Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Grakelin]

I stumbled across it today.

This guy, playing things completely straight, repeatedly harrasses GoG.com because there is a mod being used in their release of Lords of Magic which, in turn, has parts of a mod he once released contained inside of it. In one e-mail, he claims his name is protected by copyright law, and requests the Head of Business Development over at GoG stop using it in his e-mails.


I figured I'd share, since it's the funniest thing I have seen all week.


EDIT: It's even better if you poke around some of the other posts there, or read the bar across the top. The guy offers people a pirated copy of the game, but is threatening to sue GoG.com for stealing his mod.

[Zangi]

Slum version of the Patent Troll?  Epic

[Chaoswizkid]

I'm confused.

Is he actually trolling? It sounds like he's being a one (my name is copyrighted), but there is some logic in it (which is perhaps what merited the 'Great').

[Duuvian]

In my view his claims are entirely legitimate. This was a game made by a now defunct company. This guy (Dan for fear of legal trouble  ) worked on it for years as a hobby after talking to the original creator and received his permission to continue development. At some point in the past he helped another mod-maker with his mod and supplied him with code and/or technical advice.

This second mod was for a time packaged with GoG.com's download and thus his work is a part of the derived product. In addition his maintenance of his website suggests that, in addition to providing some portion of GoG.com's saleable product, he also willingly supported the further development of that product for free.

In otherwords, these people should be partners rather than facing a legal battle.

Basically, this sums it up, from Dan himself:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As stated previously, COPIES of LOMSE which contain stolen works is... you guessed it, STEALING. Stealing from 3 people at once. Whether or not my contribution to the LOMSE community was derivative, GoG.com is guilty of stealing both my labor and infringing upon the copyright and EULA. It was admitted that one agent of GoG.com tried to find a patch for the game. You cannot patch the game without being a End-user, can you? Or would you argue that you have to use the "Install" or "Setup" program first?

GoG.com breached EULA, as stated in previous emails, and have trampled upon copyright by repackaging the game at a profit.

Also as previously stated, you're not selling original retail CDs. If you were, you would be selling legitimate copies of the game. And those legitimate copies would not include my works, which are a product of my labor.

[chaoticag]

He is wrong though. Working on a mod does not make the mod your property, it makes the mod property of the property holder, as it technically is a derivative work. The mod is the property of the IP holder, which can choose to have it distributed in whichever form they like. Lastly, can someone breach the EULA if they are not an end user? For that matter, is Dan even looking at with whom the EULA is referring to, and the scope of it? There is, to my knowledge, nothing stoping him from placing an excerpt online to make his point. And if you do not declare copyright and have no proof of copyright, then the mod becomes public domain once it's reached a point in distribution. Lastly, you cannot copyright your own name, so far as I know.

[RedKing]

I've let a writer buddy bounce some ideas off me in the past, and given him one or two that he further fleshed out and eventually used in work that was later published. Does this give me any kind of IP rights to *his* work? If his published work containing some ideas, characters, etc. that I was marginally involved in creating is then published in an anthology, do I have the right to sue the publisher of the anthology for royalties?

I think he may have a technical case, but it's a very slim one. At best, I'd say he would need to produce documentation as to what chunks of code he was directly responsible for (vouched for by the actual mod creator), determine what percentage of the overall product that represents, and pay any royalties accordingly. So if his direct contribution was only 1% of the finished code (including the base game code), then he gets 1% of whatever the royalties would be if they were paying the originating publisher. Indirect contributions such as advice should not be considered IP.

[Duuvian]

I think he may have a technical case, but it's a very slim one. At best, I'd say he would need to produce documentation as to what chunks of code he was directly responsible for (vouched for by the actual mod creator), determine what percentage of the overall product that represents, and pay any royalties accordingly. So if his direct contribution was only 1% of the finished code (including the base game code), then he gets 1% of whatever the royalties would be if they were paying the originating publisher. Indirect contributions such as advice should not be considered IP.

Seems like it would be better to offer him that in return for continued work on his mod. Everyone wins that way. He would probably do advertising for them for free if he had a slice. That's what I'd advise the two parties to do, anyways.

[RedKing]

I think he may have a technical case, but it's a very slim one. At best, I'd say he would need to produce documentation as to what chunks of code he was directly responsible for (vouched for by the actual mod creator), determine what percentage of the overall product that represents, and pay any royalties accordingly. So if his direct contribution was only 1% of the finished code (including the base game code), then he gets 1% of whatever the royalties would be if they were paying the originating publisher. Indirect contributions such as advice should not be considered IP.

Seems like it would be better to offer him that in return for continued work on his mod. Everyone wins that way. He would probably do advertising for them for free if he had a slice. That's what I'd advise the two parties to do, anyways.

Yeah, but I don't think GoG is interested in continued work. They're not adopting the game to carry on development, they just go around and buy up the rights to old games so they can turn around and sell cheap digital copies of them. This usually means fully patched games, and in the case of a game like Lords of Magic, the original was so horribly bug-ridden that the developer/publisher (Impressions/Sierra) abandoned it and it was left to the player community to develop patches to work out the remaining problems, and mods to address the play balance issues.

I'm guessing they might run into the same issues if they sell Emperor of the Fading Suns with the Hyperion and/or Nova patch, since both patches were unoffical (read: player-created) but almost anybody who plays the game uses one of those two. Or Ascendancy, another great but crippled title that had a lot of user-intervention to make playable.

[chaoticag]

At best, he can expect a recognition, but without any documentation or proof of the hours and work he put into it, he won't come off as the kind of guy that did it. Heck, he's going into this without any idea what the copyright laws entail, and GoG.com is not legally obligated in any way to help him. Would you rather help someone that is polite with his requests, or someone you know is all bark and no bite?

[chaoticag]

Actually, it isn't. Imagine if programming were something like reading. A game mod that doesn't modify your ability to read basically just switches out the book you are reading, so that's not modifying the program so much as modifying some of the parameters.