'Foxed'

[Dracos]

http://www.planetquake.com/features/articles/editorials/foxed.shtml

Got this via PA.  Linking it here both for future finding and well, it's a rather neat article.  I would've loved to have this handy for bitchslapping folks whining over the chrono trigger thing.

Dracos

[Karlinn]

I am firmly of the opinion that we need some sort of oversight group that routinely checks to make sure companies don't sit on otherwise awesome licenses.  You pick up a particularly popular or acclaimed series, and periodically you receive visits from scary guys in suits and black suburbans at your place of business.

Said scary guys inspect the place top to bottom and make sure said series isn't going to waste.  If not, carry on.  If so, they take everybody in the company, from the CEO on down, out back and shoot them in the mouth.

When this is happening, and I am confident that there will, in fact, be a System Shock 3, then we can talk about foxing.

Now, to return to reality for just a moment, this is an interesting article.  On the one hand, I hate to side against mod makers because they're a large part of why I'm big on PC gaming in general, and if there's no money involved then I don't see it being a huge problem.  On the other hand... well, it's kind of the law.  I can't fault a company for trying to protect what is legally theirs, at least not in this instance, and making a mod directly based on someone else's ideas is generally asking for trouble.

With all that said... mouth-shooting.  That's all I ask.  I'm for whichever party does the mouth-shooting.

[Jason_Miao]

Now, to return to reality for just a moment, this is an interesting article. On the one hand, I hate to side against mod makers because they're a large part of why I'm big on PC gaming in general, and if there's no money involved then I don't see it being a huge problem.

But there IS money involved.  It's just not your money.

The way trademark law works, for example, is that if you don't vigorously enforce your trademark, you lose it.  That's why you see companies do "boneheaded PR" things like MS threatening MikeRoweSoft.com owner Mike Rowe, who was selling himself as a software dev.  If they don't want a bajillion people using a "Microsoft" label on their webpages, they have to do it.

As for a series going to waste, it is a shame.  On the other hand, let's say you own some land and you decide to just leave it as an empty lot.  Are scary guys allowed to come in and take it away from you because the land is going to waste?  What if it would benefit lots of other people (e,g a company wants to build a big polluting factory there, but it will create thousands of jobs).  Do you have the right to control your property anyway?  And if you believe that you should have the final say over your lot of real property, then why do you think that Fox shouldn't have the final say over their intellectual property?

[Dracos]

I am firmly of the opinion that we need some sort of oversight group that routinely checks to make sure companies don't sit on otherwise awesome licenses.  You pick up a particularly popular or acclaimed series, and periodically you receive visits from scary guys in suits and black suburbans at your place of business.

Said scary guys inspect the place top to bottom and make sure said series isn't going to waste.  If not, carry on.  If so, they take everybody in the company, from the CEO on down, out back and shoot them in the mouth.

When this is happening, and I am confident that there will, in fact, be a System Shock 3, then we can talk about foxing.

Now, to return to reality for just a moment, this is an interesting article.  On the one hand, I hate to side against mod makers because they're a large part of why I'm big on PC gaming in general, and if there's no money involved then I don't see it being a huge problem.  On the other hand... well, it's kind of the law.  I can't fault a company for trying to protect what is legally theirs, at least not in this instance, and making a mod directly based on someone else's ideas is generally asking for trouble.

With all that said... mouth-shooting.  That's all I ask.  I'm for whichever party does the mouth-shooting.

Truthfully, I find it easy to pick which side to side on.  I think of all the favorite mods I've played over my life and how many have used corporate property as their base... I get a grand total of 0.  I've seen plenty of sucky ones which any good stewert of a property would be absolutely in the right to scuttle like so many cigerette ashes, even without the trademark bit.

Do I think trademark law is a little insane on it?  Yeah.  It is.  But given I don't have a much better way of doing it in mind and it generally works in 99 percent of the cases (Most of the issues largely are people trying to use properties in precisely the way it intends to protect with very few saying 'we're making a true sequel or something').  Do I think that the legal departments could take a little more grace with how they do it? Sure, but given over half these guys respond with "Fuck you" type stuff and smearing the entire company across the interweb, I don't blame them that much for being heavy on the outset.

Dracos

[Karlinn]

Now, to return to reality for just a moment, this is an interesting article. On the one hand, I hate to side against mod makers because they're a large part of why I'm big on PC gaming in general, and if there's no money involved then I don't see it being a huge problem.

But there IS money involved.  It's just not your money.

The way trademark law works, for example, is that if you don't vigorously enforce your trademark, you lose it.  That's why you see companies do "boneheaded PR" things like MS threatening MikeRoweSoft.com owner Mike Rowe, who was selling himself as a software dev.  If they don't want a bajillion people using a "Microsoft" label on their webpages, they have to do it.

As for a series going to waste, it is a shame.  On the other hand, let's say you own some land and you decide to just leave it as an empty lot.  Are scary guys allowed to come in and take it away from you because the land is going to waste?  What if it would benefit lots of other people (e,g a company wants to build a big polluting factory there, but it will create thousands of jobs).  Do you have the right to control your property anyway?  And if you believe that you should have the final say over your lot of real property, then why do you think that Fox shouldn't have the final say over their intellectual property?

With land, you have an argument.  With most intellectual property, you have an argument.  However, System Shock 3 is non-negotiable.  Either make it or let someone else make it.  Otherwise, mouth-shootings.

Back on topic: hence why I used the qualifier "if".  Laws being broken = angry people send mean letters and/or threaten legal action.  It's to be expected, there's not a lot of wiggle room there, and I certainly wasn't debating the legality of this kind of thing :/

[Jason_Miao]

With land, you have an argument. With most intellectual property, you have an argument. However, System Shock 3 is non-negotiable.

Well, according to present law, you can't MAKE them create a sequal.  So I'm afraid we're going to have to stage a revolution.  You get the guns, and I'll try to round up some lab monkeys to use as an army.

[Jason_Miao]

In an attempt to get this thread away from all of that monkeying around, here is an overview of applicable copyright law that is purportedly from a copyright lawyer.  Although on the internet, who really knows?