I am not quite sure how easy that would avoid a company's troop of lawyers if they really want to take you down. I've seen similar situations with comic book companies, for example, the long-debated court case with the creation of Captain Marvel. Here we have a unique character created by a small company, but just happen that his name's the same as one of the largest comic companies ever, they filed a claim on him. Even changing the name to Captain Thunder didn't save them in the end just cause they simply did not have the money and resource to fight Marvel. Here are a few questions that came to mind: - Are we really questioning people using sounds from sighted games cause we are law-loving, good people, or are we just doing it cause we think someone might come and steal ours too?
- Can it be that some of us are just hoping for free games? - Do the giant companies really going to waste time bothering small time game-makers like in the blind community? How would they even hear about us? Especially when and if they do that, they might get to deal with the human-right societies and other groups that seem to think that materials copied for blind-use should get a break... - Are we maybe flattering our selves a bit in thinking that even if we make and sell 50 copies of a starwar game, some big-ass company gonna come and drag us to court? - Are we now over reacting a bit in view of what's just happened with Liam's copyright being stolen? I once played alot of sighted games my self, even when I was blind as I am now. Quitting them was my own choice, but to be honest, I'd die a happy man if someone come and sell me a blind-friendly copy of something that I never could manage to play. JST P.S: If any of you come up with a resident evil game for blind people, I'll buy it! -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 9:46 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Illegal activity was: star wars sounds Hi Johnny, Well, it is possible a community as small as ours has simply gone unnoticed by companies like Paramount, or they don't think we are worth there time. Either way David Greenwood has never indicated having any problems with Trek 2000 and I have never heard any complaints about STFC. Copyright law is a very sticky and tricky business. There is both an intelectual property and ownership angle that needs to be balanced here. With Shades of Doom it is based on the doom concept, but the name and game is different enough to probably get away with to much complaint from the maker's of the Doom triligy. As someone pointed out one way to get around copyright law is to come up with something similar, but change it enough that isn't an outright copy. Take the game Resident Evil. At the basic level you are an investigative reporter trapped in a shopping mall with a bunch of psychos and Zombies. The concept itself probably could be used, but not the characters and sounds and avoid copyright laws. Say I come along call it the Zombie mall. Instead of a reporter I am a comando from the Seals, Marines, a FBI agent, bla. The layout of the mall is different. Zombies are in different places. I used someone elses initial idea, but made up my own game. johnny tai wrote: > I don't think I'm too worried about personal preferences here. I too like > original materials, but I can't say if someone to make, say, a > blind-friendly Final Fantasy game using the FF sounds, I wouldn't buy it- > hell, I'd buy it in an instant! My question was more around the legal issue, > if using starwar sounds is really not legal, how did GMA get around with > using star trek sounds, and the Doom name, that too is not quite original > seeing how that game's kind of like the original Doom. > And by the way, the sounds in Shades of Doom, some of them anyway, are not > original...as far as I can tell, since I came across a site which contains > hallween effect sounds for download, and alot of them are sounds you find in > SOD. > I admit, it is perfectly possible someone took the sounds out of SOD and put > it on a site for free download, but it'd be interesting to know how this > work legally. > Again, I am not trying to argue with anyone or criticize anyone, just want > to learn how things work-- legally. > JST > _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
