Dear Indepent Game Developers, I would like to inform of the following page - http://www.webforcecreations.com/legalfund.htm I believe you should read it. If you believe we are doing the right thing please make a link to that address. Thanks, we hope for your co-operation

Hasn''t a settlement been reached already with Infogames?

Personally I have trouble entrusting money to a site that can''t spell "financial."


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com
"Boredom''s Greatest Enemy"
-------------------------------------------------------
Earn $1000 - $10,000 USD per month in royalties when we publish your next game. See developer.dexterity.com for details.

The site is taking PayPal donations to the account of phankinson@email.com . I think I''ll pass. If the accused parties want to band together and set up a non-profit organization or some type of escrow to where we could be reasonably confident that the funds were actually to go towards defense costs, then maybe I could be bothered to contribute. OR...MAYBE I could just set up a fund and you could all mail me your contributions to my PO Box (cash only, please).

Ron Frazier
Kronos Software
www.kronos-software.com
Miko & Molly - Taking Puzzle Games to A Whole New Dimension

I have a real problem with people who have a fundamentaly sound case (resisting Hasbro''s copyright infringement claims) but instead of detailing that, they write drivel like;

"they [Hasbro] want to basically control ALL the game content on the planet and monopolize all the game programmers work."

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

Maybe I missed something here, but:

- why would I give money to a company not named in a suit, trusting (!) that they''ll in turn hand over money to these companies, when it would be MUCH simpler to donate money to these companies directly?

- Doing a little research, why can''t I seem to find a court docket filed that notes any such lawsuit?

- Doing further research, why do I find that Hasbro Interactive no longer exists as a corporate entity; that they were bought out in 2001 by Infogrames, who now owns the company and renamed it to Infogrames Interactive - and they are in fact the owner of the old Atari licenses, and are in fact negotiating with several companies to release classic editions of those games?

With all due respect, Infogrames has every right to pursue legal action against any company that has infringed upon their copyrights (trademarks are simply the brands, not the works themselves). The courts wouldn''t allow a suit to take place unless Infogrames did, in fact, have a valid claim.

Of course, that still fails to answer why such a lawsuit does not seem to exist on any of the court systems. I may simply not have put in the correct search information; perhaps you could provide a copy of the actual docket, or reference news articles (by link, please, not by quote unless you have specific source and date of publication).

Otherwise you''re solicting money under false pretense, which under the law is called fraud. I''m going to forward this information to a few relevant contacts; I''m hoping, for your sake, this is a legit claim.

The court case is genuine, and in many cases it is unfounded. Someone releasing a game called "PacDude" deserves to be sued by the PacMan copyright owners, but people like MVP Software didnt deserve to be hounded for Debris(i think its them). Just because a game has gameplay thats influenced by another title doesnt mean you should be sued by it. Kurosawa didnt sue Goerge Lucas, and Ford don''t sue other car companies.
Agreed this web site is rather dubious but the cause is a valid one.

http://www.positech.co.uk

quote: Original post by EricTrickster

The courts wouldn't allow a suit to take place unless Infogrames did, in fact, have a valid claim.

That's not true. The courts will let you sue anyone over just about anything. Sure you'll probably lose but that's not the point. The point is to financially destroy the person/entity you're suing (assuming you have more money than them). If you want a good example go to clue.com whom Hasbro sued just because they wanted that domain name for their game Clue (and that site has nothing to do with it). Of course they lost, and lost the appeal.

[edited by - FenixDown on September 25, 2002 4:00:34 PM]

This is all true in the US. In the UK its not as easy to screw someone around in court if they have no moeny. Search google for the McLibel case to see a classic example of how David v Goliath court cases dont always go goliaths way in the UK.

http://www.positech.co.uk

Okay, did some more digging and found the settlement that the company fka Hasbro Interactive reached back in 2000:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/nexus/features/news/pr/hasbro_15.shtml

Based on what I read there and a few other places, I''m still going to side with Hasbro on this issue. Admittedly I haven''t seen screenshots from the actual games, but judging by the titles these games seem little more than carbon copies of the original titles with a slight name change.

Even in the cases where MVP or Webfoot created 3-D versions of the original games, that still does not preclude Atari/Hasbro/Infograms from enforcing their copyright on those games.

It''s one thing to create a maze game where your character is chased by 4 creatures, while picking up powerups to defeat them. It''s another to make the player character a yellow spherical mouth chased by ghostlike figures.

The former is derivative enough to escape a lawsuit. The latter is a dangerous risk of infringement.

quote: The courts will let you sue anyone over just about anything.

Not a true statement, even here in the US. You can initiate a lawsuit, but the defendant can have the case dismissed before it ever goes to trial if there are no grounds for the suit itself. In this case, Hasbro very obviously had strong grounds for an infringement suit.

The prevailing popular "argument" is that copyright laws do not allow for the copyright of ideas. This is absolutely true. However, at least in the case of Webfoot and MVP, they did not simply use the ideas in Frogger, Pac-Man, Missile Command and Asteroids (to name a few) to create a new, unique game.

They copied these games close to the original, game them similar names, and sold them to distributors.

I read Xtreme Games'' website (which, incidently, the original poster took the vast majority of his information from near verbatim), which of course takes an understandably negative view to being sued. It links to a GameDev hosted site which, after reading, I''m frankly disturbed by considering the inaccuracies of the text (http://www.gamedev.net/hosted/greenribbon/)

In one part of the page it actually makes a comparison to clothing "knockoffs", in which the courts decided that as long as the consumer was not led to believe they were buying the designer label there was no claim of infringement. This comparison doesn''t apply to a video game. Using this logic, I could then make a Diablo exact clone, give everything different names and market it as "Hellmouth" - and be perfectly within my rights. I can''t imagine anyone on these boards agreeing that I should be able to do so.

I will go back to an earlier statement: i have not seen screen shots of the alleged infringing games. What I also have not seen, in any of the articles I''ve read nor the websites of the developers themselves, any outright claims that the games they marketed are NOT knockoffs of the originals.

I just question the integrity and dedication of anyone calling themselves a game developer who publishes and sells carbon copies of existing games without considering that they''re repackaging someone else''s property and claiming it as their own.

This isn''t about freedom of creativity, because - at a glance - there is no creativity involved here. When you take someone else''s work and pawn it off as your own...we called that plagarism in school.

Regardless, these seem to have been settled 2 years ago.