How long before this gets taken down for copyright infringement, how long before it's... you might say, Foxed!
Oh it's been a while since I've been able to use that term.
Are companies still agressively beating down any fan mod that dares even closely resemble their IP these days or do they turn a blind eye to it now? They're probably even more at risk when you take into account the fact there's just been an official remake of Goldeneye released for the Wii, companies don't like unnecessary competition.
I'd download it ASAP if it interests you and archive it if it's any good as it may not be available for long. I still have my copy of Alien Quake etc. somewhere in the depths of my file archives!
They can't, that's the point. They grow more than they can sell because it's such a competitive market, a farmer can't always guarantee he'll be the one who gets the deal with the stores, and if he isn't then his field of crops is just left to rot. There's any number of fields around here that end up like that (I live in rural Yorkshire).
If each farmer had a smaller yield, stores, particularly the big supermarkets, would have to shop around to more farmers, and because they'd not be able to pick and choose the farmers would get better prices.
I'm not sure what country you're in but quite a few EU countries end up with food just being left to waste, this is a particular problem in France where farming is heavily subsidised, such that farmers get paid to plant crops whether they have any hope of ever selling them or not.
Things would be much better if we only grew what we needed and there was more land left to naturalise as a result, but it's just not that way- hedges are removed to make farmer bigger fields easier, and crops are left to rot, it's quite sad.
"The pesticide is a seed coating? How frequently do bees come into contact with seeds that are planted?"
It'll be systemic, in that the plant absorbs it through it's life and any pest eating the plant gets a dose of it. The problem with these systemic insecticides is that they carry through even to the pollen, so Mr Bee plays around with the flower, gets some pollen on him, takes it back to his hive stuck to his legs and then you have pollen infected with systemic insecticide that kills the bees in the hive.
"Also, it's apparently used in the UK. Are only North American bees susceptible to this?"
No, Europe has the same problem with heavy bee decline.
"I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase food and crop yield."
Even if they do, is it necessary? Here in the UK we have farmers complaining about how crop prices have been forced lower and lower, so many complaining they can't afford to compete each year, we have fields of cabbages and so forth that are just left to rot. In my mind with this kind of evidence we have too much food, perhaps if farmers moved back to organic methods then they may get smaller yeilds but it'd push the prices up for them and yeah, the end customers will probably have to pay more too, but it's not like paying unsustainably low prices in the first place is a good thing, it just means folks will have to give up their chelsea tractors, or get a 40" TV instead of a 50". It aint going to be the end of the world. There's also many health concerns caused by pesticides, we're not immune to any effect from these pesticides, in larger doses they're just as harmful to us, we just don't get them in those doses from crops. The problem is, we don't know what effect small doses have in the longer term.
Interestingly I used to live in the south of the UK and we eventually moved up to Yorkshire, since moving up here my dogs have developed lumps, they're not cancerous but they're quite large all the same and oddly, all the dogs around here have grown lumps- this isn't something that happened to anyone's pets I knew down south, and the difference here is we're surrounded by more fields and the dogs run through the fields. I do wonder if perhaps pesticides are to blame, the lumps don't seem to hurt the dogs, but they are large- the size of a fist in some cases.
Despite all this, as someone who grows cacti in his spare time, I also know the flip side of it- amateur gardeners have lost access to a lot of pesticides over the years and that has led to immunity to the small range (Imidacloprid, Thiadacloprid) of insecticides that are available to amateur gardener amongst invasive species such as non-native Mealy Bugs and Red Spider Mites. As always though, the reason they've been removed for amateur use is due to abuse of farmers- there's a big difference spraying thousands of gallons of the stuff, to an amateur using half a pint to spray a few plants which are kept in a closed environment such as a greenhouse.
I don't really know what the answer is, large scale use of pesticides simply is not good, I think in many ways even GM foods are a better option, because at least you're not introducing poisons that kill things like bees, and have potentially harmful effects on people and pets. Current regulation seems to let farmers get away with murder, whilst not providing pesticides that amateurs could use to abolish invasive species in small quantities in a closed environment where they don't effect the outside world.
I think the only solution is a massive overhaul of regulation from the ground up, but companies like Bayer are massive, and seem to have a near worldwide control of national and international pesticide regulations. I was quite shocked to see a note from Bayer in a garden centre the other week withdrawing one of their named pesticides to be replaced with a new one that was based on the same mix, but had just been rebranded and the price increased- the bit that shocked me is that this meant their old product, was now illegal to use beca
West and North Yorkshire in my office. I asked around this morning where deliveries where the tracking data on tracked parcels people hadn't received were from and a few people said Kettering, Northants. and one said Milton Keynes, others didn't have any tracking details so it doesn't seem in at least some of these cases that there really is much of an excuse. We did have bad snow around here for a few days, but it was maybe 3 days out of a week the week before last.
I can certainly see why people who went for guaranteed delivery would be annoyed, they shouldn't really use that term if they can't fulfil it. It's the sort of term you should only really be using if you're using a courier that can cope with all weather conditions- i.e. have delivery vans either with snow tyres/snow chains, or have vehicles better adapted to off-road. Either that, or simply don't offer the service. If the road from the depot to a main road is too deep in snow it woudln't cost much in the grand scheme of things to just pay for a snow plow to clear the road. These services run just fine in places like the US/Canadian snow belt who get far worse, for far longer so it's not as if it's impossible to resolve, just that after 3 winters of this kind of weather the courier firms whose business fundamentally revolves around figuring out how to get to places still haven't planned for it it seems.
You wont have seen the 503s because they were being returned in response to the AJAX request issued by clicking the add to basket button on the Black Friday offers. If you tried to by any of the items and found yourself stuck indefinitely in a queue, or at least for a few minutes or more then it was because Amazon's Javascript wasn't setup to handle 503 responses from the server, and so just hung there with the queue animation, even though the reality is your request was never even processed.
I looked into it myself after my suspicions were aroused due to me and a colleague click spamming where the button was to click it as soon as the offer came up, and us getting stuck in queues, whilst our colleague being a bit dormant didn't click it until about 30 seconds after it appeared and got the item straight in her basket whilst we were supposedly queueing. That's when I cracked open Firebug and had a look under the hood at what was going on.
I've never really thought about it as a lottery until reading the GGPs post, but I guess he has a point, there may be a case for trading standards in this respect I guess because Amazon did say it was a first come first served sale, where it clearly was not- if for example there were 500 units of a product, and of the first 500 that click only 300 have their requests serviced, and 200 do not but get told they're in a queue when they're not, then that means others who click afterwards may get the items those should've got.
The system seemed a bit too easy to game for my liking too, if it weren't for the fact I'm one of the worlds greatest procrastinators, I'd have written a quick plugin to simply keep resubmitting the AJAX request until a proper response was received rather than a 503 error. I imagine that's in fact how some people did hoarde some of the top items so quickly, because it's fairly trivial to do.
