(edit: Nothing about permission in article.)
How about weighing a couple potential morons thinking less of a company against the archival value and reach of a project like this? In my view it isn't even close. The translation is worth it.
Not everything needs to be reduced to "business reputation" and "$". Especially when we're talking about 24 year old japanese software. If anything a translation would improve outcomes for the company in myriad ways. One may be laying groundwork for a modern product that they could actually sell.
Like at least put in an applications, your time is valuable.
Job interviews take way too much time. People have better things to do, such as working for free translating old games.
Maybe this will result in them seeing this outpouring of love for a 24 year old game and deciding to do a remake to their modern standards!
Or maybe a Cease & Desist letter from a lawyer. We shall see.
I mean even then it may still be fine. But speculating about what the company might possibly think is beside the point - they're right there active on twitter! It's perfectly reasonable to wonder why TFA author didn't bother to reach out.
Not contacting them means keeping the clearance status at 'legally copyright infringement' rather than 'explicitly forbidden by the owners'. The two are the same if you just want to answer the 'Is this legal?' question, but for a noncommercial community translation effort like this it changes the 'Is this morally sound?' one.
It's unlikely Kairosoft, or any company, will sue in the US without first notifying. Courts much prefer you solve things without taking up their time, and so most company lawyers know to first give notice.
Given that, it makes perfect sense NOT to ask for permission. If Kairosoft is unaware of it, or okay with it, for the time being at least, they can just ignore it. If that stance later changes, they will almost assuredly notify (especially given the international nature of it, since an international court case, against fans, for something they're not selling, is going to be a lot of trouble and expense and loss of good will, for no real gain) in which case the translation can be taken down.
So legally, this is the sounder strategy. But you may be talking about the ethics of it. We'd have to define what we mean by ethics before really diving into that, but consider - if they were to ask permission, even if everyone involved in creating the game, even if the CEO of the company, were all on board letting them translate it...the lawyers likely wouldn't be. Actually, the lawyers might WANT to say yes, too, but feel it their legal duty to say no - "If we give them the okay others might etc etc and it would weaken future cases in court and etc etc". And based on that the company would say no, even though -everyone involved- there wants to say yes. Not asking, then, gives the company plausible defense later should they need to assert their copyrights, without actually telling the translators 'no' now.
In short, not asking, regardless of how the company feels about it, risks only that the translators will later have to scrap their work. It does not risk the company anything (and in fact gives them the option to allow their work to reach a broader audience AND to assert their copyright any time they choose). As long as the translators are okay with that risk, it presents a win-win.
Now, what makes sense to do -in Japan-, I couldn't say.
I'm talking about the ethics. I think when you're doing something with someone else's creative work, you have to give someone an opportunity to say no. And while it's possible they may want to say yes but not be in a position to do so (for whatever reason), that's ultimately their problem; not asking them because you think they would say no but secretly mean yes is... icky reasoning to say the least.
I'm arguing from a utilitarian aspect - ethics as a means to maximize overall utility would dictate not to ask. But I'm curious what perspective you're speaking from, other than, as mentioned, gut feel (which will leave us at a bit of a conversational impasse I'm afraid).
Kairosoft also produces English translations of many of its games. [2]. According to this photo from the article, the translation appears to be incomplete and leaves much of the text appearing as strings of question marks. [3] I don't believe that a company that produces dozens of games, including for current systems and many translated into English, would approve of an incomplete fan translation of one of its games.
[0] https://kairosoft.net/company/
[1] https://kairosoft.net/game/
And if doing things without an author's permission upsets you don't ever take a look at fanfiction.net.
It doesn't upset me. It's just that no one making fan fictions or fan translations should be surprised when they receive a cease and desist letter, DMCA takedown notice, or copyright infringement complaint.
edit: Actually, it does bother me that some of us think that it's perfectly okay to distribute fan translations of other people's work. It seems like when the work is a game or is in a language that few of us understand, like Japanese, respect for the rights of the creators goes out the window. This causes real problems for the creators, particularly individuals and small companies, that might want to enforce their rights, but don't have the budget or legal resources to do so. So, many of them are victims of international "fans" who do whatever they want. Here, there's no indication that the fans even tried to contact the company about doing a legitimate licensed translation; they just did whatever they wanted to without any regard for the rights of the creators.
In some visual novels, patches are distributed via delta patches that are designed to be used on the binaries provided by the original installation. Or in some other cases, the group only provides certain modified archives which are installed by overwriting the original installation.
In both cases, the end user who doesn't understand Japanese (or in some other VNs, Chinese) are able to play while the publisher/developer still gets compensated for their work.
But for things which you'll not be able to enjoy in a legal way, even if you want to spend the money? I'm all for piracy of software / books / music / art in that situation.
Fanfictions are legal, this one, not so much. At the very least, the redistribution the game part surely isn't.
If publishers aren’t quick to litigate fan fiction away, I’d say it’s because they decided that it’s actually beneficial to them. It keeps the community invested in the fictional universe, and the canonical works only gain in respect—and these are the only ones making money. So it’s a social contract between fan fiction authors and publishers. That is why fan fiction communities try to moderate submissions to keep their end of the bargain—i.e. no selling of fan fiction, and no fan fiction that could be seen as detrimental to the image of the work (for example erotica is not allowed in many places).
Related to this, the novel 50 shades of grey had a pretty interesting genesis where it started out as a twilight fan fiction, which was booted of fan fiction sites because of its explicit content. The author then created her own website. Because she gained a massive following, she realised that she could commercialise the novel. That’s when she changed all the names in the novel to no longer refer to Twilight characters. Because she had already transposed the characters to another universe, at that point there wasn’t much of Twilight left and she was free to market and sell it.
American version is like rights holder’s right to protect mostly financial interest, almost literally “copy-rights”.
When ones from different sides meet a misunderstanding like this happens; one side says “it’s not going to hurt your sales”, the other side says “how dare you mess with someone else’s binary” and the discussions go nowhere.
As for resolution, an emerging choice is to make the author monetize the pirated translation and let them take down the free version. Don’t work always as sometimes the rights holder consider that a negligible gain or minor loss with high reputation risks to day jobs.
So, “it’s not going to hurt sales” won’t work. “Do you have any idea to make it official” is probably better.