Capcom 'Saddened' By Game Plagiarism Controversy 163
Capcom's recent release of action platformer Maxsplosion for the iPhone caused indie developer Twisted Pixel to call Capcom out for copying the concept from their successful Xbox Live game 'Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom." The indie studio had even pitched the game to Capcom for publishing at one point, but were declined. Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was developed independently by Capcom Mobile. Nonetheless, we are saddened by this situation and hope to rebuild the trust of our fans and friends in the gaming community."
"Controversey"? (Score:5, Funny)
/. readers 'saddened' by misspelling of "controversy" in the title.
Re:"Controversey"? (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly not the same.
Heck, I can't see any [ecetia.com] similarities at all [apple.com].
As if they don't lose that argument already at the name.
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Yes, I know whereof I speak.
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You make whoever you present it to sign an NDA, which you get notarized before you ever speak to them.
So, then if the person you talk to likes your idea, he can't speak with anyone else in his company to champion it. That doesn't seem like a good way to sell an idea.
Basically, it's not possible to present an idea to anyone without giving them the chance to "steal" it. Since ideas are cheap and it's all about the execution, anyway, you really shouldn't worry too much.
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Is it the same? The Wikipedia article says they copied SMB after it launched - and considering it launched two year later than SMB, it doesn't surprise me.
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I always thought the American spelling of whisky was silly, but this is getting ridiculous.
I believe you mean the Irish spelling [wikipedia.org], as far as I know the U.S. produce nothing that's worthy of the name :)
Rye and corn indeed...
Amazing coincidence.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Amazing coincidence.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I accuse you of sarcasm!
This could get complicated (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This could get complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand corporate emotions now. As soon as I read the title, I knew Capcom had plagiarized something.
So here is the corporate-to-human emotion conversion table:
Corporate --- Human (Example as used in corporate-speak)
Sad --- Remorseless denial of guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence (As seen in the title, or "we are saddened about the situation at our Chinese manufacturing plant")
Happy --- Having a Greedgasm (As in "we are happy to report record 4th quarter earnings")
Proud --- Cautiously Optimistic (as in "Microsoft is proud of the security enhancements to our latest products")
Pleased --- Cackling like a Supervillain (as in "we are pleased to be found innocent in this case")
Regret --- Polite Indifference (as in "we regret to inform you that your services are no longer needed" or "we regret to inform you that your personal information was stolen from our database")
Disapproval - Insane with Rage (as in "Ubisoft disapproves of piracy")
Remorse - Grudging, hollow, and remorseless admission of guilt (as in "BP expresses remorse at the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico")
Re:This could get complicated (Score:5, Informative)
Silence --- Thankful no one seems to have noticed "Phew we seem to have got away with that, everyone is blaming BP"
as in the Gulf Oil Spill :
Hyundai - Built the Deepwater Horizon
Transocean - Owned the Deepwater Horizon
Halliburton - Contractors doing the work, and Maintaining the Rig
Anadarko, MOEX - Co-Operators of the field and Rig
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You left out the caterers, the company that ferried employees back and forth, the security firm and the janatorial contractor.
You're not really a very good BP shill, are you? I hope they aren't paying you much, if the best you can do to deflect the significant portion of responsibility that rests with them for choosing such a lousy bunch of contractors and pushing them to complete a dangerous well on an unrealistic schedule, is to point out that there are others who must take their own portion of the blame
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The same thing occurred to me as I was writing it actually...
Re:This could get complicated (Score:4, Informative)
I am pleased to announce that this list is brilliant, and I express remorse at not having penned it first. However, I regret to inform you of the possibility of it showing up on other websites soon.
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Sad --- Remorseless denial of guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence
Or: "Hey look, lying is profitable! But my god don't tell our employees or customers, because we depend on thier honesty for our business to succeed!"
There is a moral theory that says you ought to make your behaviour the rule--that action is ethical if you could will that everyone behaved that way. This is based on quite reasonable notions of identity: if all humans are of the same kind, then it is reasonable that they should behave in the same way, so what is ethical for one ought to be ethical for all
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Their response reminds me of the Johnny Carson (I think, it's been a while now) skit of Nixon saying "I didn't do anything wrong, and I apologize for what I did do."
