an expert witness who provided an opinion regarding the similarity of the games. However, they did not actually demonstrate the games to the jury, which would have allowed the jury to make a subjective determination for itself. The judge ruled that because the jury never actually saw the games, they did not have enough information to rule that the games were similar.
Anyway, the attorneys better hope they win on appeal or figure out how to settle (perhaps for no fee) --- otherwise, the developer's next lawsuit is one for malpractice.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Patents and Copyrights are for rich companies....not people.
As an afterthought, perhaps the developer's attorneys knew their suit wouldn't stand up to a side by side comparison, informed their client that their only chance was to wing it with an expert (dime a dozen at $1000/hr), and hope for the best. In that case, the attorneys are home free. But ... that seems pretty far fetched.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
What a mess they are, and always will be.
It seems to be more like a dispute between developer and employer.
EA owned the rights to the game; they had signed with the programmer, an agreement for the developer to be compensated by royalties for the first edition.
For the second/third/later years editions, they claimed to have paid a team of developers to rewrite the software from scratch, so they could get out of having to pay royalties for future versions.
I'm sure from EA's point of view --- the millions of dollars in sales of later editions of the game were not attributable to the work of the programmer of the first edition or any individual software developer, but the valuable brand name they developed for their company and the product in partnership with Madden, and EA's fan base.
That sounds like a bad ruling. If the expert was right, then the jury was right. If the expert was wrong, then the defense should have shown them side-by-side to show the differences. Either way, the subsequent judges shouldn't be ruling on the facts unless the defense tried to compare the games, but the lower judge improperly excluded it.
A read of the opinion you linked to, and I think the appeal was wrong. The appellant judge should have ruled that the expert opinion on the similarity of the games be inadmissable, and return the case to the lower court for a re-hearing. Given the testimony (allowed at the time) that the games were identical, and without anything to contradict it, the jury ruled they were identical. Overturning the entire case because one piece of testimony was given improperly should result in a re-trial, not an overturn. If the plaintiff were told that witness was excluded for that reason, he could have proven his point another way. That the lower court made an error in allowing it doesn't change the facts.
Learn to love Alaska
" they had signed with the programmer, an agreement for the developer to be compensated by royalties for the first edition and any derivative works"
...."it depends on what your definition of 'is' is..."
FTFY
The fact that a jury already found his claim valid, and he is only asking for compensation from the first few editions of Madden (not all versions up to current gen), makes me think he probably is due compensation.
But, you now how lawyers are. I am sure the EA lawyers can prove that the sky is green.
wow, thx for the link about some of the history about Visicalc! Didn't realize Mitch Kapor wrote VisiPlot and Visitrend, then left to found Lotus (of Lotus 123 fame)
I disagree on this one.
Let's take a car analogy.
If I bring suit because you hit my car and drove off, then bring a witness who says you hit my car and drove off, and you do jack+shit in the case only to claim in a post-verdict motion that I didn't provide photographs of my car in support of my case, you will get laughed out of court.
Unless you're EA. The judge may have thought that the judgement was high, but a jury found that the preponderance of the evidence supported the plaintiff's claim. Remember, that burden is a greater than 50% chance that the plaintiff's claim is true. Sure, showing the games might help show that, but an expert witness who has made a deep inspection of the games in question can determine if the underlying mechanics of scoring, play selection, and player rating are derivative, without getting bamboozled by 16-bit graphics.
In this case, the staggering move is the absolute lack of source code. Sheesh, people. Just subpoena the source. Oh, it's not available? How about expert analysis determining the algorithmic similarity? Oh, surprise, here we are.
We need more judges who want to learn to code. The rest should sit the fuck back and stop screwing things up.
No. This is the original judge overturning a jury determination. It is a legal determination, but he's not ruling on the law. I'm pretty sure there isn't any case law requiring side-by-side game demos in order to make a determination of infringement/contract-breach in the presence of analysis-based expert testimony for one party and thumb-up-ass rebuttal from the other.
This is blazing new (and stupid) ground.
[...] also there is always the chance that the other party will run out of money and give up. Being a civil case this is fair game.
