Its very questionable to include the assets. The bottom of the readme says:
> Includes assets and graphics extracted from the original SimCity 2000 Special Edition CD. These assets are NOT covered by the GNU General Public License used by this project and are copyright EA / Maxis. I'm including these assets in the hope that because the game has been made freely available at various points in time by EA, and because it's 24 years old as of publishing this project that no action will be taken. Long story short, please don't sue me! Long term, I plan to add functionality to extract assets from the original game files within this project.
The normal way for these open-source engines work is to insist that the users get the artwork from another source.
I once wrote a building generator that could create SC2k pixel art buildings based off a simple floor plan and some settings. It could be used to generate a lot of assets in a hurry.
Unfortunately it was quite a long time ago when I was into game development as a hobby, two MacBooks ago. I’d have to see if I still have the hard drive it was on. I never thought it would be useful for anything.
In any case I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is inspired to write a similar tool, it’s really just laying down pixels and shapes in an isometric perspective, and a few other decorative touches.
I don't think "bad faith" and "slimy" should really apply to 24 year old game assets.
I value useful creation much higher than dated intellectual property. Or in other words, I do not support long-tail profit and control of any creative work.
I suspect virtually all of us here agree that copyright terms are too long, but this still looks like wilful copyright infringement.
Not that it would make any difference if EA stopped selling it on GOG. The idea of 'abandonware' has absolutely zero legal standing, as far as I'm aware.
I agree with you in sentiment, but this is not a form of protest -- just laziness. Even if it were some sort of protest against copyright laws, it would be a pretty terrible one.
I don't think anyone here is claiming that the author is legally in the right. This is a moral question and labels like "slimy" and "bad faith" are moral labels, not legal ones.
> If powerful corporations or special interests want to influence legislation, make them convince the people that something is a good idea and have the people contact their representatives.
(1) A "special interest" is any strict subset of the population. There is no necessity that it be nefarious, as you imply.
(2) A republic, by definition, doesn't require the constant approval of the population for each action. That would be a democracy, which we in the USA don't have and never did. In fact, our founding fathers explicitly ruled out the idea of governance by "the mob".
(3) The problem with "powerful corporations and special interests" is that they have receive concentrated benefits with diffuse costs. The solution is for every elected representative to always vote "no" to every change to the status quo unless it meets a very high bar for diffuse benefits. That kind of government would get even less accomplished than the "Do Nothing Congress".
(4) It's simply unwieldily for elected representatives to talk to their entire constituency on any regular basis. The only time this does happen is when we have some sort of panic. Those with means figured this out and hired people that specialized in getting the attention of legislators, executives, and regulators.
(5) I'm all for rooting out corruption and eliminating it. I'm not for hanging people for doing something that is perfectly legal under current US law.
Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to anyone else that the copyright on most software will outlast the existence of any computer the software was designed to run on? Part of the intellectual property “bargain” is that the right will one day return to the public, who can finally benefit. The extreme length of time appears to circumvent that end of the bargain.
When they grew in popularity they gathered to completely redraw new assets from scratch.
It's a good way to kick start an MVP.
Also the technology choice doesn't really matter, there's a sweet spot where the new features outbalance the nostalgia of running the original game. At least that's what I think when I play OpenTTD
OpenRA is reimplementation of the Red Alert game engine that support multiples games. They have their way to deal with the assets issue but I forgot what exact solution it is. At least RA is available for download for free for EA so its help too.
Edit: « OpenRA is 100% free, and comes bundled with three distinct mods. When you run a mod for the first time the game can automatically download the original game assets, or you can use the original game disks. »
Reminds me of Forge, which is a fanmade computer implementation of Magic: The Gathering. It doesn't come with any card art, but after you start it up there's a menu item that'll let you download all the card art from a server.
(honestly, that probably isn't totally legal either, though)
How do these types of projects get around the fact that the new source code is clearly a derived work of the old game? I’m not saying they copied code, but they must be copying the design or the game would be a different game.
It can get dicey if you end up copying actual machine code, even if you translate it in to something higher level. One way round this is clean room design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Many EULAs state that there will be no attempt by the user to reverse engineering the workings of the program. How would that fit with clean room implementations?
They could do what many propiratary software developers do and simply write a wrapper that download and extract the assets on the users side during installation and have the user do the "compiling". If that work to avoid creating a derivative gpl program, or simply put the legal responsibility on the user, then surely it will work here too.
That's the plan here. Short term, it will include the ability to select and parse out the original assets - long term I'd like to do something similar to the approach that OpenRA has taken (in game asset downloader that makes it seemless to the user).
I agree, but wanted to get something working out there first. I'm finishing up some code over the next day or two that will import the original assets from the game files without needing to include the assets within the repository.
who cares? intellectual property law in the united states is irrational and immoral. i strongly support evading the law or fully exploiting gray areas / unenforced copyrights.
That's easy to say if you are not the one who gets hit with a C&D plus some claim for x billion damages or whatever the going rate is these days. Life's too short to sit in courts and fight for something which is a hobby.
simcity's IP is owned by EA, which is a multibillion-dollar publicly-traded company. this isn't just "someone's art". the only ones who benefit from strict enforcement of 25-year-old IP are EA's shareholders, not the artist, and certainly not the public.
Abandonware is nearly always technically illegal (after all, if it wasn't, and was formally released by the copyright holder, it would be freeware). As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the game is still sold, so I'm not sure it even qualifies as "abandoned".
Most of these sites depend on the copyright owner no longer caring or being hosted in countries that may have shorter copyrights or aren't subject to the DMCA.
This is why copyright laws are terrible in the US. It is a game that came out in the 90s, copyright protection for it should be over at this point.
Personally I pretty much just ignore copyright. I don't have a bootleg factory, but at the same time I am not concerned about downloading a file like this
Copyright is pretty straight forward in the US. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
This game is still under copyright and including the assets for public consumption is considered illegal, unless otherwise specified by the rights holder
> Includes assets and graphics extracted from the original SimCity 2000 Special Edition CD. These assets are NOT covered by the GNU General Public License used by this project and are copyright EA / Maxis. I'm including these assets in the hope that because the game has been made freely available at various points in time by EA, and because it's 24 years old as of publishing this project that no action will be taken. Long story short, please don't sue me! Long term, I plan to add functionality to extract assets from the original game files within this project.
The normal way for these open-source engines work is to insist that the users get the artwork from another source.