Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Naively, I had the inverse question after reading that, how would this be illegal? Why must this be a labor of love? Use of Factorio IP seems limited to visual inspiration and file format parsing, and its clearly transformative (in the legal sense of the word)

View on HN

Sometimes I think we're far too obsessed with legal. The developer is good to the community, the community is good to the developer. This seems like a much more productive relationship than arguing over what is legal.

"Visual inspiration" is generous. The models are a direct 1:1 copy of the in-game sprites, which sounds like a "derivative work" to me. IANAL.

In this instance, it would be more than "look and feel" and more "would a person assume this project is done by the original Factorio developers" — are they misleading the audience. They copied much of the UI from the Factorio site for instance — so if they wanted you could make the argument the intent is to mislead.

The website UI is by the Alt-F4 team, not the FUE5 team, it's like seeing this discussion and then complaining that FUE5 'copied' Factorio's colour scheme, thinking they are also behind hackernews, lol.

I think you’re confusing trademark and copyright. Trademark is about confusing the public. Copyright is about derivative works. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a derivative work, due to its direct copying of Factorio sprites.

I mean, nothing is clear in terms of "transformative" and never has been, but I absolutely agree with the overall point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com