Not sure what's going on about deliveries, but there's been enough people in the office complaining about having not received deliveries from Amazon, and it's not like we've had any snow here either since the week before last, it was all melted off by last Monday so if they are overdue there doesn't really seem to be an excuse now.
"It makes 100% clear concise sense when my point was that./'s groupthink is to bash EA, say EA sucks, and let's not buy EA. Fail #1."
Which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the thread or the article.
I don't have a problem with your point, I have a problem with the fact you're bitching and complaining at people about something that's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, or anything anyone in the thread said, and in that context, your post made no sense because it went off on such a wild tangent to the discussion.
Yeah, sorry, but what the fuck? Slashdot had a story about the "discovery" of ACO a few months back, there was a similar one a year or two prior also, now it's been "discovered" again? How can something from the 90s be "Next Generation". How many times do we have to have stories on ACO? It's been around so so long, it's taught in undergraduate AI classes across the world.
Perhaps Slashdot needs to create it's own ant inspired algorithm to handle submissions because at least ants probably wouldn't post a story about the same god damn thing all the time.
I'm just waiting for them to "discover" particle swam optimisation or similar so we can have stories discovering that every few months too.
Your post doesn't make a lot of sense, it sounds like a mindless rant.
You mention Dead Space as an excellent example of a game, and then state games should have multiplayer, yet Dead Space was excellent because it was a well crafted single player experience, precisely demonstrating that there's no point putting multiplayer in if it doesn't add anything to the game.
You talk about groupthink, yet that seems precisely what your post was, for example, I have no problem with EA, I think they're one of the better publishers out there now in that they at least dropped their DRM down to a point where it's far less problematic than the likes of Ubisoft or Valve use, they're one of the few studios churning out new IPs like Army of Two, Deadspace etc. also.
Regarding Gears of War 2 multiplayer that you like it that's fine, I certainly said there shouldn't be multiplayer, I merely said there should only be multiplayer if it fits the game and can be done properly. The Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty series are all fine examples of where multiplayer worked well, that doesn't mean competitive multiplayer made sense in games ranging from Bioshock 2 to Naughty Bear to Dead Rising 2 though where their multiplayer modes were dead in the water a very short time after release, and where it was obvious this was always going to be the case. Why waste resources on competitive multiplayer in these cases where it was always obvious they wouldn't provide the multiplayer experience IPs like Halo, GoW, and CoD do? Why not just focus those resources on an even better single player experience? Multiplayer is fine if it can be done right, but if out of 100 games, 90 have multiplayer, but only 5 have multiplayer worth playing, then why even waste time and resources, sometimes leaving unachievable achievements on multiplayer modes that just end up dead on arrival or at least shortly after? Either do it properly and be sure you can do it properly, or don't do it at all.
I don't know what you were on about with "But please, you CAN put your money where your mouth is.". That comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of the discussion and sounds exactly like the kind of groupthink outburst you claim you have a problem with.
"But no, you all will be like those PC gamers"
Yeah, except I'm not. Other than Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War II out of the couple of hundred games I've bought and played this past 5 years or so they have all been console titles.
Why bitch about groupthink when almost your entire response made no sense in the context of the discussion and was therefore in itself a fine example of a knee jerk groupthink response? Perhaps the reason you think there's a groupthink issue is because you're thinking what you want to think without reading what individual people are actually saying.
I made a post previously on this, and pointed out an important fact. If you look at the footage, the Apache's gun camera clearly shows the Apache is at a range of around 1.3km from the targets, this is outside the range of threat for any weapons the insurgents will have had. Whilst US ground forces were approaching the target they were not there yet.
Even if he honestly believed they were going for weapons, there was no excuse not to wait and verify that with some degree of certainty.
The fact is, however you cut it, the guy was far too trigger happy and even if he did not fire because he simply liked shooting and killing people or whatever, then he was still guilty of gross negligence due to not at least properly confirming a threat before firing.
At that range there really was no threat, he was outside the range of insurgent weapons, and the chance of insurgents having acquired weaponry capable of making them a threat at that range, and the people in the vehicles having been able to get out, spot the Apache, and equip and fire upon it is so impossibly unlikely that it does not count for an excuse.
Even if the threat was real the people involved in that incident did so many other things wrong in terms of verifying targets and failing to limit collateral damage that if that's the standard US forces are working at then they need a massive overhaul of their training programme to more properly prepare their forces for fighting in environments where there are both threats and civilians present if not only for their own good as much as anyone elses- because killing civilians only strengthens and emboldens your enemy.
Yeah that tends to be what happens- I just don't bother with the MP achievements in the end, but it really kind of bugs me when I don't manage to get 1000/1000 gamerscore, I guess it is like OCD in a way, but largely fed by a strong competitiveness- I just don't like giving up on a challenge.
I also don't like selling games I haven't got 1000/1000 gamerscore on as I tend to feel I may want to go back and complete them one day, but I figure because the multiplayer is dead/shit I never will.
What I do know for sure however, is those games where getting 1000/1000 is a real challenge, but doable without some shit MP element (i.e. by either only having single player achievements, or by having MP worth playing) are the games I really look back at and think "Yeah, that was a good fun challenge" and end up recommending to friends, and end up more likely to buy the sequels of. The best example that springs to mind is the Need for Speed series, I simply gave up on them because the challenges provided by achievements just became far too focussed on a dull MP I'd never play, so it didn't even seem worth bothering buying them to start with- certainly the storyline itself wasn't compelling enough, and other games provide better plain old driving experiences. It's one of those borderline cases where if the achievements were good, fair, fun challenges I would have probably actually continued to buy the series each year.
It took me a while to get into SP, I admit I found myself getting bored after an hour or so each time I picked it up, whereas AC2 just had me hooked for hours upon hours in a "Shit, I've missed dinner time" kind of way. After a few hours of picking it up and putting it down though the SP did start to get to a point where it was drawing me if. If you haven't finished SP yet then your dissapointment of SP may fade somewhat as you get a bit further into the game, but it is this initial dissapointment, and the relative shortness of the game compared to AC2 that makes me feel it could've been much better if they'd just decided to ignore MP.
"lol - We have millions of people that act against the government more than Xiaobo has in China."
No you don't.
The Chinese government has far more dissidents acting against it which it actually tolerates and the sheer size of the population coupled with the severity of their situation means the number acting against the government in China dwarfs those in the US. Recently even some members of Chinese government expressed their desire to improve things even further in this respect.
The only reason they're making a fuss about Xiaobo is because he's a high profile dissident, and it brings international embarassment for them. So, er, exactly like with Assange and the US then really.
What was your point again? It seems like the AC is completely right. It sounds like you were talking about something you don't understand, because the situation in China is very different to what you appear to believe.
