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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

GNU != Transport Tycoon

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).

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Both OpenTTD and FreeDoom have identical gameplay to the originals but different assets. Also, the level layouts are different in both games as the scenarios are copyrighted, not the concept of the game themselves.

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.

We are going around in circles. Of all the examples, Dave Gnukem quite obviously infringes the trademark. Again, just because no one sued them doesn't mean it's not succeptible to a trademark infringement claim if the IP owners wanted to sue.

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.

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