5 ms·
I'm sure I'm missing some context but what is Atari's role here exactly? Isn't OpenTTD an independent and fully legal project? What is Atari's basis for asking
by paxys 8mo ago
I'm sure I'm missing some context but what is Atari's role here exactly? Isn't OpenTTD an independent and fully legal project? What is Atari's basis for asking for a "compromise"?
Or is it just the case that the project maintainers got paid off?
- Closi 8mo agoAtari own all the IP and copyright. While OpenTTD is open source, it's basis is really that the original game was reverse-engineered, originally using the original assets, and then rebuilt. Also all the map data etc is owned by Atari, so you need to have a 'genuine' copy to access all the levels etc.
- paxys 8mo agoWhat copyright? OpenTTD doesn't copy any code or assets from the original game. It is a ground-up rewrite. There is no copyright violation.
- sylos 8mo agoI read somewhere that it's not a clean room rewrite but rather it started off as a reverse engineering.
- designerarvid 8mo agoReproducing someone’s intellectual property and publishing it is exactly what constitutes a copyright violation. You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.
- Sharlin 8mo agoReproducing the surface behavior of a program, no matter how faithfully, is not in itself copyright violation if it's a cleanroom implementation. But int this case it's not to write the new one, the developers studied (and manually translated to C++) the original code, not just the program's behavior. So this is more of a case of a derived work, like a translation of a novel.
- orphea 8mo agoReproducing is absolutely not a copyright violation. Otherwise emulators would have no legal option to exist.
- designerarvid 8mo agoThat is a question about which copyrights are enforced. Different question.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo agoAn emulator is not a reproduction of the thing it emulates.
- anthk 8mo agoLearn something new, dear GenZers: https://osgameclones.com/ https://osgameclones.com/ Maybe you all realize how much brainwashed from corporations yall actually are.
- iso1631 8mo agoLook and Feel in computers and how it interacts with copyright is hardly something new https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJLTech195.pdf https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJL...
- anthk 8mo agoAnd Sony vs Bleem (or the IBM BIOS reimplementation) already set a precedent so that doesn't really matter anymore. Look at Wine. Or Exegutor. Or DOSBox. All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
- iso1631 8mo ago> The code of computer programs are excluded from design protection, but visual aspects of software are very commonly protectable as long as they are ‘new’ (i.e. not a direct copy of anything that has come before) and possess ‘individual character’ (i.e. that the design produces a different ‘overall impression’ than anything that has come before) I'm no expect, but Chris Sawyer style games certainly provided a unique overall impression to me. Whether it needs to be a registered design or not I couldn't say, but it's not going to be cheap to find out. More recent battles have relied on Trademark and Patent law rather than Copyright, but "Look and Feel" is still a legal grey area
- anthk 8mo agoWine literally copies both the Win32 UI -needed to respect that for interop- , some of the kernel functions and Win32 which is just an API implementation and not copyrighteable per se. If not, we woudn't have GNU. Or Microsoft services for Unix.
- jorl17 8mo agoNote that, while it is a rewrite, it was done so through disassembling the original game, not via a clean room implementation. I find this particularly relevant given that the original was written (mostly) in assembly too.
- Closi 8mo agoAlso even if it is a ground up rewrite, the look and feel still matters. Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)
- anthk 8mo ago[flagged]
- bjt 8mo agoThe fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.
- anthk 8mo agoSony vs Bleem. They already lost this case in court.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- comex 8mo agoThat was a very different case. Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here. The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent. If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
- not_the_fda 8mo agoIts not a clean ground-up rewrite. They dis-assembled the original binaries into assembly and started from there.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Macha 8mo agoThere's two issues: 1. OpenTTD is not a clean room rewrite. It started by disassembling the original game and manually converting to C++ on a piecemeal basis. 2. As the game was updated, sure lots of this code has been rewritten. Almost certainly the majority. But has all of it been legally rewritten? Ehh... much less clear. This sort of process has generally been held to produce a derived work of whatever you're cloning, even if the final result no longer contains original code, hence why clean room reverse engineering even became a thing in the first place. It's probably fuzzy enough at this stage that you could have a long expensive drawn out legal battle about it (and I suspect we'll see at least one for some other project in the coming years with the recent trend of "I had AI rewrite this GPL project to my MIT licensed clone"). Would OpenTTD win? Who knows. Could OpenTTD afford it? Certainly not.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but wasn't BSD in a similar legal limbo for a while? In that case wouldn't there be precedent for such projects to be legally fine so long as they've existed long enough and been heavily modified?
- Macha 8mo agoBSD was resolved by a settlement of BSD dropping a handful of disputed files and mutual copyright acknowledgement after it was determined that the company suing them also infringed in BSD’s copyright, so as precedent it’s pretty inconclusive
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 8mo agoIt might be improved and changed in many ways. But I have zero doubt it would not lose in court any argument over copyrights. Most reasonable people would tell that it looks way too close to original. And that would probably be enough.
- iso1631 8mo agoIf I were to create a new game from the ground up, with new artistic assets, and not an LLM in sight, with the characters of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader playing around on the Millenium Falcon, I would be breaching copyright. I'm not sure if look and feel of a game like Transport Tycoon can be copyrighted, but I wouldn't like to be against it. (I remember buying Transport Tycoon from I think Beatles, in Altrincham. I clearly remember riding on the front seat of the bus upstairs on my way to Flixton back in 1994 reading the manual)
- ikiris 8mo agoIt seems you don't understand copyright. The entire game is copyrighted. Not just the specific sprites. You can see the same effect if someone were to make a yellow short guy with metal claws and regeneration as a character.
- hrmtst93837 8mo ago[flagged]
- hrmtst93837 8mo ago[flagged]
- lstodd 8mo agoWhat levels? TTD, Open or no has no levels, only a map generator, and you seriously don't want to try the reimplementation of the original one.
- LoganDark 8mo agoAtari probably threatened to take it down if there wouldn't be a compromise. So a compromise was worked out that wouldn't require a takedown.
- lstodd 8mo agoPretty much this. No one was interested in playing corporate games, and Steam/GoG isn't that important anyway.
- legitster 8mo agoThese are not people ripping off TTD to make a buck. If you absolutely love the game so much that you spent 20 years modding it, you're going to have some respect for the original and the publisher and are probably glad they are interested again. I get that it's not the same Atari as it was 30 years ago. But I liken it to you being a Beatles cover band and the estate of John Lennon reaches out to you, you're going to treat them with some sort of respect.
- altairprime 8mo agoSee also what happened with Tron 2.0, where Disney unexpectedly published a software patch 20 years later that obsoleted the community work necessary to get it running on modern Windows 10+. The community was ecstatic, not offended, that the IP owner had randomly decided to contribute. Sure, a lot of their work was either disrupted or nullified, but that's not someone 'ripping off' the community's investment — that's someone validating the community's investment. Given how other companies act, 'validation and cooperation' after a long drought of inattention is perhaps the least likely outcome here. It's so nice to see it. (Of course, in an ideal world, companies would not be wholly inattentive to older properties — but that's basically unsolvable without economic-level solutions for the problems of capitalism, so I don't have any ideas specific to video games to offer.)
- kabdib 8mo agoI really wonder who "Atari" is these days . . .
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoWhile Atari holds the rights to Transport Tycoon, I'd argue that at this point taking OpenTTD down would be a huge footgun; like Nintendo with emulators, they can also buy / license the engine and re-release the game on modern platforms under its official name.