How To Judge Legal Risk When Making a Game Clone? 270
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"
Assassinate the original owners (Score:2, Funny)
Once they're all dead, they'll be no-one left to sue you.
PlanetMULE (Score:3, Funny)
By any chance are you the guy running PlanetMULE?
Find prior art first (Score:1, Funny)
Find some earlier game that the game you are cloning copied.
Make yours look more like the earlier (hopefully unprotected) game - when it goes to court
most of the attack against you will also be an attack against the attacker.
Re:You can't (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Laws have become horribly, horribly complex (Score:2, Funny)
that's the plain ugly truth hanging-all-out-there-naked
Coming from a girl posting on slashdot at 4AM, that has to be an oxymoron! Will you mary me?
by snowgirl (978879) * writes: Alter Relationship on 2010-01-12 20:26 (#30734680) Journal
Maybe she lives in my part of the world...
Re:Assassinate the original owners (Score:4, Funny)
Assassinate the copyright owners, then wait 70 years?
Re:You don't... (Score:2, Funny)
How do I make sure I don't get pregnant while having sex every day without using any form of contraception?
Be male.
Re:Good luck with that. (Score:2, Funny)
No - all that hiring an expensive lawyer does is give you someone to sue if you follow their advice and still get sued into oblivion by the other party.
So your plan is to sue a lawyer??? you will need a lawyer for that I guess.... oh shit.
Re:Laws have become horribly, horribly complex (Score:3, Funny)
I sell FUD insurance. It's not clear now if you need it, but it would be very bad if you do turn out need it and don't have it.
Re:Laws have become horribly, horribly complex (Score:2, Funny)
That seems a bit unfair to guys. I mean, I know a guy who's interested in four things.
Re:Let me present a third choice (Score:5, Funny)
No, they don't. Atari as a company ceased to exist in 1996. The name was picked up by Hasbro in 1998 and then by Infogrames in 2001, but apart from the name, logo and ownership of a truckload of copyrights the organization currently calling itself "Atari" has absolutely nothing in common with the company Nolan Bushnell founded back in 1972.
This isn't a question of Theseus' Ship sitting in the harbour at Athens and being slowly replaced board by board until there is nothing left of the original, it's more like Theseus taking his ship out to sea for a wild party, dousing it with gasoline and burning it to the waterline, only to have Menelaus build an entirely new ship in Sparta with the name "Thezeus" on the prow two years later and then sailing it to Mycenae and selling it to Agamemnon who turns it into an amusement park where people pay large sums of money to play on half-finished rides and be beaten with sticks when they complain.
The modern day Atari is the ship that Orestes built after termites destroyed that one. And it has trouble floating because he ran out of wood before the job was done. The Mycenaean QA department insists that the boat is good and that there is no need to patch it as any sinking problems are clearly the fault of the end users.
Re:Let me present a third choice (Score:4, Funny)
No, this is either TediousAnalogyGuy or PretentiousAnalogyGuy.
Re:The real question: WOULD they sue? (Score:3, Funny)
And SCO seems to still haven't come to the conclusion.