Huh?
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Double-plagiarism É (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging by the video, Capcom's game looks like as much a rip-off of Splosion Man as of Sonic the Hedgehog.
If this is the product of the wholly-owned subsidiary that used to be called Cosmic Infinity, then I'm not surprised. There were a shithole back when they were independent, cranking out such shovelware classics as "Who wants to be a millionaire", which was little more than "You don't know Jack" 's Java engine with a different set of questions. That shop was an embarassment to the Canadian tech industry, and for Capcom to buy them up, well that just shows how little they care about the mobile segment.
For Twisted Pixel, this is not worth suing, because if push came to shove, Capcom will simply disown the studio and there will be nothing to go after. This is partially why big game houses farm out the shady/underdeveloped titles to subsidiaries: limited liability.
Re:Double-plagiarism (Score:2)
Re:Double-plagiarism (Score:5, Interesting)
We here at Capcom are saddened that [...] we can't go after Minecraft, Super Meat Boy etc without getting noticed.
Well, I think that they don't care that much about simply getting noticed.
They're saddened that they could lose sales because of bad publicity as a consequence.
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>>They're saddened that they could lose sales because of bad publicity as a consequence.
I thought all publicity was good publicity? =)
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To be fair, they could probably code a better Minecraft than the official client and server that Mojang have been putting out. :3
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Considering Notch coded Minecraft in OpenGL 1.1 and has lighting on a cubic basis is manually calculated on every "chunk" update, yeah Capcom could CODE Minecraft better (they won't update it afterwards however).
I'm not dissing Minecraft the game: I own it since the alpha before 10000 sales (it's over 1 million now). It's just really primitively implemented and Notch needs to buy and read a book like OpenGL 2.0 for dummies.
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Sadly this behaviour gets noticed only here on
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Free clones of UNIX (Score:2)
I see a pattern here where these big cat corps think thay can just pick up ideas from little devs and shoulder it out.
What is your take on free clones of UNIX, distributed under such names as FreeBSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu?
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Although to an individual developer, suing someone with limited liability can still result in a reasonably sizable settlement; possibly far less than Capcom might make on the rip-off, but more than the indie dev was likely to make on it, which is arguably a reasonable solution.
What they won't get is 10% of Capcom which, ironically, may mean that the studio is more likely to go with the settlement rather than tying it up for decades.
That's it? (Score:2)
I mean, I see the similarities and everything, and if I were them I'd go after Capcom.
Of course, maybe their motivation for not doing so has nothing to do with Capcom being huge... maybe they're afraid of some Jihadist group claiming prior art.
MBA programs now teach this kind of approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the likely net cost of the lawsuit times the likeliness of that lawsuit succeeding is smaller than the expected revenue minus the goodwill hit, then move ahead.
If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed.
Just as simple as that. Just like any other lesson from school. I've been amazed and disgusted at how openly some executives have admitted this to me. And they almost always phrase it precisely like that.
After more than a few drinks.
Usually then they laugh and look smug.
Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools. You think I'm exaggerating? Get a few drinks into a graduate of a high status MBA program on a day that they're feeling good and ask them.
Re:MBA programs now teach this kind of approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the likely net cost of the lawsuit times the likeliness of that lawsuit succeeding is smaller than the expected revenue minus the goodwill hit, then move ahead.
If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed.
Just as simple as that. Just like any other lesson from school. I've been amazed and disgusted at how openly some executives have admitted this to me. And they almost always phrase it precisely like that.
After more than a few drinks.
Usually then they laugh and look smug.
Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools. You think I'm exaggerating? Get a few drinks into a graduate of a high status MBA program on a day that they're feeling good and ask them.
As much as I hate the whole concept of management school are you sure you're not confusing correlation with causation? It may not be part of the curricula - perhaps only criminal scum of this ilk are attracted to the degree in the first place and don't need to be taught to behave unethically?
