How To Cash In On Screwing Over Foreign Developers
Every now and then an interesting piece of journalism comes out of left field and captures our attention while having nothing to do with either Sony’s inept marketing or a certain Miami lawyer’s tantrum-like behavior.
Today, such writing comes in the form of John Anderson’s “Ripping Off Japan- Japanese Video Game Copyright Protection & Preservation (Or Lack Thereof)”. The article shows focuses on how several US-based corporations are blatantly copying Japanese-owned games and remarketing them in North America as their own creations.
Anderson, who specializes in providing overseas business strategies for Japanese video game publishers and developers, focuses mainly on how many corporations are essentially cloning many classic titles’ play mechanics and slapping a thin digital coat of paint over the game in order to claim it as their own product.
Perhaps the most disturbing example in the article is that of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (which receives almost a billion dollars a year in federal funding):
The network currently operates “Cbc.ca/kids”, a website aimed at children with Flash versions of games that visitors can play. Their “classics games” section features X Attack, a clone of Space Invaders (Taito) and Matrix Moon Mayhem, a clone of Moon Patrol (Irem). Another notable entry in their “action section” is Sushi Samurai, a clever clone of Burgertime (which was previously owned by Data East but then sold to G-mode, a Tokyo-based cell phone content company).
Yes, that’s right, federal Canadian tax dollars are funding Flash clone development of video games originally created by Japanese companies. Some may argue there is no harm done since these games are not being “sold” for any monetary value. That’s wrong. The CBC is still selling their TV programming to website visitors of all ages.
While this may sound dull, it actually gives a simple and interesting explanation about how many copyright laws work and why many Japanese companies are hesitant to file lawsuits against these corporate jerks (here’s a big shocker: one of the reaons is that the Japanese don’t want to face a biased American court system). Click here to check it out.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to on 25 October 2006
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: clones, copyright violation, flash games, Gamasutra, illegal copies, John Anderson, space invaders
I can’t believe Gamasutra would publish an editorial from a middleman who’s complaining about knockoffs. It comes off as so much whining: “Hey, I can’t advise my clients to charge a lot for these simple 30 year old games because someone at this evil governmental entity made a knock-off in 20 minutes one day! I don’t want to be responsible for picking a job that’s not lucrative, so make them stop!”
You have to clone a game’s play mechanic pretty dead-on in order to infringe someone’s design copyright, as far as the courts here have ruled. (Not a lawyer, but as someone who’s been writing videogames off and on for almost 25 years, I’m pretty interested in that stuff.) If you copy the art in the game too closely you’ll get in trouble (see Pac-Man vs. K.C. Munchkin, which went Atari’s way only on appeal) but if you change it up a little, there’s really nothing Taito can do about your knockoff of Space Invaders…. look at Space Armada for the Intellivision, released while Space Invaders was still hot on the Atari, for proof of that. Atari had the exclusive console rights to Space Invaders but couldn’t do a thing. (But Mattel changed their Asteroids clone into Astrosmash out of fear of being sued… and Astrosmash probably gets a lot more play on people’s cell phones nowadays. Forced them to make a better game…. I have it on my Gamecube and it’s like crack when I start playing.)
Of course, in this day and age the threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to get your way, unless you bark up the wrong tree.
Think about this: if Congress hadn’t passed so many copyright extension laws in the last 30 years, Space Invaders would be public domain by now. Asteroids and Pac-Man would be freed in 2008, Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in 2010. Instead, thanks to the work of wealthy cartels, it’ll be another 40 or 50 years before the very first Spacewar game on the PDP will fall out of copyright. The real shame here isn’t that Flash designers are “ripping off” classic games, but that the classics haven’t become part of the cultural commons yet. Businesses like Andersen’s are really not much better than jackals coming late to the corpse.
Raindog, I’m not going to argue with what you’re saying because I’m actually fairly indifferent on the whole matter and simply thought the article was interesting and well-written. You have to admit, though, that Anderson’s not entirely useless/vulture-esque since he caught a company who had removed the orignal copyright info from a Japanese game and was marketing (otherwise unchanged) title as their own creation.
Cheers,
BoT
The author doesn’t seem to understand the law behind his bitching. He writes based on the standard lay person assumption “Hey, I made something, so you shouldn’t be allowed to ever copy it.”
In intellectual property law, they have what they call the “idea/expression dichotomy:” – Ideas themselves are protected from copying for only a short time, and only if the idea is actually new and inventive. This is called a Patent.
– Expressions of an idea are protected for a longer time, but only that exact expression. This is called a Copyright.
There have been some video-game mechanic patents, such as the “loading-time-game” patent. For the most part, though, video game publishers don’t seek patent protection for their games for two reasons: They know that their mechanics, though memorable, aren’t really that new. Also, it’s expensive to prove that your idea really is new, if it is.
So, they rely on copyright protection, which is automatically given to anything written or created, but it only protects that exact writing or creation.
This means that, like with books, movies, music, photography, or any other method of expression, anybody is free to take the underlying unpatented ideas and create new expressions of that idea. This is not a loophole – this is how the system is designed. It’s good for consumers, and it’s good for industry, if there are more ideas out there that can be used.
If this wasn’t allowed, then there would be no Splinter Cell games, because Metal Gear Solid came first. There’s be no Madden NFL, because Tecmo Bowl came first.
If the author of the article had his way, a manufacturer would come up with a game design, and then nobody else would be able to use a similar design. And that’s just unAmerican.
K
He makes reference to having found a company that copied a game while just replacing the copyright info or logo with their own, but he’s talking about Flash and mobile phone games, and not too many classic arcade games were written in Flash or Java. Then he moves on to the CBC thing as if it were more damning. I would need to hear more details before giving any credence to that particular claim.
I don’t really know a heck of a lot about copyright law, but…
– The CBC isn’t making an direct profit off of those games. – I highly doubt sales of Space Invaders are really raking in the dough for Taito right now. – Is someone going to see one of those plug-and-play Atari machines and think to themselves, “Why would I pay 30$ to play Space Invaders on my television when I can just play that free knockoff on the CBC website?!”
And X Attack isn’t the first Space Invaders rip-off for sure. A game like “Swarm – The Bugs Strike Back” on neopets.com, though it is styled a little differently (exempli gratia, the enemies are more spaced out) the gameplay is exactly the same.
I’m not denying that plight of Japanese developers, but I think those were some bad examples to site.