Don't be silly, the only reason some people view Assange as a douchebag is because of his detractors making statements to that effect. A few insiders have made similar statements but that's to be expected in a volunteer organisation where mouthy people have nothing to lose by mouthing off- it's not like a real job where you can be sacked if you don't know when to keep quiet.
The fact is at the end of the day Assange has got the job done, and if some people didn't like how he got it done then fine, let them go and start their own leaks organisation up. Sure a few drama queens did fuck off in Wikileaks case, one of whom you should note is, in typical tabloid celebrity trash style, writing a book about the "real" wikileaks and his time there. Assange obviously can't be that much of a douche at the end of the day though, because he has enough people who are still working with him, who are standing by him, and who are continuing to push ahead with his leaks.
There people who do leave and start their own organisation though, they shouldn't be suprised, if and when they're equally succesful, if whoever they decide to have as a spokesperson (because they will need someone to speak to the media) that that person too gets called a douchebag by detractors.
More often than not, such cries often seem to stem back to jealousy more than anything- people who are pissed off that they didn't manage to achieve their goals like Assange and the likes did. Armchair activists who whinge on the web about how the world sucks, how governments are evil and infringing our rights, but then do fuck all about it. It's easy to criticise but what have you done lately to change things? that's the question these people need to ask- I'm glad to see the folks in TFA are at least willing to put their money where their mouth is, and it's now a case of seeing how effective they are at it, because if they fail, they may well find they were the problem, not Assange.
It's results that tell the real story, because in a volunteer organisation like Wikileaks where you need the support of hundreds of people around you, you wont achieve success if you really are that much of a douche.
Seeing as multiplayer is shit and not worth playing for around 95% of games that come out, I don't think it's particularly effective.
Look at Assassins Creed, AC2 was fucking superb because they concentrated entirely on single player. This year they released Brotherhood with multiplayer and whilst it was still good, it wasn't a touch on AC2.
If anything AC2 was proof that focussing on single player can lead to a far superior experience, even if it means sacrificing a multiplayer mode, which will be dead in the water within a few weeks, or couple of months after release anyway.
It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact companies tie achievements to their shitty multiplayer modes no one plays either, because it basically means if you are a completionist and like collecting achievements and don't get them on release week then they'll be permanently unobtainable a few weeks later.
I'd rather games which are primarily single player stay that way and focus on that, rather than cut single player features/quality in favour of a waste of space multiplayer mode.
No, seriously, the problem is if you just dump a few billion dollars in Africa, all that means is that instead of gangs of milita with old Russian rifles fighting over resources and millions of dollars, you'll have gangs with old Russian tanks battling over billions of dollars.
Investing makes far more sense, by ensuring there is less money being dumped, but also guaranteeing a constant supply of money you're encouraging gradual change. You aren't going to change poor nations over night, it'll take a long time, and the problem up until now is that there hasn't been the steady supply of money, so you get the odd aid effort here and there, then money dries up and you're back to square one. Also, if you just dump money it's harder to ensure that it's being spent efficiently and sensibly, and you make sure that which is provided each year is spent wisely. If you dump $50bn into a region for example, you can probably bet a good 50% at least (and probably far more) will go to waste/corruption, but if you spread investment over 10 years then you might cut that figure down to say, 25% as it's easier to account where it's gone each year, and if it ends up going to corrupt officials for example, to make sure it goes in the right direction the next year by changing practices.
For what it's worth, you can say the same about much aid, the aid budget of countries like the US and UK isn't about giving money away to help poor nations at all, it's about winning them over to allow our companies to get contracts there, and yes those contracts are for things that help these countries, but we only do it because we net the money back in corporate profits for such contracts. That's not the only benefit of course, increased stability and buying over public opinion in those countries helps a lot in terms of security too, but ultimately there's nothing altruistic about government donations either.
To see why bulk dumping of money is a bad way to cure poverty, you only have to look at some parts of China to see how devastating it has been for local cultures and people where the government has just waltzed in and spent billions out and out building a massive city with 21st century facilities in the space of literally only a few years where previously there was nothing but agricultural and natural landscapes for hundreds of miles.
Really? It seems pretty foolish to pursue a false agenda. Right near the start of this very article someone linked The Daily Mail's take on it which gives a reasonably close interpretation to that he put forward. From the article:
"The pair went out for dinner together at a nearby restaurant. Afterwards they returned to her flat and had sex. What is not disputed by either of them is
that a condom broke -- an event which, as we shall see, would later take on great significance.
At the time, however, the pair continued to be friendly enough the next day, a Saturday, with Sarah even throwing a party for him at her home in the evening."
So apparently he isn't making stuff up at all, he's merely taking one of many interpretations as it is presumably the one he believes most likely to be true.
Or if you want a less biased approach, go read the Independent, because right wingers who read something in it they don't like call it left wing, and left wingers who read something in it they don't like call it right wing, which means it probably is in fact quite Independent as it's name suggests although it's generally referred to as centre-left so probably does have somewhat of a left wing slant to be fair. It does have the advantage at least of being able to lay claim as the only paper to have not backed any political party last election though.
That said, it's probably a bit unfair to class The Guardian as an opposite to the Daily Mail, on the right wing/left wing scale the Daily Mail is about 100 miles right, and The Guardian about 10cm left in comparison. So although The Guardian is certainly left wing, it's not far enough along the scale that you can't get sense out of it most the time, which of course can't be said for The Daily Mail, which is almost always wrong. If you try and extrapolate the middle ground from those two, due to The Daily Mails extreme right wing swing, your opinion will probably still end up predominantly right wing. If you want a true equal and opposite counter to the Daily Mail then the Daily Mirror is your best bet (which makes it's name quite apt).
This said, whilst reading both The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror should in theory allow you to extrapolate a middle ground, in practice reading these two publications will almost certainly kill your brain. The effect of reading these two papers could only I imagine turn you into a lazy layabout tramp who thinks the world owes him enough welfare to become a millionaire, whilst simultaneously blaming immigrants and gypsys and Europe for his current situation.
"it's that not stopping after the woman says "stop!" that matters"
Which you have irrefutable evidence for, I mean, you know for certain the woman said stop right?
Or are you just going by some media reports, which could well have originated from media that is hostile to Assange? Sorry, but this isn't the only thing that's been reported- the idea that she said stop is merely one of the stories that's going around.
So speaking of agendas, what's yours? or did you just falsely assume that because you read it somewhere, it must be true, and it can't possibly be one of many conflicting stories that's been put forward?
You should note that The Daily Mail has a history of outright making shit up, so the parts that are and aren't true in that story are simply unknown, such that that story doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
To cite one example off the top of my head, when media speculation was rife that Tiger Woods had slept with 12 women whilst being married, the Daily Mail's headline was along the lines of "Tiger Woods has slept with 24 women during his marriage!"- yes, they outright took the number and doubled it.