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Now now. I'm sure a job with the sole goal is earning as much money as possible attracts all kinds of social, creative and non-materialistic people.
Yes, I meant precisely what I wrote. (Score:2, Informative)
Hi. OP here. no, I meant precisely that executives have admitted to me that this approach is taught in business schools. Which should be no great surprise since it's none too far a stretch from the philosophies of people like Alfred P. Sloane who organized and endowed many of these schools in the first place.
http://streetcarstospaceships.typepad.com/s2s/2008/12/i-dont-want-to-live-in-a-society-run-by-a-bunch-of-generals.html
Iacocca's autobiography, oddly enough, goes into quite a bit of detail about this. A
Some history and help to FTFMs. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi. OP again. Fwiw, I first heard the formulation above at an inventor's conference in Crystal City in, iirc, 1985 from one of the conference speakers. Funny thing, in his case he was mentioning it as the reason that he said most companies *won't* steal inventions. After all, afahcs, they also then followed the rule that if the lawsuit was likely and the damage solid, it was cheaper just to buy the frackin' thing.
Problem is, as books like The Innovator's Dilemma lay out, Not Invented Here makes it, oddly en
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No, he's right. I've been taught to "imitate" things that show promise. They don't exactly teach you to break the law, but they give examples where obvious plagiarism has been dealt with outside of the court system, so I guess they think it's OK then.
Are there any known situations where someone or something has intentionally *exploited* another company's likelihood of screwing them over?
Example. I have some arbitrary intellectual property (let's call this the "MacGuffin [wikipedia.org]") that would plausibly have some real and very non-trivial value if offered to other companies on the free market.
In reality, I know that one or more of these companies are likely to be *not* acting in good faith and will probably attempt to rip it off if they can get away with it- s
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I'd always thought of it as a Master of Bullshit Artistry but I think yours fits better.
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Hey, at least this way TwistedPixel are getting some free advertising. I'm not that interested in the game yet, but at least I'm now aware of it.
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It's not an ethics program, it's a business program. To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
I wouldn't do these things myself, but I can see the "business sense" in your little formula. Whoever can bend the rules the most has a good chance of being the most successful, as long as they don't go too far.
but reality is more complex than the formula (Score:3, Interesting)
Look again at what you just wrote. "make the most of every resource you have". "make the most". What does that mean exactly? "every resource you have". What do you mean by that? And do they "have" things that first they need to steal? Do I "have" your possessions? The contents of your bank account? Is that a view of the world we should look at and say "that's only natural"? If that's not "too far" for you, what is?
Not only that, ya see, you actually *don't* even always maximize gain by maximizing short-term
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I didn't say to make the most of the short term or to try to screw people over necessarily. IMO that is not good business sense unless you're one of those douchy CEOs looking to make a quick buck and then jump ship. I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
For example with the first Saints Row game it was obviously a rip off of GTA and I found that kind of despicable. For some reason I decided to try the second game though, when it got really cheap, and I found
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I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
Did you know it's actually legal to, I don't know... goof off on /. during the workday [*]? If employees took the attitude of their bosses, companies would go broke in short order. So it your position isn't even logically consistent: it depends on there being one set of rules for some human beings and a different set of rules for others who are beings of exactly the same kind.
[*] Hey, don't look at me... I've got two compiles and a firmware update running...
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Well, I can't blame employees for goofing off on Slashdot either, seeing as people do need to take a break every so often. Of course, I probably do it just a teeny bit too much. I think that makes my position pretty consistent. I get my coding done, and part of my job is just being around in case things go wrong anyway.
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To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
You would not like to walk down the street in a society where everyone behaved that way.
If it isn't right for everyone to do it, it isn't right for anyone to do it, because we are all beings of the same kind.
Arguably, there is a stable solution to the social game that involves treating people the way they treat others, and I see no reason not to treat all corporate executives as dishonest scum who should be looted at every opportunity, based on exactly the reasoning you just gave.
