legal mumbo jumbo

[honkFactory]

Hey y'all,
I was checking out the legal articles posted recently and I'm still alittle unclear on the subject. Take Tetris for example. There a 5 million different versions of tetris out there. Can any of these publishers charge money charge for these games? (Naturally nobady would charge money because nobody would pay for Tetris in this day and age, but is it legal for them to charge.) What if somebody wanted to remake, say, facetris(tertris like game) or descent or agent usa (old game that was available on apple II and atari). What then?
Also what if somebody wanted to make a descent-like game or a princeOfPersia-like? How close can one get without being liable?
Anyway,to hell with lawyer and happy christmas.
A.W.

[ChrisD]

Hi

1. People will still pay for a cool 3d tetris clone.

2. It is not legal to copy it straight out.

3. Legal is a ummm relative term....
Ok so someone... I think its infograms which bought atari from hasbro who now
owns it... Needs to sue you to stop selling your clone and or for damages...
Now what they sue you over is kind of gray...
So as a mac game you can probably get away with it just fine...
Im not saying you should but they tend to ignore smaller non commercial... read.... in store companies...

4. In the past this is how this played out...

A... for years lots of people made clones of tetris and other games.

B. A 3 years ago or so there was a number of companies selling these clones in all the stores for PC
and making good money.

C... Then Hasbro... came along and bought atari... or at least there software division and rights to the name(?) and older games... They backed by lots of money started sueing everyone selling clones in stores... for the most part I think all those suits were setteled out of court.
Now a few years later hasbro after loseing a lot of money on their software division ( somehow ? ).... went on and sold atari to infograms...
Since then I have heard no word of additional law suits of this kind.
But it had a chilling effect across the whole commercial budget game industry
as you can tell by the store shelves these days...

PS: IANAL :blink:

[Carlos Camacho]

Read the interview with Andrew of Xtreme Games. I look at it this way, if you make a direct clone of the game, say Tetris, you better be ready to reply to a lawyers letter. On the other hand, if you take a game, and build on it -- so that it stands on its own, then things should be OK. A good case study is Airburst.

I also think that some ideas for games would be hard to defend in court, so you should be safe. Maybe an example would be a golf game. But if you copy the exact method that a popular golf game uses to swing the club, then you might get an "Adobe/Macromedia" type situation.

Cheers
p.s. I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on TV.