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?
Or is it just the case that the project maintainers got paid off?
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.
(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.)
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.
You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.
Maybe you all realize how much brainwashed from corporations yall actually are.
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJL...
All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
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
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)
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.
Another similar case with exact grounds was GNU which with Linux it completed an OS albeit in a hacky way, because the original OS would have been GNU+Hurd, but both are reimplementing Unix. Same SH derived shell, but extended. Kinda like OpenTTD. We have GNU Coreutils, Findutils, GNU AWK reimplementing and extending AWK (even when AWK was propietary), GNU Zip, Tar... the list goes on and on.
Oh, another one: Lesstif vs Motif. Same UI, if not very, very close to Motif 1.2 in order to be interoperable. Today it doesn't matter because nearly a decade a go Motif was relicensed into the GPL, but tons of libre software depending on propietary Motif was just seamlessly running with LessTIF libraries except for some rough edges/bugs. One of the most known example was DDD, a GUI for GDB.
- Chip's Challange and custom levels pack
- Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic
- LibreQuake
- Supertux2
- Oolite
- Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets
- Frozen Bubble
- Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.
There are clear counter examples - see Tengen vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Palworld, Microsoft vs halo inspired games, Microsoft vs Minecraft clones. Most are settled out court. Examples that go to court tend to be from companies with budgets to fight, lots of projects will just get DMCA’d and won’t fight, or will back down after a legal letter.
Ultimately copyright and IP infringement is decided in the courts, and the rules aren’t entirely black and white.
On software recreating something propietary:
- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... vs AT&T Unix.
- GNU+Linux or GNU+Hurd against propietary Unix kernels.
- Coreutils+Findutils+Sharutils... every tool reimplemented being propietary.
- Bash, GAWK, GCC, binutils, Clisp, SBCL, GNU GCJ+Classpath, Red, FreePascal+Lazarus, GNUStep+WMaker, LessTif, EMWM+Motif vs Irix' Maxx Desktop (still propietary, and from the 90's) Gaim, AMSN, 7zip, Haxima+Nahzgul (and Ultima it's still being sold at GOG), Supertux2, Supertuxkart, ReTux (very Wario like), Hexoshi (Metroid), SMC (Super Mario World), Pingus (Lemmings), XMMS/Xine cloning WinAmp and maybe PowerDVD (Xine with skins), WordTsar for Wordstar, Nano for propietary Pico (and Alpine for propietary Pine), BSD vi and Amiga vim for maybe propietary vi under AT&T/commercial Unix, Lincity and Lincity-NG for Simcity, FreeCiv against Civilization (it can use both the OG Civ rules and their custom ones), Frozen Bubble (I think the level set it's from the Neo Geo release), KGoldrunner and such for Lode Runner, Kapman for Pacman, every BSD shipping Tetris and Boggle, GNU Octave for Matlab....
The list example for both software and games being just reimplementation/clones of propietary tools goes on an on. Even DOS had propietary clones which had to reimplement the same interface as MSDOS because if not the tools written for it would just crash. Same commands, same output, same formating tools, same memory layout, they ran the same DOS binaries and drivers...
Other than the fact that most of these are very different situations, but even if they were the same it is like saying “snorting coccaine is legal because I can give a list of celebrities that have done it and have not been arrested”
The examples that are similar - eg FreeCiv, imo probably survive because of the decisions and polices of the original publisher rather than some magical legal protection which allows you to make 1:1 copies without being sued.
TuxRacer isn’t really a copy of anything, and an OS or computer utility will likely be treated in a materially different way to a computer game by a court of law.
GNU AWK it's literally copycat of Unix AWK having all of the functionality of the original AWK without being bound to the original source. So is GCC vs any vendored Unix 'cc', 'ld' and 'as', where GNU GAS was the alternative.
Again, there's GNU Bash against Unix SH, with the same exact flags for interoperativity. Ditto with Alpine against Pine, or GNU Nano against Pico with the literal same interface, commands and layout. And these are older than TTD itself.
Should I go in? Lesstif against Motif. If you installed Lesstif tons of Motif stuff would work straightly as is, as XPDF did. Another one? XMMS. Once you skinned both the were the same.
Different types of media get treated differently by courts. If you repaint a painting 1:1 then you are liable to copyright. If you make a song that is too substantially similar you are liable to penalties. If your branding is too similar to the Oscar’s or Starbucks you are liable for infringement.
On the other hand if you reimplement Java the courts have decided that’s OK.
Different media are treated differently. A game and an OS kernel have different attributes in reality (even if technically they are both bundles of code - courts don’t always decide things on technical literalism, they often apply the spirit of the law, understanding if the application meets the original intent and precedents).
If anyone wrote custom cities, textures, scripts and so on with the OpenMW engine you are totally free to do so even if the result looks eerily similar to Morrowing but not being the same game at all, if any sharing a fantasy RPG setting and that's it.
Ditto with OpenArena being a total clone of the Quake3 Arena concept but with different levels and assets, and virtually it's the same game at a 99%. You can totally sell OpenArena or any new game reusing these assets if you comply with both the GPL and the CC license from the media.
Dave Gnukem it's an obvious Duke Nukem (pre-3D) clone and even if it can't play the original game, it can be trivially adapted to reuse the original textures and level sets in order to get a very close gameplay to the original. And yet no one sued them.
While I am aware they claim parody law exempts them, see the enforcement of other brands (e.g. Starbucks) and see how far that goes once it gets to court.
But I don't think I'm going to convince you, and I don't think you are going to convince me, so I'll just disagree agreeably and this will be my last message.
Software projects that are themselves a type of art that is itself copyrighted, lol no.
Heck, back in the day Rogue was propietary and commercial (and thanks to that we got both the roguelike genre and the Curses library) and yet Hack was born as a libre clone and from Hack we got the now uber known Nethack and forks like Slashem.
Cloning commercial games it's older than Windows 95 itself and probably as old as the NES.
The https://osgameclones.com has so many examples that you whole point gets invalidated since the first Hack release for Unix. And Tetris for Terminals, MSDOS and the like.
Hell, in the 90's everyone in Europe (children of blue collar workers) got a Russian Tetris clone -oh the irony- called Brick Game with often several micro low-res commercial game clones such as for Frogger and Battle Tank. No one sued that company ever, even if the Tetris concept itself was for sure patented and copyrighted. And that game was probably sold by millions, maybe even more than the Game Boy if we count every clone sold with different plastic cases, because you could get one for the price of a book and today for less than a fast food ration.
See Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc
That happens all the time, as long as you don't put their logos on your thing, there isn't shit they can do about it.
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.
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)
You can see the same effect if someone were to make a yellow short guy with metal claws and regeneration as a character.