The case of the identical rabbit games | Hacker News Reader

The case of the identical rabbit games

kotaku.com

58 pointsjeff1810 comments

This is a pretty straightforward case of copyright and perhaps trademark infringement; I would be pissed off if I were Wolfire, too, but the reality is, they just need to send a DMCA takedown notice if someone's infringing on the Lugaru trademark or copyright on the levels / game data.

If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff developers.

Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.

Agreed. What bugs me about Rosen's statement is that he seems to expect Apple to police this for him, and that's not something they can or should do. He's within his rights to send Apple a DMCA takedown and they'll respond to it, as they have done in the past (for example, in the case of VLC for iPad)

"and that's not something they can or should do."

Why not? They provide a lot of other policing work, like use of wrong APIs, style violations, rejecting your app because there are already enough apps of that kind and you added nothing new, and all kinds of things way more fiddly than wholesale copying. They're taking a nice cut, they ought to be bringing the customer and developers some value for it. Isn't that the whole Apple Store value proposition?

What Apple does is curate the store to their standards, which makes them the decision makers on what is and is not acceptable. Copyright is a large and nuanced legal issue in which they can't be the final arbiter, so why would they want to expose themselves to that hassle? This exact issue is a great example: according to the "copiers", they have a legal right to release the app. Whether or not they do is not up to Apple to decide.

The whole point of the DMCA takedown process (for better or for worse) is to remove the burden of investigating the validity of copyright claims from distribution services. It's one thing to judge app quality; it's another thing altogether when two people submit essentially the same app, and disagree over who actually created it.

I haven't downloaded either of them, but at least on the App store page, iCoder's Lugaru isn't accompanied "with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange." iCoder's response in the article seems like a slightly more coherent version of "if it's on the internet it's in the public domain."

An earlier version of paolomaffei's comment also pointed out that the original post says that only the code is GPL2, and the game assets are not to be resold without permission.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source

All game assets and demo data (should all be in "Data" folder in the root of the source tree) are not under the same license as the engine code. Wolfire has allowed the _data_ to be _freely_redistributed_ for _non_commercial_purposes_, but it is forbidden to use in any revenue generating works.

http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/file/97b303e79826/CONTE...

I find it incredible someone with enough expertise to build the project and get it on the Mac Store can be so clueless with regard to licensing.

Not only are they using unlicensed game assets, but it seems they are violating the GPL as well.

I suspect iCoder knew what it was doing all along.

This is a shame, I bought this game as part of the Indy Bundle and really enjoyed it.

What Matlin is doing is defiantly unethical but if it's illegal (thanks to the distribution of the media) then it sounds like Apple aren't doing enough for the hefty cut they're taking.

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