But even assuming that for once, the Daily Mail has written a factual story, there is still plenty of room in that story for US authorities to have become involved, there's plenty of room in the story for the days that fell between the event and the accusation of rape for US agents to have influenced the women with money for example. There are still questions about the women- their actions do seem quite strange, offering someone they've never met the opportunity to stay in her flat whilst they're away, then coming home a day early when he's staying there and having sex with him that very night? The other one just turning up at an event and trying extremely hard to get close to him, eventually doing so and again, having sex with him that night? You're right this could just be an obsessive fan, but then, it could be a CIA plant too.
The reality is we simply don't know either way, even if the initial story is true we don't know if the US authorities have pressured influential people in Sweden to bring the case back up, to pursue it again after it was dropped and so forth. It's still odd that the case has been brought up in Gothenburg when the original case was in Stockholm, the women were in Stockholm, it was reported in Stockholm, and Assange had been in Stockholm.
One thing I can say for sure though, is that it's dishonest to take a Daily Mail article and assert that it's certainly the case that there is no CIA involvement. Simply having one of the women as an activist is not evidence that she isn't under the thumb of the CIA- intelligence agencies have been infiltrating such groups for centuries. It's a bit like saying an attractive red haired girl with US ideals of running her own business and living the American dream couldn't possibly be a Russian spy but, well, there you have it.
Do you have images disabled or something? The linked article quite clearly shows screenshots of the game which are nigh on identical to classic copyrighted Pacman.
"Copyright only protects the exact image, the exact sound, and the exact text. That's it."
Okay genius, so why is encoding an audio CD track to MP3 format, which changes the sound slightly a copyright issue? Why is changing a few words in an eBook so that it's no longer the same and uploading it to The Pirate Bay a copyright issue?
You are wrong. You're confusing fair use provisions, which allow exemptions from copyright with limits, such as for academic research, and providing you do not copy the entire text.
"There is no such thing as "IP." IP is a bogus concept that doesn't exist in law. It's more like a dream of some greedy people rather than reality. The dream is that virtual things and ideas could be privatized. It won't happen."
What rock have you been living under? Do you think the US economy is still manufacturing based, or do you think it's an agrarian society or something? The majority of the US (and many other Western economies) are based around the concept of IP. If you think it doesn't exist in law you need to take a peek out from under your rock.
If you're going to accuse someone of making shit up, then at least have a clue what you're on about. Something you clearly do not.
"The thing is, the industry doesn't make law. If they call something IP, that doesn't automatically make it legally protected. The only thing that matters is what is legally protected, and that's copyright and trademarks."
That's just a pointless argument of semantics really, it's simply a commonly used term to refer to a companies assets and that's merely the context I was using it in.
"And that protects that work from direct copying. But it doesn't protect the idea behind that work against reimplementation using different art, different code, and different names."
It covers more than direct copying, it covers copying of an arbitrary set of the constituent parts, this is where the problem is though, it's really quite arbitrary which is where the courts decide, but the point is this, if something is 90% copied as in this particular case, you can safely say it's copyright infringement, it's when you get to lower levels of similarity that it becomes hard to guage.
"You still sound a bit confused here. Names aren't copyrightable at all. The entire idea behind trademarks is to protect customers against fakes. A third party can't use "Sonic the Hedgehog" because that name might lead customers to believe it's a real Sonic game from the original makers/owners of Sonic."
I don't think you get the point still. I gave the example that using "Sonic the Hedgehog" by itself wouldn't fall under copyright, but would fall under trademark law, however if you create a game with a hedgehog in and call it "blue hedgehog" or similar then even use of a common word coupled with other components baring similarity to an overall copied work does constitute copyright infringement.
You're still making the false argument many others here have, and that's separating out constituent parts of the copyrighted work, such as the name and saying "Hey, but this part by itself doesn't fall under copyright law" and you're right, but that's not the context here, we're not talking about someone taking Pacman and putting him in a game genre he's never been in before such as a first person shooter or RTS game or whatever, if we were then because no copyrighted work had been imitated but a trademarked character had still been used then a trademark case would be valid. Instead we're talking about his use in a fall blown copy of the original Pacman game and once again, that's why it falls under copyright- again, with copyright, it's the whole work that matters and how representative of that original work this new work is, and Pacman is part of that work. In this case Namco could always ignore the copyright infringement and focus directly on the Pacman character with a trademark case, but why when it's much more a case of full blown copyright infringement? Copyright is the correct thing to use when an entire work has been copied, or closely mimiced, trademark is the correct tool to use when a trademarked entity (i.e. a character) has been used in a context which the company did not want it to be used, but which otherwise bears no other resemblance to copyrighted works in which that entity may previously have been used.
In the gaming industry when talking about IP it's a reference to the combined constituent parts of the game- the characters (names, visual depictions, etc), the storyline, the world, the sounds etc.
You don't copyright constituent parts individually, you copyright the work as a whole. When considering a case of infringement there will be a comparison between the constituent parts of the original work, and the alleged infringing work and that comparison will involve character names. If the alleged infringing game was just using the same names of characters and nothing more than it's unlikely a copyright case would rule in their favour, and in fact, it's unlikely even a trademark case would, but if you create a game where the characters look the same, and are named the same then it will be a violation of copyright because copyright protects the work as a whole, including all it's constituent parts.
Trademarks protect against use of say, "Sonic the Hedgehog" in a 3rd party game created without permission, even if that game is nothing like any of the existing Sonic games. A copyright case would not be sufficient here because not enough IP from an existing Sonic game has been copied.
This is why naming is relevant in copyright cases- because it's part of an overall copyrighted work that must be considered in an infringement case.
"You can't copyright a name, or a character. Those would be trademarks."
A lot of people seem to be getting confused over this. You can't copyright a name in the general case- for example, you can't copyright Mario and Luigi as names, but you can have them protected by copyright as part of your greater IP- i.e. as names for plumbers who jump around on mushrooms and chase princesses or whatever.
Many slashdotters are pointing out that you can't copyright constituent parts of an IP by themselves and this understanding is completely correct, what they don't seem to realise is that you can copyright a game, a film and so forth and that covers the set of IP in that, so in the case of a small yellow circle with a mouth moving round a maze called Pacman, then yes the use of Pacman absolutely is copyright infringement.
Copyright protects the whole IP and you can't use copyright to protect constituent components of that IP individually, but you can use copyright to protect that IP as a whole. As such in a case like this changing the name IS an important part of avoiding copyright infringement issues because the name is part - not all certainly, but definitely part - of the copyrighted IP.
This is why it's a copyright violation, this is why the DMCA is relevant.
No, but they put them all together into a game where you go around munching power pills.
This is the problem with copyright in this case, and something many Slashdotters are apparently struggling with- it's not the individual components that matter, it's the whole thing that constitutes Namco's copyrighted work and it's creating a clone of the whole that is the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
How long before this gets taken down for copyright infringement, how long before it's... you might say, Foxed!