No, as always, a "deep pockets" win is not a fair game, it is dirty pool.
I used to be a huge fan of the Madden series up until a year or few before they stopped building a PC version (used to have loads of fun playing online with that terrible little java based matchmaker before they broke everything and made matchmaking built-in).
I also used to work at EA around this time, and even beta tested the first Madden PS2 release (though, not a single bug I reported was fixed).
I used to be given these weird little tasks (instead of manning the phones like I was supposed to) where I would have to, say, go set up a console in the board room so the C*Os could check out the stuff the slaves were churning out. One of those times, and I can't remember what I was doing, I got to talking with one of the engineers about Madden because I noticed he had a copy of all the old console versions up on his shelf. I had pointed out the versions I used to have (going back to SNES) and he made a comment about how "today's versions have nothing in common with those old relics."
This little anecdote doesn't really have a point, but an interesting recollection from a former life of mine.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
It's good to see that if I've got enough cash and I ever break the law, all I need to do is refuse to show an "expert witness" is wrong - it's far easier to just find a convenient judge to rule that since I didn't present any evidence, they jury's verdict should be overturned. *facepalm*
Welcome to America, where you can have all the justice* you can afford.
* Dictionaries are being rewritten as we speak.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On top of voluminous case the, the statute requires that the plaintiff show evidence that the copyrighted source code is the same. What is at issue is not the general concept of the game, but the source code.
Plaintiff presented no evidence at all that the source was copied. Therefore as a matter of law, the defense prevails. It's upto a jury to determine if the evidence is "good enough" . Under the law, it's up to the judge to rule when no evidence eas presented, and that's what happened in this case.
Plaintiff may or may not be right, but his attorneys presented no evidence that he was right - that his source code was copied.
They were presented evidence that they were sufficiently similar to meet the legal standard. But the judge retro-actively (and essentially secretly) excluded that evidence without warning, then appointed himself jury of the evidence and re-tried it with himself as judge, laywer, and jury.
That's why I disagree with the finding.
Learn to love Alaska
I might agree somewhat with your conclusions if plaintiff properly attempted to get the source through discovery and EA didn't produce it. As far as I know, EA provided the source to plaintiff and plaintiff decided they didn't want the jury to see it. Perhaps it's written in an entirely different language.
If the source was copied, an expert should be able to SHOW evidence of that to the jury using techniques as simple as "strings". It sounds like the expert simply declared that he thought it was copied, rather than showing WHY he thought that and letting the jury decide.
There are two kinds of witnesses, material witnesses and expert witnesses.
Material witnesses saw, heard, or found something. Expert witnesses explain what someone else saw, heard, or found.
In other words, material wwitnesses provide evidence. Expert witnesses explain evidence.
This isn't my opinion, this has been law since 1782, when Smeaton explained the silt in Wells Harbour.
In this case, he wasn't called as a material witness. The PLAINTIFF decided he was an expert witness, not a material witness. In other words it was the PLAINTIFF who said he was there to explain evidence, not provide evidence. You'll note he was paid handsomely for his services. If a material witness is paid, that's called bribery and it's punishable by 15 years prison under 18 USC 201. So which is it? Was the witness paid to testify as evidence, which makes the plaintiff guilty of bribery, or was he an expert witness, paid to explain independently existing evidence? You can't have it both ways.
He did not in fact explain any evidence brought before the jury, so either a) there is no evidence or b) his testimonial evidence is the result of felony bribery. Believe whichever you wish.
You mentioned fingerprints and bloody clothes as evidence. You'll notice a fingerprint examiner points to poster-sized copies of the fingerprints, showing the jury "this part matches, and this part, and this part." Then the jury can take the fingerprints into deliberations with them. The jury decides if they agree that the prints match. It's the fingerprints that are evidence, not the examiner's opinion. The examiners opinion is an opinion ABOUT the evidence. That's where this case fell down. The plaintiff didn't bring any evidence for the jury to see, they just paid someone to give an opinion. If that opinion were based on something other than getting paid, the plaintiff's lawyer should have brought that something into court for the jury to see.