After all, if I can bend th
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I didn't say it was "right", I just said it was what you needed to do to do "as well as you can", and for a company that basically means maximising profit. Companies very often do things which your average person would think of as wrong, but is not necessarily illegal.
There's a difference between "right" and legal. It's very hard to keep the two in line. Especially since "right" is such a nebulous term.
I see no reason not to treat all corporate executives as dishonest scum who should be looted at every opportunity, based on exactly the reasoning you just gave.
After all, if I can bend the rules without getting caught--the bet execs are making every day--then there's nothing wrong with my doing so. It's a business decision, and I'm in the business of maximizing my own benefit, just like they are. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?
That is indeed how a lot of people think, and act. I sometimes wonder if I'm being a fool for not acting t
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Everybody is supposed to work within the confines of the law, but we all tend to push it if we think we can get away with it. Everyone goes over the speed limit a little bit sometimes (probably most of the time). That's generally ignored by the Police and not seen as too bad by other people. Some people go over it by a lot and risk getting caught, but they still obviously consider the risk worth it.
With grey areas like this I don't have too much of a problem. If you can copy a game and make it a better game
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I've never liked the speeding analogies when it comes to this concept of breaking laws a little. There is a fundamental difference between a speed limit (note limit) and assault and battery. Granted t hat when I go over the limit by a few the cops may or may not fine me, but its not jail time. It is not an arrest. If I throw a punch, even a small one at another and a cop sees this and the victim presses charges its a crime with the potential for jail time.
Speed limits are about revenue first, safety sec
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Yeah I think you're taking the analogy a little far. It was not meant to be any kind of justification for breaking the law, it was an example of grey areas before the law is being broken.
In the analogy, the point where a businessman is actually breaking the law IRL would be the point where a Police official considers that they have to pull someone over for speeding - which is usually not just from going over the speed limit by a couple of mph. Any point before they need to be pulled over is a grey area wher
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If that explanation still sounds like a justification then I'm sorry, perhaps a better example would be a noisy neighbour. The neighbour might know that they are being so noisy that you can hear them, and even though you may be annoyed at it, unless it's past a certain time of day, or above a certain noise level, you can't really do anything about it but ask them to keep it down. Maybe they'll be nice and comply, maybe not.
Again, don't try to take the analogy too far, I'm just trying to illustrate how peopl
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Tony: I am afraid the time has come for you to pay us.
Krusty: Look, I'm cleaned out. Just take the Clown College.
Tony: We have already taken it.
[at the college]
Man: Kids have a lot of money these days. So after you finish your
performance, you might consider robbing them.
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There's a big difference between knowing what ethics are, and being an ethical person.
I've never taken a business management course in my life btw, I've just witnessed situations where people take liberties with what may be considered ethical for their own benefit, or those of a business. Often such things can bite you in the ass (and deservedly so), but people who get close to the line without stepping over it, obviously have a good advantage when it comes to things like taxes etc. By all accounts most com
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A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't know about you, but the fact that something like this can even happen is an egregious
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Really? Do you ride in cars at all? Because then you're just as culpable. We could make cars much, much safer, but they would then be much, much more expensive... perhaps so expensive that no one could afford them, or at least a very few.
Everyone is making this trade-off all the time. It's harsh to see it laid out so explicitly, but it's actually there all the time.
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Exactly. Consider 4 or 5 years ago, I was at Firestone getting new tires put on my car. There was a customer there who was told by the Firestone rep that their car needed ball joints, shocks, tires. Basically the front end had been let go long enough that all of the normal wear parts needed swapped.
The customers got new tires and maybe an oil change. And due to their budget, the cheapest of the cheap tires. Now THAT should scare everyone; because no matter how well you take care of you, someone else is
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That's not completely the fault of the customer, it's the fault of greedy companies just like the ones we're discussing. Shops have a habit of telling the customer they need things they don't really need, and/or trying to sell expensive items when the cheap one is just as good. The customer has no way to know that this time around he really does need all those other parts and really wouldn't be better off with the cheap tires, since he has no way to know that the shop is telling the truth this time instea
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While I don't disagree about shops telling people about things they don't need, when a customer comes in with a beat up '80s era taurus that should have been put out to pasture a long time ago it's probably not corporate greed driving the recommendations.
