

The case of the identical rabbit games - jeff18
http://kotaku.com/5750238/the-case-of-the-identical-rabbit-games

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vessenes
This is a pretty straightforward case of copyright and perhaps trademark
infringement; I would be pissed off if I were Wolfire, too, but the reality
is, they just need to send a DMCA takedown notice if someone's infringing on
the Lugaru trademark or copyright on the levels / game data.

If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk
licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have
absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff
developers.

Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire
release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial
release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.

~~~
Skroob
Agreed. What bugs me about Rosen's statement is that he seems to expect Apple
to police this for him, and that's not something they can or should do. He's
within his rights to send Apple a DMCA takedown and they'll respond to it, as
they have done in the past (for example, in the case of VLC for iPad)

~~~
jerf
"and that's not something they can or should do."

Why not? They provide a lot of other policing work, like use of wrong APIs,
style violations, rejecting your app because there are already enough apps of
that kind and you added nothing new, and all kinds of things _way_ more fiddly
than wholesale copying. They're taking a nice cut, they ought to be bringing
the customer and developers some value for it. Isn't that the whole Apple
Store value proposition?

~~~
Skroob
What Apple does is curate the store to their standards, which makes them the
decision makers on what is and is not acceptable. Copyright is a large and
nuanced legal issue in which they can't be the final arbiter, so why would
they want to expose themselves to that hassle? This exact issue is a great
example: according to the "copiers", they have a legal right to release the
app. Whether or not they do is not up to Apple to decide.

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rflrob
I haven't downloaded either of them, but at least on the App store page,
iCoder's Lugaru isn't accompanied "with a written offer, valid for at least
three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of
physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of
the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1
and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange." iCoder's
response in the article seems like a slightly more coherent version of "if
it's on the internet it's in the public domain."

An earlier version of paolomaffei's comment also pointed out that the original
post says that only the code is GPL2, and the game assets are not to be resold
without permission.

------
paolomaffei
<http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source>

~~~
pygy_
_All game assets and demo data (should all be in "Data" folder in the root of
the source tree) are not under the same license as the engine code. Wolfire
has allowed the_ _data_ _to be_ _freely_redistributed_ _for_
_non_commercial_purposes_, _but it is forbidden to use in any revenue
generating works._

[http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/file/97b303e79826/CONTE...](http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/file/97b303e79826/CONTENT-
LICENSE.txt)

~~~
pedanticfreak
I find it incredible someone with enough expertise to build the project and
get it on the Mac Store can be so clueless with regard to licensing.

Not only are they using unlicensed game assets, but it seems they are
violating the GPL as well.

I suspect iCoder knew what it was doing all along.

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philjackson
This is a shame, I bought this game as part of the Indy Bundle and really
enjoyed it.

What Matlin is doing is defiantly unethical but if it's illegal (thanks to the
distribution of the media) then it sounds like Apple aren't doing enough for
the hefty cut they're taking.