Oh it's been a while since I've been able to use that term.
Are companies still agressively beating down any fan mod that dares even closely resemble their IP these days or do they turn a blind eye to it now? They're probably even more at risk when you take into account the fact there's just been an official remake of Goldeneye released for the Wii, companies don't like unnecessary competition.
I'd download it ASAP if it interests you and archive it if it's any good as it may not be available for long. I still have my copy of Alien Quake etc. somewhere in the depths of my file archives!
"If they'd already grown them, they'd sell them"
They can't, that's the point. They grow more than they can sell because it's such a competitive market, a farmer can't always guarantee he'll be the one who gets the deal with the stores, and if he isn't then his field of crops is just left to rot. There's any number of fields around here that end up like that (I live in rural Yorkshire).
If each farmer had a smaller yield, stores, particularly the big supermarkets, would have to shop around to more farmers, and because they'd not be able to pick and choose the farmers would get better prices.
I'm not sure what country you're in but quite a few EU countries end up with food just being left to waste, this is a particular problem in France where farming is heavily subsidised, such that farmers get paid to plant crops whether they have any hope of ever selling them or not.
Things would be much better if we only grew what we needed and there was more land left to naturalise as a result, but it's just not that way- hedges are removed to make farmer bigger fields easier, and crops are left to rot, it's quite sad.
"The pesticide is a seed coating? How frequently do bees come into contact with seeds that are planted?"
It'll be systemic, in that the plant absorbs it through it's life and any pest eating the plant gets a dose of it. The problem with these systemic insecticides is that they carry through even to the pollen, so Mr Bee plays around with the flower, gets some pollen on him, takes it back to his hive stuck to his legs and then you have pollen infected with systemic insecticide that kills the bees in the hive.
"Also, it's apparently used in the UK. Are only North American bees susceptible to this?"
No, Europe has the same problem with heavy bee decline.
"I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase food and crop yield."
Even if they do, is it necessary? Here in the UK we have farmers complaining about how crop prices have been forced lower and lower, so many complaining they can't afford to compete each year, we have fields of cabbages and so forth that are just left to rot. In my mind with this kind of evidence we have too much food, perhaps if farmers moved back to organic methods then they may get smaller yeilds but it'd push the prices up for them and yeah, the end customers will probably have to pay more too, but it's not like paying unsustainably low prices in the first place is a good thing, it just means folks will have to give up their chelsea tractors, or get a 40" TV instead of a 50". It aint going to be the end of the world. There's also many health concerns caused by pesticides, we're not immune to any effect from these pesticides, in larger doses they're just as harmful to us, we just don't get them in those doses from crops. The problem is, we don't know what effect small doses have in the longer term.
Interestingly I used to live in the south of the UK and we eventually moved up to Yorkshire, since moving up here my dogs have developed lumps, they're not cancerous but they're quite large all the same and oddly, all the dogs around here have grown lumps- this isn't something that happened to anyone's pets I knew down south, and the difference here is we're surrounded by more fields and the dogs run through the fields. I do wonder if perhaps pesticides are to blame, the lumps don't seem to hurt the dogs, but they are large- the size of a fist in some cases.
Despite all this, as someone who grows cacti in his spare time, I also know the flip side of it- amateur gardeners have lost access to a lot of pesticides over the years and that has led to immunity to the small range (Imidacloprid, Thiadacloprid) of insecticides that are available to amateur gardener amongst invasive species such as non-native Mealy Bugs and Red Spider Mites. As always though, the reason they've been removed for amateur use is due to abuse of farmers- there's a big difference spraying thousands of gallons of the stuff, to an amateur using half a pint to spray a few plants which are kept in a closed environment such as a greenhouse.
I don't really know what the answer is, large scale use of pesticides simply is not good, I think in many ways even GM foods are a better option, because at least you're not introducing poisons that kill things like bees, and have potentially harmful effects on people and pets. Current regulation seems to let farmers get away with murder, whilst not providing pesticides that amateurs could use to abolish invasive species in small quantities in a closed environment where they don't effect the outside world.
I think the only solution is a massive overhaul of regulation from the ground up, but companies like Bayer are massive, and seem to have a near worldwide control of national and international pesticide regulations. I was quite shocked to see a note from Bayer in a garden centre the other week withdrawing one of their named pesticides to be replaced with a new one that was based on the same mix, but had just been rebranded and the price increased- the bit that shocked me is that this meant their old product, was now illegal to use beca
West and North Yorkshire in my office. I asked around this morning where deliveries where the tracking data on tracked parcels people hadn't received were from and a few people said Kettering, Northants. and one said Milton Keynes, others didn't have any tracking details so it doesn't seem in at least some of these cases that there really is much of an excuse. We did have bad snow around here for a few days, but it was maybe 3 days out of a week the week before last.
I can certainly see why people who went for guaranteed delivery would be annoyed, they shouldn't really use that term if they can't fulfil it. It's the sort of term you should only really be using if you're using a courier that can cope with all weather conditions- i.e. have delivery vans either with snow tyres/snow chains, or have vehicles better adapted to off-road. Either that, or simply don't offer the service. If the road from the depot to a main road is too deep in snow it woudln't cost much in the grand scheme of things to just pay for a snow plow to clear the road. These services run just fine in places like the US/Canadian snow belt who get far worse, for far longer so it's not as if it's impossible to resolve, just that after 3 winters of this kind of weather the courier firms whose business fundamentally revolves around figuring out how to get to places still haven't planned for it it seems.
You wont have seen the 503s because they were being returned in response to the AJAX request issued by clicking the add to basket button on the Black Friday offers. If you tried to by any of the items and found yourself stuck indefinitely in a queue, or at least for a few minutes or more then it was because Amazon's Javascript wasn't setup to handle 503 responses from the server, and so just hung there with the queue animation, even though the reality is your request was never even processed.
I looked into it myself after my suspicions were aroused due to me and a colleague click spamming where the button was to click it as soon as the offer came up, and us getting stuck in queues, whilst our colleague being a bit dormant didn't click it until about 30 seconds after it appeared and got the item straight in her basket whilst we were supposedly queueing. That's when I cracked open Firebug and had a look under the hood at what was going on.
I've never really thought about it as a lottery until reading the GGPs post, but I guess he has a point, there may be a case for trading standards in this respect I guess because Amazon did say it was a first come first served sale, where it clearly was not- if for example there were 500 units of a product, and of the first 500 that click only 300 have their requests serviced, and 200 do not but get told they're in a queue when they're not, then that means others who click afterwards may get the items those should've got.
The system seemed a bit too easy to game for my liking too, if it weren't for the fact I'm one of the worlds greatest procrastinators, I'd have written a quick plugin to simply keep resubmitting the AJAX request until a proper response was received rather than a 503 error. I imagine that's in fact how some people did hoarde some of the top items so quickly, because it's fairly trivial to do.
