Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content 235
An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm."
You got it wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Yawn! (Score:5, Funny)
They should be grateful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They should be grateful (Score:4, Insightful)
Coca Cola did the same... but sortof fixed it. (Score:5, Informative)
Two weeks later it was reported that Joel Feitch got well compensated for it (exact amounts were not disclosed as part of the agreement).
Read all about it here [robmanuel.com], with accompanied footage.
The Chinese version doesn't even make sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Social Commentary about China's pollution? (Score:3, Funny)
Of course this: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8874472 [economist.com]Economist article seems to not be loading right now, but they even have a blue sky monitoring scale which counts days without brutal amounts of smog, and are trying to figure out if they can somehow control the weather.
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http://kerrycollison.net/index.php?/archives/5379-Talking-dirty-in-China-Beijing-wants-to-clear-the-air-for-the-Olympics.html [kerrycollison.net]
I guess I was thinking about cloud seeding when I originally read that article
Probably off-topic but what the hell... (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW I am not interested in the Beijing Olympics. Any lingering interest in the event has been soured by the appalling way that Chinese citizens have been treated by their government and, by extension, the IOC. No sports event in the world is worth evicting, beating, imprisoning and killing your own citizens for.
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First of all, it's a friend of my father-in-law's, not his brother. Secondly, I have never met this chap and have never been in his hotel, although I have seen it. Thirdly, I didn't say where this hotel is. I have no interest in promoting his hotel, nor can anything in my post be taken as such. It was just an example of the IOC's zeal in enforcing its trademark.
The second paragraph was a mild piece of self-indulgence, making the point that whatever charges of plagiarism, copyright the
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Heavy Handed Hypocrisy (Score:5, Interesting)
US: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15360 [dvorak.org]
CA: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1777/125/ [michaelgeist.ca]
UK: http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/2008/02/06/olympic-tussle-over-a-name/ [reuters.com]
Given the IOC and each local Olympic committee's approach trademark ownership, they should have no problem removing the game.
This is unlikely because, they will not treat other's work the same as they want theirs enforces. Hypocrisy at its finest.
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Please note that we are a major corporation or something. Laws exist to protect *OUR* copyrights and trademarks. As a major entity, we are allowed to do whatever the hell we want.
Thank you,
The IOC
So let me get this straight (Score:2)
Re:So let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
You are looking at two different uses of the word 'copy', or rather, at two different levels of copying. Scrabulous copies the rules of Scrabble in a game developed by different people, and if there was a lawsuit for every internet game that - to put it mildly - took a great deal of inspiration from another, none of us would be able to move for the boxes full of litigation papers. This, on the other hand, is different, because it copies actual code and graphics from the original. You cannot legally protect game rules, but you can legally protect code and artwork.
There is also an irony issue here, in that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always gone after people even vaguely infringing *it's* copyright with all the teeth-baring viciousness of a rabid attack dog, so to have a website associated with them involved in blatant copyright infringement is more than a little amusing, but that takes a back seat to the difference between the actual legal issues of the two.
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Yeah, because Slashdot is of course a single entity with a single opinion on every subject, not a huge and diverse community whose members hold a wide range of opinions, and indeed disagree so strongly with one another that they waste vast amounts of their time on endless flame wars.
You can make accusations of hypocrisy when you have collected some statistics that show that the majority of Slashdot posters hold both the contradictory views you
Re:So let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
Please name the posters that have demonstrated this hypocrisy. Fiding posts FROM DIFFERENT PEOPLE that are inconsistent is not unexpected when there are upwards of one million members.
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I think its stupid that we live in a world where downloading a song lands you 100K in lea
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Besides, as is said so many times: there many different people that post here with a diverse range of views.
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Right, because you can point me to a story where:
* The FSF has lobbied for laws tightening copyright laws or introducing new ones like the DMCA.
* A GPL copyright holder has sued individuals for distributing a GPL piece of software without source code over p2p (preferably for billions of dollars) (as opposed to a commercial company violating the GPL).
* A lin
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You CAN'T take the source code, rip out the author's information and publish it as entirely your own.
2) The RIAA and MPAA have copyrights, and I'll acknowledge them. The problem I have with the AAs is the fact that they unfairly litigate and punish people using a broken law. Then they try to tell me that I can't copy my CD to my iPod without buying t
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Attitudes toward record industry vs. GPL (Score:2)
Don't forget that copyright is ridiculous when it applies to the RIAA and MPAA, but it's incredibly important when it applies to flash games and the GPL.
If there were no copyright, copyleft wouldn't be necessary. If somebody were to try to take a Free program proprietary in a world without copyright, someone else would disassemble it, comment it, and post it to some comp.sources group.
But the record industry is a different matter entirely. Music publishers have successfully sued people for accidentally copying a couple bars from a proprietary song into their own songs. The precedent set by cases such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three
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Actually, Scrabulous is likely to be removed soon [news.com]. You do have some degree of copyright protection over game rules, and people do patent the damned things all the time. See also: KC Munchkin.
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The implementation is subject to copyright. The public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (for example, the appearance of an icon).
