Probably not a NES rom…

Just an Executable!

Ill let u guys know more about it later…

Yet, for some retarded reason people still buy sony’s rip off hardware and ridiculous priced memory cards for there psp.

Yet, for some retarded reason people still buy sony’s rip off hardware and ridiculous priced memory cards for there psp.

Ok, not really, but there is a lot of misinformation here about legal stuff. IANAL but apparently I know more than the average reader.

First of all, it looks like he’s writing the code from scratch. Good. Same with the graphics. Great.

Some people said that because he’s not selling it and/or that it wouldn’t cause lost sales that he can’t be sued. That’s 100% wrong.

Other people said that he’s reverse engineering their software and that that’s illegal. The first assertion is questionable (depends on your exact definition). The second is false. You can’t be sued because you reverse engineered something.

So what are the actual problems?

Ok. Let’s start by talking about the different types of intellectual property:

copyright
patent
trademark
trade secret
publicity rights
DMCA rights (access controls)

I don’t think there are any patents involved here. Those are not an issue. Trade secrets would only be an issue if he had worked for Rockstar or stolen internal documents or something. No sign of that here. Those are out. Publicity rights really only apply to celebrity images. Nothing like that here. Access controls aren’t involved. He’s not bypassing encyption or an authentication mechanism or anything like that.

We are left with copyrights and trademarks.

Copyrights can be a problem even if you aren’t making a literal copy. For example, it would totally be copyright infringment if he used their code, images, or dialog. He’s not. But his work is still based on their code and images. The question is if you are copying a protected expressive element of the original work. Since the map is closely based on the original I think that could be a problem. The same thing with the characters and the missions. They could even claim some kind of crappy look-and-feel copyright or trademark like Apple did against Microsoft. (Apple lost.)

The other thing is trademarks. Certain aspects of the game, music, logos, etc. can be protected even if you don’t make a literal copy. And the name of the game…. that’s a real problem. Don’t make it easy for them. Change it to something completely different.

And finally, they wouldn’t “sue for a cease and desist”. They would proably start by mailing your ISP a takedown notice under the DMCA claiming copyright infringement. They might send the author a cease and desist. If he didn’t take it down and stop development then they might file an infringment claim with the courts. Once this happens they tend to “pile it on” by adding claims for every crazy thing they can think of. The court will sort them out…. many years and thousands of dollars later. They would probably also ask for a preliminary injunction to stop development while the court case drags on. You don’t want to get to that point with a big company. They have lots of expensive lawyers who make everything difficult.

That’s my two cents on the legal stuff. Be careful because this software is way too cool to lose to IP concerns.

forza roma!!

se vedemo quanno me compro gta SA