Not sure what's going on about deliveries, but there's been enough people in the office complaining about having not received deliveries from Amazon, and it's not like we've had any snow here either since the week before last, it was all melted off by last Monday so if they are overdue there doesn't really seem to be an excuse now.
"It makes 100% clear concise sense when my point was that ./'s groupthink is to bash EA, say EA sucks, and let's not buy EA. Fail #1."
Which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the thread or the article.
I don't have a problem with your point, I have a problem with the fact you're bitching and complaining at people about something that's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, or anything anyone in the thread said, and in that context, your post made no sense because it went off on such a wild tangent to the discussion.
Yeah, sorry, but what the fuck? Slashdot had a story about the "discovery" of ACO a few months back, there was a similar one a year or two prior also, now it's been "discovered" again? How can something from the 90s be "Next Generation". How many times do we have to have stories on ACO? It's been around so so long, it's taught in undergraduate AI classes across the world.
Perhaps Slashdot needs to create it's own ant inspired algorithm to handle submissions because at least ants probably wouldn't post a story about the same god damn thing all the time.
I'm just waiting for them to "discover" particle swam optimisation or similar so we can have stories discovering that every few months too.
Your post doesn't make a lot of sense, it sounds like a mindless rant.
You mention Dead Space as an excellent example of a game, and then state games should have multiplayer, yet Dead Space was excellent because it was a well crafted single player experience, precisely demonstrating that there's no point putting multiplayer in if it doesn't add anything to the game.
You talk about groupthink, yet that seems precisely what your post was, for example, I have no problem with EA, I think they're one of the better publishers out there now in that they at least dropped their DRM down to a point where it's far less problematic than the likes of Ubisoft or Valve use, they're one of the few studios churning out new IPs like Army of Two, Deadspace etc. also.
Regarding Gears of War 2 multiplayer that you like it that's fine, I certainly said there shouldn't be multiplayer, I merely said there should only be multiplayer if it fits the game and can be done properly. The Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty series are all fine examples of where multiplayer worked well, that doesn't mean competitive multiplayer made sense in games ranging from Bioshock 2 to Naughty Bear to Dead Rising 2 though where their multiplayer modes were dead in the water a very short time after release, and where it was obvious this was always going to be the case. Why waste resources on competitive multiplayer in these cases where it was always obvious they wouldn't provide the multiplayer experience IPs like Halo, GoW, and CoD do? Why not just focus those resources on an even better single player experience? Multiplayer is fine if it can be done right, but if out of 100 games, 90 have multiplayer, but only 5 have multiplayer worth playing, then why even waste time and resources, sometimes leaving unachievable achievements on multiplayer modes that just end up dead on arrival or at least shortly after? Either do it properly and be sure you can do it properly, or don't do it at all.
I don't know what you were on about with "But please, you CAN put your money where your mouth is.". That comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of the discussion and sounds exactly like the kind of groupthink outburst you claim you have a problem with.
"But no, you all will be like those PC gamers"
Yeah, except I'm not. Other than Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War II out of the couple of hundred games I've bought and played this past 5 years or so they have all been console titles.
Why bitch about groupthink when almost your entire response made no sense in the context of the discussion and was therefore in itself a fine example of a knee jerk groupthink response? Perhaps the reason you think there's a groupthink issue is because you're thinking what you want to think without reading what individual people are actually saying.
I made a post previously on this, and pointed out an important fact. If you look at the footage, the Apache's gun camera clearly shows the Apache is at a range of around 1.3km from the targets, this is outside the range of threat for any weapons the insurgents will have had. Whilst US ground forces were approaching the target they were not there yet.
Even if he honestly believed they were going for weapons, there was no excuse not to wait and verify that with some degree of certainty.
The fact is, however you cut it, the guy was far too trigger happy and even if he did not fire because he simply liked shooting and killing people or whatever, then he was still guilty of gross negligence due to not at least properly confirming a threat before firing.
At that range there really was no threat, he was outside the range of insurgent weapons, and the chance of insurgents having acquired weaponry capable of making them a threat at that range, and the people in the vehicles having been able to get out, spot the Apache, and equip and fire upon it is so impossibly unlikely that it does not count for an excuse.
Even if the threat was real the people involved in that incident did so many other things wrong in terms of verifying targets and failing to limit collateral damage that if that's the standard US forces are working at then they need a massive overhaul of their training programme to more properly prepare their forces for fighting in environments where there are both threats and civilians present if not only for their own good as much as anyone elses- because killing civilians only strengthens and emboldens your enemy.
Yeah that tends to be what happens- I just don't bother with the MP achievements in the end, but it really kind of bugs me when I don't manage to get 1000/1000 gamerscore, I guess it is like OCD in a way, but largely fed by a strong competitiveness- I just don't like giving up on a challenge.
I also don't like selling games I haven't got 1000/1000 gamerscore on as I tend to feel I may want to go back and complete them one day, but I figure because the multiplayer is dead/shit I never will.
What I do know for sure however, is those games where getting 1000/1000 is a real challenge, but doable without some shit MP element (i.e. by either only having single player achievements, or by having MP worth playing) are the games I really look back at and think "Yeah, that was a good fun challenge" and end up recommending to friends, and end up more likely to buy the sequels of. The best example that springs to mind is the Need for Speed series, I simply gave up on them because the challenges provided by achievements just became far too focussed on a dull MP I'd never play, so it didn't even seem worth bothering buying them to start with- certainly the storyline itself wasn't compelling enough, and other games provide better plain old driving experiences. It's one of those borderline cases where if the achievements were good, fair, fun challenges I would have probably actually continued to buy the series each year.
It took me a while to get into SP, I admit I found myself getting bored after an hour or so each time I picked it up, whereas AC2 just had me hooked for hours upon hours in a "Shit, I've missed dinner time" kind of way. After a few hours of picking it up and putting it down though the SP did start to get to a point where it was drawing me if. If you haven't finished SP yet then your dissapointment of SP may fade somewhat as you get a bit further into the game, but it is this initial dissapointment, and the relative shortness of the game compared to AC2 that makes me feel it could've been much better if they'd just decided to ignore MP.
"lol - We have millions of people that act against the government more than Xiaobo has in China."
No you don't.
The Chinese government has far more dissidents acting against it which it actually tolerates and the sheer size of the population coupled with the severity of their situation means the number acting against the government in China dwarfs those in the US. Recently even some members of Chinese government expressed their desire to improve things even further in this respect.
The only reason they're making a fuss about Xiaobo is because he's a high profile dissident, and it brings international embarassment for them. So, er, exactly like with Assange and the US then really.
What was your point again? It seems like the AC is completely right. It sounds like you were talking about something you don't understand, because the situation in China is very different to what you appear to believe.
Don't be silly, the only reason some people view Assange as a douchebag is because of his detractors making statements to that effect. A few insiders have made similar statements but that's to be expected in a volunteer organisation where mouthy people have nothing to lose by mouthing off- it's not like a real job where you can be sacked if you don't know when to keep quiet.