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We could make cars much, much safer, but they would then be much, much more expensive...
I've heard that attaching a large spike sticking out of the steering wheel would make drivers drive very, very carefully.
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This was taught to me in a network security class as "Risk Management". Of course, it was being applied to questions like "how much should I spend on security measures for facility x?" The big difference with MBAs is that ethical implications are a possibility but not a deterrent.
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cost-benefit analysis, and it's the cornerstone of every informed business and management decision.
So you're against having reason and logic i
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What do we expect them to do? They are a small company. If they win the lawsuit they would break even or make a few bucks. If they lose it will be hundreds of thousands and they go out of business. Even if they win a huge settlement, they don't see a dime until the suit is won, the years and years it takes them to win in court leaves them deeply in the red.
We should be more outraged that large companies can effectively strong arm small businesses or individuals out of attempting to raise a suit like this.
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No, greater than. Why do you think so many companies lose money?
The profitable ones have executives smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
reading wikipedia (Score:2)
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Yeah that's really dumb, they want to win back their fans trust and they do that by telling a big lie. They really must take us all for idiots; I can't wait to see an article from them discussing piracy. Keep this in your bookmarks folks.
Typo. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was copied independently by Capcom Mobile.
fixed that for you.
maxsplosion is a blatant copy of splosion man. i wrote a short story in 3rd grade where a man named flilligan got stranded on a desert island with several other castaways, and that wasn't even as blatant as this.
For $699 I'll entertain that notion (Score:2)
maxsplosion is a blatant copy of splosion man.
yeah, and linux is a blatant copy of unix. you sound like sco.
Isn't that legal? (Score:3)
copying the concept
Isn't that perfectly allowed, as long as they don't copy any actual code, data, or trademarks? If cloning a concept is a problem, then there are a lot of open source projects and indie games in trouble :S
Re:Isn't that legal? (Score:4, Informative)
You're free to write a story about a wizarding school somewhere in the remote parts of the UK, you're fine writing a story involving said wizarding students fighting against some great evil, you're on shakey ground when the heroic lightning-bolt scarred Harry Motter and his two friends (one poor, the other both a girl and smart) battle the forces of wizardy prejudice, and you're probably going bankrupt if you go ahead and skip the pretense. It's all a matter of degree really.
Re:Isn't that legal? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Data East also released http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ>Karate Champ, the first side on beat'em up, 4 years before Street Fighter came out.. so while the Fighter's History poster and style does look very much like Street Fighter, you could still make the case that Capcom were the first to actually copy anything in this instance.
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Precisely.
I think an appropriate level of criticism would be: "Bad show, old bean", followed by a fair amount of tutting.
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Some aspects can even be patented. Fortunately this is not a common practice.
... yet.
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A Pac-man clone with the same main character would be a trademark infringemnt.
And also copyright infringement if the characters look more similar than the game rules require. Atari v. Philips.
Some aspects can even be patented. Fortunately this is not a common practice.
Not common? I can think of a few patented games of the top of my head: Dr. Mario is patented (US Patent 5,265,888, which since got a reissue to fix claim wording), and so is the sanity meter of Eternal Darkness. Remember Konami v. Roxor over the Dance Dance Revolution patent?
Copyright used in practice as an ersatz patent (Score:2)
And for every game you mention that does have a patented mechanic I can come up with dozens that don't.
And one major game whose copyright owner routinely pretends that its copyright is a patent: Tetris. In 2009, The Tetris Company threatened Biosocia, operator of Omgpop.com, with a lawsuit over having copied the rules of Tetris into Blockles. Six months later, they settled out of court with Biosocia agreeing to replace Blockles with a Puyo clone by the same name.
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
"We are sad that someone noticed, and hope that people will forget that we did this."
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Justice is one-way? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Simpsons did it - "People like us can't afford justice" [subtitlr.com].
