WoW copyright judgment - Problem for P99?

[guineapig]

Originally Posted by Lazortag [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Sony is just as bad in this respect. They sued someone for tens of thousands of dollars for downloading a song on the internet (If I find the story I'll post it, it's kind of old and not that uncommon anyway).

What ever happened to the punishment fitting the crime in this case? If the case was really about one specific song then how can the lawyer prove that all that money was necessary to cover the damages?

Lawsuits and settlement prices have always seemed so ridiculous to me. We're not talking doctor bills, lost wages here.... hell even emotional distress is more legit (albeit barely).

/derail end

[Lazortag]

In that case Sony argued that because she left bittorrent open, lots of people downloaded the song from her, and so it's kinda like she distributed the song to all those people.

I think there's a thing called "mens rea" that the judge forgot about.

Not to mention the fact that it's just a fucking song.

[wrxBRAH]

Originally Posted by Taxi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Although i think corporate greed is what is driving games down the shitter these days, the people running the server behaved like idiots. They took someone elses work, a mega-greedy corporation's work no less, and re-packaged it and tried to make money off it.

It would be a stupid move to try to do this even with a relatively small company. Im not rooting for blizzard, its more like wtf do you think was gonna happen. Im guessing they gambled that blizzard wouldnt bother, now they get to be the example.

As for p99, as explained, doing this to a private server crew that doesnt try to make money off the game would backfire badly IMO, the money wouldnt be worth the bad press they would be getting from it. Never underestimate corporate greed though, although i hope nothing bad happens to p99.

Edit: Im french and sometimes my fingers type faster than my brain thinks hah, so what i actually think is that they are not in it for the money, but as an example so other people dont get funny ideas about making money off some of their games. Money is always welcome, but IMO not the main reason why they are doing it.

Its the American way brah. Most of the new technology/games/products/music/movies/yada yada that comes out nowadays is just a remake of something before. How many guys write their own code from scratch? 0.000001% ?

[eqdruid76]

Originally Posted by Seritaph [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

By all rights they should, and the Tolkien estate should sue everybody.

Aye. Without Tolkein, we'd be playing Oz Online and World of Wonderland.

And no, there would be no Narnia. Sorry.

[PhelanKA]

Originally Posted by eqdruid76 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Aye. Without Tolkein, we'd be playing Oz Online and World of Wonderland.

And no, there would be no Narnia. Sorry.

Or "The Legend of Jack Chick"

/shudder

[Supreme]

I think the private server was forcing people to pay to play.

Unlike EQ Emu that accepts willing donations for support.

[fastboy21]

the key phrase is that blizzard took action. why they did is unimportant.

sony hasn't taken any action against p1999. if they did p1999 would be shut down also. it has nothing to do with the legal arguments of whether p1999 is actually in violation of copyright law or not. it has to do with the fact that sony can easily throw legal resources at p1999 and its creators that would be highly inhibitive.

[Elissa]

Originally Posted by fastboy21 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

the key phrase is that blizzard took action. why they did is unimportant.

sony hasn't taken any action against p1999. if they did p1999 would be shut down also. it has nothing to do with the legal arguments of whether p1999 is actually in violation of copyright law or not. it has to do with the fact that sony can easily throw legal resources at p1999 and its creators that would be highly inhibitive.

Sad, but probably true. I've said as much in other threads. The legal system is unfortunately flawed in this manner. Costs of participating, even when you have a valid legal argument/defense, are much too high.

[Taxi]

Originally Posted by fastboy21 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

the key phrase is that blizzard took action. why they did is unimportant.

sony hasn't taken any action against p1999. if they did p1999 would be shut down also. it has nothing to do with the legal arguments of whether p1999 is actually in violation of copyright law or not. it has to do with the fact that sony can easily throw legal resources at p1999 and its creators that would be highly inhibitive.

Its still nebulous to me to see if corporations will clamp down on servers like p99 who have no intentions of making money off a game beside donations. You can see the trend though, people who are older and are "hardcore" PC gamers probably have fond memories of the whole mod scene that grew with the release of doom. New maps, new weapons, and then completely new modes of play when games like Half-life came into being (Counter-strike, Natural selection).

Now companies like Bethesda, who used to sell games because their games were so moddable in the past, are trying to appropriate themselves this idea of independent fiddling with a game to extend shelf life way past what it would accomplish on its own. So now you got ridiculous things like bethesda selling horse saddles for 2$ for oblivion. Thats all the downloadable content trends that we are seeing now, where companies are nickle and diming players of content that they used to get in one big expansion every year or so. This trend has another incarnation in the form of MMOs who use micro-transactions as a payment model.

I think one of the reasons to clamp down on independent developpers like the ones here at p99s would be that it makes them look bad. Some of the unreal2004 maps were mind blowing, top notch stuff made by amateurs. One example of this is how starcraft 2 is run. Now if you make a map for SC2, by default the work is owned by Blizz. Theres a huge rant somewhere that i cant find right now on SC2 that splits opens this recent trend of companies like Blizz and Bethesda who used to be at the forefront of the modding scene who are now trying to cash in and push the independents who were responsible for it in the first place to the side. Im afraid this is whats coming for the Indy MMO mod scene as well.

I think the crux of the matter is that when the influence of the bean counters in big companies like Blizzard becomes too big, those companies who used to be at the forefront of the "For gamers by gamers" motto gets diluted and people like Kotick at activision runs companies into the ground. Its not all gloomy though because it leaves a vacuum for quality games that (hopefully) theres always a new batch of "garage" devs like ID software were back in the days ready to blow up the spot. To me these new studios are companies like Relic and Stardock. Unfortunatly i see MMOs taking the hard nose dive recent where no game that has come in the last 2 years has got me to play for more than a month (Fallen earth, Darkfall, Champions online demo). There are so much MMOs coming out, i really hope that these corporate fucks will lose a shit ton of money because they dont understand why people play games (fun) so that they get burned and leave the genre alone. Then when all the shit is filtered out what will remain is games that will stand out because of the passion behind the people making them.