And games, being somewhat superfluous in nature, are generally more expressive than business software
Do They Have Slashdot in China? (Score:2)
Now we know why the Chinese government built the Great Firewall...
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Lets say you are a happy Ubuntu user but somehow interested in Olympic content. As Icaza (future author of future clone) already started whining, the only way to watch videos from official sit
WTO membership implies some things about © la (Score:2)
Wow... seventy-nine posts, most of which attempt to debate the subtleties of Chinese copyright law, something about which none of the posters know anything.
We do know that the People's Republic of China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 [wto.org]. This means that Chinese copyright law has to conform to the restrictions of TRIPS [wikipedia.org].
This is a good reason why... (Score:2)
...pirates have no respect for copyright. The holders of copyrights apparently only respect their own.
They demand that others respect their copyrights and then turn around violate others. How many times have we seen stories where this happened? I've lost count.
nevermind the law... (Score:2)
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Part of the culture (Score:2)
The sad thing for China is that unless this culture changes, it's going to be a very long time before products of any kind coming from there will be accepted by the rest of the world with the same kind of lax inspection standards ones from the West enjoy. Thus, on a per-capita basis, China will never catch up.
You reap the whirlwind.
That's not the only copy... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah that's exactly the same sort of thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
C'mon there is a difference between stealing someones game and tweaking it _without license_ and writing a game that is somewhat similar in game play but completely different.
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It's a byte-perfect copy of many of the elements in the game, sound and graphics. So it really is a copyright violation.
It's simply re-skinning some elements and publishing it as your own. Like taking Windows, make the default background red, and selling it as your own operating system.
Sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fair use (Score:5, Insightful)
In a nutshell, "Fair use" means taking another's copyrighted material for academic or critical purposes. Instead, this (assumed) copyrighted material has been taken for neither of those purposes - instead, it is used to make a website more fun for kids.
And furthermore, 16% of a document/book/program likely goes far beyond fair use for even academic, scholarship, or critical use.
If these "copyrighted materials" had no value, then the developers should have simply included their own materials instead of someone else's content.
FURTHERMORE, to say that 16% of a book, movie, song, or other work is "small enough" to be considered fair use is simply ludicrous. The percentage of material is irrelevant to the copyright. A film is made of over 100,000 still images, yet a single 35mm photograph doesn't have 1/100,000th the copyright protection of a film.
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FURTHERMORE, to say that 16% of a book, movie, song, or other work is "small enough" to be considered fair use is simply ludicrous. The percentage of material is irrelevant to the copyright. A film is made of over 100,000 still images, yet a single 35mm photograph doesn't have 1/100,000th the copyright protection of a film.
Ok, true... but a single frame of a film can be copied under fair use while the film in its entirety cannot.
Your description of fair use is also incomplete (it's not just study or criticism, it can also be time-shifting, transient copying for certain purposes, backups of software and a few other things). I'm tired though, so I'll let someone else explain all this.
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Re:It is NOT fair use, or even close to it. (Score:5, Interesting)
From your link:
This is China. Not United States. If you post a relevant link to the Chinese copyright laws and their notion of fair use, that would be informative and interesting.
Re:It is NOT fair use, or even close to it. (Score:5, Informative)
Here y'go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Trade-Related_Aspects_of_Intellectual_Property_Rights [wikipedia.org]
Note that China is a participant in TRIPS (follow the link at the bottom t'see all participating countries). Software copyright is addressed (it is treated as a literary work under this agreement), and fair use is very limited.
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What goes around [www.cbc.ca] comes around.
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Sorry, infringing the copyright on a work that is given away for free precludes 4.
Nope. Ever heard of advertising revenue? How about non-free items included with the free ones? Ever hear of a company called Red Hat?
The nature of the copyrighted work is that it is trivial and has about a $20 value
That's about the value of a music CD of your favorite band. Now, someone remind me, what is the fine for illegally redistributing copyrighted material?
and in a Chinese court the case would be thrown out.
Would it? [wikipedia.org]
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Look at the ruling on the Java Model Railroad Interface case, and then come back and tell me you want that kind of valuation determination to be generally accepted.
The cost for commercial use of a work, even if that work is freely provided for non-commercial use, is whatever price the author decides on for a differently-licensed copy. Look at the business model used by Trolltech -- do you think that the availability of a GPLe
It's perfectly legal to copy. (Score:2)
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html [copyright.gov]
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
cubes.png [palli.nl]
You can look hard you can see the gamma is a little different between them, but how are they not the same image?
Are you willing to tell me that these are images made by two different persons that just happen to make it look exactly the same?
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They didnt strip out a lot of the unused resources.
Many of the original game files are still in there even when they arent used.
It doesnt take a genius to realise that many of the graphics and sounds are identical as well.
It appears like they did rewrite the code but its still a blatant copy.
They based it from the original swf, they didnt start from scratch.
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I remember him threatening to beat up anyone who bought an iPhone, then denied that he was morally wrong to do so.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
Smells like trouble for the US job market
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd that the graphics are just about all the same in both games. The differences are trivial.