The fact is at the end of the day Assange has got the job done, and if some people didn't like how he got it done then fine, let them go and start their own leaks organisation up. Sure a few drama queens did fuck off in Wikileaks case, one of whom you should note is, in typical tabloid celebrity trash style, writing a book about the "real" wikileaks and his time there. Assange obviously can't be that much of a douche at the end of the day though, because he has enough people who are still working with him, who are standing by him, and who are continuing to push ahead with his leaks.
There people who do leave and start their own organisation though, they shouldn't be suprised, if and when they're equally succesful, if whoever they decide to have as a spokesperson (because they will need someone to speak to the media) that that person too gets called a douchebag by detractors.
More often than not, such cries often seem to stem back to jealousy more than anything- people who are pissed off that they didn't manage to achieve their goals like Assange and the likes did. Armchair activists who whinge on the web about how the world sucks, how governments are evil and infringing our rights, but then do fuck all about it. It's easy to criticise but what have you done lately to change things? that's the question these people need to ask- I'm glad to see the folks in TFA are at least willing to put their money where their mouth is, and it's now a case of seeing how effective they are at it, because if they fail, they may well find they were the problem, not Assange.
It's results that tell the real story, because in a volunteer organisation like Wikileaks where you need the support of hundreds of people around you, you wont achieve success if you really are that much of a douche.
Well, kind of works.
Seeing as multiplayer is shit and not worth playing for around 95% of games that come out, I don't think it's particularly effective.
Look at Assassins Creed, AC2 was fucking superb because they concentrated entirely on single player. This year they released Brotherhood with multiplayer and whilst it was still good, it wasn't a touch on AC2.
If anything AC2 was proof that focussing on single player can lead to a far superior experience, even if it means sacrificing a multiplayer mode, which will be dead in the water within a few weeks, or couple of months after release anyway.
It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact companies tie achievements to their shitty multiplayer modes no one plays either, because it basically means if you are a completionist and like collecting achievements and don't get them on release week then they'll be permanently unobtainable a few weeks later.
I'd rather games which are primarily single player stay that way and focus on that, rather than cut single player features/quality in favour of a waste of space multiplayer mode.
You're old fashioned!
No, seriously, the problem is if you just dump a few billion dollars in Africa, all that means is that instead of gangs of milita with old Russian rifles fighting over resources and millions of dollars, you'll have gangs with old Russian tanks battling over billions of dollars.
Investing makes far more sense, by ensuring there is less money being dumped, but also guaranteeing a constant supply of money you're encouraging gradual change. You aren't going to change poor nations over night, it'll take a long time, and the problem up until now is that there hasn't been the steady supply of money, so you get the odd aid effort here and there, then money dries up and you're back to square one. Also, if you just dump money it's harder to ensure that it's being spent efficiently and sensibly, and you make sure that which is provided each year is spent wisely. If you dump $50bn into a region for example, you can probably bet a good 50% at least (and probably far more) will go to waste/corruption, but if you spread investment over 10 years then you might cut that figure down to say, 25% as it's easier to account where it's gone each year, and if it ends up going to corrupt officials for example, to make sure it goes in the right direction the next year by changing practices.
For what it's worth, you can say the same about much aid, the aid budget of countries like the US and UK isn't about giving money away to help poor nations at all, it's about winning them over to allow our companies to get contracts there, and yes those contracts are for things that help these countries, but we only do it because we net the money back in corporate profits for such contracts. That's not the only benefit of course, increased stability and buying over public opinion in those countries helps a lot in terms of security too, but ultimately there's nothing altruistic about government donations either.
To see why bulk dumping of money is a bad way to cure poverty, you only have to look at some parts of China to see how devastating it has been for local cultures and people where the government has just waltzed in and spent billions out and out building a massive city with 21st century facilities in the space of literally only a few years where previously there was nothing but agricultural and natural landscapes for hundreds of miles.
Really? It seems pretty foolish to pursue a false agenda. Right near the start of this very article someone linked The Daily Mail's take on it which gives a reasonably close interpretation to that he put forward. From the article:
"The pair went out for dinner together at a nearby restaurant. Afterwards they returned to her flat and had sex. What is not disputed by either of them is
that a condom broke -- an event which, as we shall see, would later take on great significance.
At the time, however, the pair continued to be friendly enough the next day, a Saturday, with Sarah even throwing a party for him at her home in the evening."
Article link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336291/Wikileaks-Julian-Assanges-2-night-stands-spark-worldwide-hunt.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
So apparently he isn't making stuff up at all, he's merely taking one of many interpretations as it is presumably the one he believes most likely to be true.
Or if you want a less biased approach, go read the Independent, because right wingers who read something in it they don't like call it left wing, and left wingers who read something in it they don't like call it right wing, which means it probably is in fact quite Independent as it's name suggests although it's generally referred to as centre-left so probably does have somewhat of a left wing slant to be fair. It does have the advantage at least of being able to lay claim as the only paper to have not backed any political party last election though.
That said, it's probably a bit unfair to class The Guardian as an opposite to the Daily Mail, on the right wing/left wing scale the Daily Mail is about 100 miles right, and The Guardian about 10cm left in comparison. So although The Guardian is certainly left wing, it's not far enough along the scale that you can't get sense out of it most the time, which of course can't be said for The Daily Mail, which is almost always wrong. If you try and extrapolate the middle ground from those two, due to The Daily Mails extreme right wing swing, your opinion will probably still end up predominantly right wing. If you want a true equal and opposite counter to the Daily Mail then the Daily Mirror is your best bet (which makes it's name quite apt).
This said, whilst reading both The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror should in theory allow you to extrapolate a middle ground, in practice reading these two publications will almost certainly kill your brain. The effect of reading these two papers could only I imagine turn you into a lazy layabout tramp who thinks the world owes him enough welfare to become a millionaire, whilst simultaneously blaming immigrants and gypsys and Europe for his current situation.
"it's that not stopping after the woman says "stop!" that matters"
Which you have irrefutable evidence for, I mean, you know for certain the woman said stop right?
Or are you just going by some media reports, which could well have originated from media that is hostile to Assange? Sorry, but this isn't the only thing that's been reported- the idea that she said stop is merely one of the stories that's going around.
So speaking of agendas, what's yours? or did you just falsely assume that because you read it somewhere, it must be true, and it can't possibly be one of many conflicting stories that's been put forward?
You should note that The Daily Mail has a history of outright making shit up, so the parts that are and aren't true in that story are simply unknown, such that that story doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
To cite one example off the top of my head, when media speculation was rife that Tiger Woods had slept with 12 women whilst being married, the Daily Mail's headline was along the lines of "Tiger Woods has slept with 24 women during his marriage!"- yes, they outright took the number and doubled it.