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I do believe you've got it. This will continue for a while longer until a majority of people complete the grieving process and internalize this knowledge. Them citizens will begin burning down corporate headquarters when this sort of thing happens. They will, of course, be labeled as terrorists and criminals. After that happens for a while, the citizens will take to burning down the courthouses as well. There is an outside chance that enlightened self-interest on the part of various leaders will bring about
More likely... (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd think (Score:2)
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It's really not even that unlikely that the team that developed the game for Capcom didn't know that the idea h
Obvious (Score:2)
"too small to take on a company like Capcom."
Which is exactly why Capcom can and did.
5 step plan (Score:2)
Step 1: ???
Step 2: We may have no idea what to do, but a tiny little company that's way too small to sue us made a successful game!
Step 3: Copy their idea.
Step 4: Profit!
Step 5: Act remorseful when the similarities are inevitably discovered.
Time honored tradition? (Score:2)
I was under the impression that gameplay plagiarism in video games was a time honored tradition, and is not illegal in any way unless the actual source code or data is plagiarized.
How many Angry Birds clones are there?
I can see there being trademark infringement here because of the name, but nothing else.
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I know of at least one game [wikipedia.org] that was recalled for being a blatant rip-off.
We need tort reform (Score:2)
That way small companies will have even *less* ability to fight the giants in court. Oh wait, that doesn't help at all.
Protest suggestion (Score:3)
Everyone should buy this game and then post a bad review for it. That will teach 'em!
Saddened eh? Emotions on corporations (Score:2)
In other news today, Playstation felt irritated and exasperated because of PS3 pirates, Linux feels disappointed and neglected for another year, Facebook feels cheerful and optimistic about the coming year, and Apple was full of rage and jealousy because Google looked so damn cheerful and content.
No basis for legal action. BUT. (Score:2)
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Capcom did not violate copyright. You cannot copyright a game mechanic, a character design, or a game concept. This isn't like Capcom pulled art assets out of Splosionman and resized them before putting them into Maxplosion, or put Splosionman through a disassembler and included chunks of the resulting code in their own game, or made a character or logo so similar that it would violate trademarks (remember, trademark law operates on very different principles than copyright
So "plagarism" bad for CapCom, NOT open source? (Score:2)
I wonder what the reaction would be if it weren't CapCom who had written a "knockoff" product, but rather an open source one.
My bet is that most of the people piously talking about how evil mimicking ideas was, would be defending the open source project.
Mark me down as on the side of allowing software engineers to be inspired by other products which, while having some interesting elements, just don't quite get all the way there. Otherwise we just hold back innovation.
The last thing the world needs are pat
They admit it. (Score:2)
Originality is a myth. Self-important hypocrites. (Score:2)
Originality is a myth. Every idea that ever has been had wouldn't have been had were it not for other ideas others had in the past. Anyone who claims he is owed for an idea he had is a hypocrite for he then also owes many others for the ideas that inspired his.
Also, people think of things all the time, everywhere, and have forever. There's no way to know who thought of an idea first, and it doesn't matter, since people can think of things independently at different times.
All these "controversies" are not
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Or substitute it for the RIAA, who last week were discovered to have been illegally selling songs over and above the number that they were legally licensed to sell, and not giving any of the profit to the artists.
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By the sounds of it, they settled for cheaper than the amount that they'd set aside in case of lawsuits, so somehow I still think they came out on top. For one thing they were still making interest on the money that they'd set aside. The interest on 50M over a few years is not to be sniffed at.
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So the punishment was to do exactly what they were supposed to do. Exactly how is that justice? Or, for that matter, punishment? How does it discourage them from doing the exact same thing over and over again, knowing that sometimes, they'll get away with it and that when they don't, they lose nothing over what they would have paid anyway?
And that's not even counting that this was a settlement, most likely for far less than they actually owed.
Re: (Score:2)
Here you go.
http://static.arstechnica.net/assets/2011/01/max-splosion-man-mash-thumb-640xauto-18966.jpg [arstechnica.net]
They pretty much ripped off everything. Even the name is similar.