Looks more like someone purposefully made the scripts different, so that they could point and say "Lookee, it's different. See? It's not the same at all. Look at the code. Different." As if they knew ahead of time that there were potential copyright conflicts, and were trying to make an end run around copyright law.
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Just an added thought to you question:
What's the possibility that two different programmers who presumably speak different languages working independently and exclusive of one another,Re: (Score:2)
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From China:
bonus_mc.bonusPtsTXT.text = score;
bonus_mc.bonusCtTXT.text = "X" + _loc5.length;
bonus_mc._alpha = 100;
bonus_mc._x = ice_mc._x;
bonus_mc._y = ice_mc._y;
From the other
Not just a copy... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also like to point out that this is not just a clone of my game. They didn't see my game and set out to make a similar game. They actually stole my game. I'll say it again:
The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).
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Unfortunately, if my assumption is true, since this is
Re:Chinese copies? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, they clearly did decompile the original Flash file and just swapped a few (though not all) art resources. The clouds aren't suspiciously similar... they're the same. The snow, mechanic, ice art, launching art, health bar, etc aren't just similar, they're identical. The tuning seems to be the same, with the same launch times, etc.
It's true that the Chinese are known for copying things. And that flash games get copied a lot more than they should. But the olympic games are notorious for enforcing their copyrights over the slightest infraction by others. Having the Olympics casually steal other developer's work in this fashion seems extremely self-contradictory.
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He even says he decompiled their game and found remnants of code that he reused from other games he made which have nothing to do with this one.
So it's a lot more than just a knock-off. It's an alleged derivitave work without permission.
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(2) Unless they actually copied exact content then there's no copyright issue I can see, just lack of creativity.
Mod score +Five Insightful for the two individual concepts.
Mod score -TwelveBazillion Didn'tReadTheFuckingArticle.
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Re:Chinese copies? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, think about it -- in the Chinese game, your goal is to make the clouds *go away* so you have blue sky.
So, obviously, you hit them with ice cubes. And they go away?
NO, they start snowing on you.
The fact that they didn't even change that detail from the original game -- and it would have been a fairly trivial change! -- looks pretty bad to me.
No copyright on game idea, title, rules, gameplay. (Score:3, Informative)
Remember, you can't copyright the rules of a game - not even in the US of A.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html [copyright.gov]
Re:No copyright on game idea, title, rules, gamepl (Score:2)
Again. RTFA.
Its legal in China ... (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the relevant clause of the Berne Covention [wipo.int]:
Since they don't exactly give their own nationals very much in the way of individual copyright protection, the use of a foreigner's material is no more protected
Re:No copyright on game idea, title, rules, gamepl (Score:2)
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And under the Berne Convention, they only have to give foreign works the same level of protection they give works by their own nationals. In other words, the Chinese government or its' designates are free to copy code, images, and the song of foreigners to the same extent they would with their own people.
Re:Chinese copies? (Score:5, Informative)
If true that's beyond coincidence or imitation.
What de-compiler do you use? (Score:2)
Closed source flash tools [osflash.org] lists only one decompiler. The Open Source Flash Projects [osflash.org] list has no decompilers.
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Re:Chinese copies? (Score:5, Informative)
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Seriously RTFA.
Re:Article presents no evidence of copying?? (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... what? Did you read the article? It specifically does exactly what you say it does not do. It includes screenshots to show that many of the graphics are stolen (pixel for pixel exactly the same, not an approximation). And it includes text from the creator of the original game, documenting how he reviewed their game code and discovered that it was completely stolen, not clean-roomed. From the article:
I'm pretty sure that if the game the Olympics is using contains sound files that are basically leftover stubs from his other games then that's pretty damning evidence.
Re:Article presents no evidence of copying?? (Score:4, Informative)
Any lawyers out there fancy taking on the Chinese Olympic Committee? Might not be a good idea... [guardian.co.uk]
Actually, It works EXACTLY like that. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Copyright doesn't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)
This is good old-fashioned copyright infringement, with no ambiguity at all. And not only are you wrong, you're being a dick about it. What do you have against the author of the original game?
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In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope there are no vulnerabilities in Flash.
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Comment 1: That's not how copyright works. No explanation of why.
Comment 2: Really? How so?
Comment 3: Bad summary.
Comment 4: Actually, copyright does work that way.
Comment 5 (your comment): I have nothing to say, but I'll try and take you down a peg or two by making an inane comment.
The bottom line is: you haven't actually contributed anything yourself. Reread your own comment - it's not exactly full of information - interest or insightful.
Re:Copyright doesn't work like that (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't get mad, get even (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Don't get mad, get even (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Because when the IOC sues you, "they did it first" is a perfect defence.
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Let's try that argument out again, with a small difference:
Let's say the original show is "Firefly." I create a work called "CowboyNeal in Space." I shoot some of my own scenes with their own dialogue and characters, but for the most part "CowboyNeal in Space" still uses scenes, music, dialog, CG from "Firefly." Some of those copied scenes reference th
OK, it's a blatant ripoff. (Score:2)