But even assuming that for once, the Daily Mail has written a factual story, there is still plenty of room in that story for US authorities to have become involved, there's plenty of room in the story for the days that fell between the event and the accusation of rape for US agents to have influenced the women with money for example. There are still questions about the women- their actions do seem quite strange, offering someone they've never met the opportunity to stay in her flat whilst they're away, then coming home a day early when he's staying there and having sex with him that very night? The other one just turning up at an event and trying extremely hard to get close to him, eventually doing so and again, having sex with him that night? You're right this could just be an obsessive fan, but then, it could be a CIA plant too.
The reality is we simply don't know either way, even if the initial story is true we don't know if the US authorities have pressured influential people in Sweden to bring the case back up, to pursue it again after it was dropped and so forth. It's still odd that the case has been brought up in Gothenburg when the original case was in Stockholm, the women were in Stockholm, it was reported in Stockholm, and Assange had been in Stockholm.
One thing I can say for sure though, is that it's dishonest to take a Daily Mail article and assert that it's certainly the case that there is no CIA involvement. Simply having one of the women as an activist is not evidence that she isn't under the thumb of the CIA- intelligence agencies have been infiltrating such groups for centuries. It's a bit like saying an attractive red haired girl with US ideals of running her own business and living the American dream couldn't possibly be a Russian spy but, well, there you have it.
Do you have images disabled or something? The linked article quite clearly shows screenshots of the game which are nigh on identical to classic copyrighted Pacman.
"Copyright only protects the exact image, the exact sound, and the exact text. That's it."
Okay genius, so why is encoding an audio CD track to MP3 format, which changes the sound slightly a copyright issue? Why is changing a few words in an eBook so that it's no longer the same and uploading it to The Pirate Bay a copyright issue?
You are wrong. You're confusing fair use provisions, which allow exemptions from copyright with limits, such as for academic research, and providing you do not copy the entire text.
"There is no such thing as "IP." IP is a bogus concept that doesn't exist in law. It's more like a dream of some greedy people rather than reality. The dream is that virtual things and ideas could be privatized. It won't happen."
What rock have you been living under? Do you think the US economy is still manufacturing based, or do you think it's an agrarian society or something? The majority of the US (and many other Western economies) are based around the concept of IP. If you think it doesn't exist in law you need to take a peek out from under your rock.
If you're going to accuse someone of making shit up, then at least have a clue what you're on about. Something you clearly do not.
"The thing is, the industry doesn't make law. If they call something IP, that doesn't automatically make it legally protected. The only thing that matters is what is legally protected, and that's copyright and trademarks."
That's just a pointless argument of semantics really, it's simply a commonly used term to refer to a companies assets and that's merely the context I was using it in.
"And that protects that work from direct copying. But it doesn't protect the idea behind that work against reimplementation using different art, different code, and different names."
It covers more than direct copying, it covers copying of an arbitrary set of the constituent parts, this is where the problem is though, it's really quite arbitrary which is where the courts decide, but the point is this, if something is 90% copied as in this particular case, you can safely say it's copyright infringement, it's when you get to lower levels of similarity that it becomes hard to guage.
"You still sound a bit confused here. Names aren't copyrightable at all. The entire idea behind trademarks is to protect customers against fakes. A third party can't use "Sonic the Hedgehog" because that name might lead customers to believe it's a real Sonic game from the original makers/owners of Sonic."
I don't think you get the point still. I gave the example that using "Sonic the Hedgehog" by itself wouldn't fall under copyright, but would fall under trademark law, however if you create a game with a hedgehog in and call it "blue hedgehog" or similar then even use of a common word coupled with other components baring similarity to an overall copied work does constitute copyright infringement.
You're still making the false argument many others here have, and that's separating out constituent parts of the copyrighted work, such as the name and saying "Hey, but this part by itself doesn't fall under copyright law" and you're right, but that's not the context here, we're not talking about someone taking Pacman and putting him in a game genre he's never been in before such as a first person shooter or RTS game or whatever, if we were then because no copyrighted work had been imitated but a trademarked character had still been used then a trademark case would be valid. Instead we're talking about his use in a fall blown copy of the original Pacman game and once again, that's why it falls under copyright- again, with copyright, it's the whole work that matters and how representative of that original work this new work is, and Pacman is part of that work. In this case Namco could always ignore the copyright infringement and focus directly on the Pacman character with a trademark case, but why when it's much more a case of full blown copyright infringement? Copyright is the correct thing to use when an entire work has been copied, or closely mimiced, trademark is the correct tool to use when a trademarked entity (i.e. a character) has been used in a context which the company did not want it to be used, but which otherwise bears no other resemblance to copyrighted works in which that entity may previously have been used.
In the gaming industry when talking about IP it's a reference to the combined constituent parts of the game- the characters (names, visual depictions, etc), the storyline, the world, the sounds etc.
You don't copyright constituent parts individually, you copyright the work as a whole. When considering a case of infringement there will be a comparison between the constituent parts of the original work, and the alleged infringing work and that comparison will involve character names. If the alleged infringing game was just using the same names of characters and nothing more than it's unlikely a copyright case would rule in their favour, and in fact, it's unlikely even a trademark case would, but if you create a game where the characters look the same, and are named the same then it will be a violation of copyright because copyright protects the work as a whole, including all it's constituent parts.
Trademarks protect against use of say, "Sonic the Hedgehog" in a 3rd party game created without permission, even if that game is nothing like any of the existing Sonic games. A copyright case would not be sufficient here because not enough IP from an existing Sonic game has been copied.
This is why naming is relevant in copyright cases- because it's part of an overall copyrighted work that must be considered in an infringement case.
"You can't copyright a name, or a character. Those would be trademarks."
A lot of people seem to be getting confused over this. You can't copyright a name in the general case- for example, you can't copyright Mario and Luigi as names, but you can have them protected by copyright as part of your greater IP- i.e. as names for plumbers who jump around on mushrooms and chase princesses or whatever.
Many slashdotters are pointing out that you can't copyright constituent parts of an IP by themselves and this understanding is completely correct, what they don't seem to realise is that you can copyright a game, a film and so forth and that covers the set of IP in that, so in the case of a small yellow circle with a mouth moving round a maze called Pacman, then yes the use of Pacman absolutely is copyright infringement.
Copyright protects the whole IP and you can't use copyright to protect constituent components of that IP individually, but you can use copyright to protect that IP as a whole. As such in a case like this changing the name IS an important part of avoiding copyright infringement issues because the name is part - not all certainly, but definitely part - of the copyrighted IP.
This is why it's a copyright violation, this is why the DMCA is relevant.
No, but they put them all together into a game where you go around munching power pills.
This is the problem with copyright in this case, and something many Slashdotters are apparently struggling with- it's not the individual components that matter, it's the whole thing that constitutes Namco's copyrighted work and it's creating a clone of the whole that is the problem.