Was this done with the permission of Kairosoft? Kairosoft may not approve of an unlicensed translation of a game that they still distribute on their web site, for various reasons including that a poor quality translation may tarnish their business reputation.
I have serious doubts that someone downloading this near 30 year old game's clearly fan translated version is going to be shocked and appalled by the poor quality translation and then reflect this onto Kairosoft's "business reputation."
How about weighing a couple potential morons thinking less of a company against the archival value and reach of a project like this? In my view it isn't even close. The translation is worth it.
Not everything needs to be reduced to "business reputation" and "$". Especially when we're talking about 24 year old japanese software. If anything a translation would improve outcomes for the company in myriad ways. One may be laying groundwork for a modern product that they could actually sell.
I don't know why everyone's piling on GP here. This isn't abandonware, the game is still being distributed by a company that still operates. And TFA author isn't distributing a mod or a patch, they're distributing the full actual game, which the owner is also still distributing.
I mean even then it may still be fine. But speculating about what the company might possibly think is beside the point - they're right there active on twitter! It's perfectly reasonable to wonder why TFA author didn't bother to reach out.
If the general very strict adherence to copyright in Japan is anything to go by, contacting them would probably mean getting a 'no, absolutely not' back initially, and even if they find someone there who is receptive to the idea the chances of getting full, legally sound permission seem remote.
Not contacting them means keeping the clearance status at 'legally copyright infringement' rather than 'explicitly forbidden by the owners'. The two are the same if you just want to answer the 'Is this legal?' question, but for a noncommercial community translation effort like this it changes the 'Is this morally sound?' one.
To my mind wilful ignorance is not a defence. If you know they'd say no if you asked so you don't ask them, that means you know it's against their wishes.
"To my mind" isn't really a legally defensible position.
It's unlikely Kairosoft, or any company, will sue in the US without first notifying. Courts much prefer you solve things without taking up their time, and so most company lawyers know to first give notice.
Given that, it makes perfect sense NOT to ask for permission. If Kairosoft is unaware of it, or okay with it, for the time being at least, they can just ignore it. If that stance later changes, they will almost assuredly notify (especially given the international nature of it, since an international court case, against fans, for something they're not selling, is going to be a lot of trouble and expense and loss of good will, for no real gain) in which case the translation can be taken down.
So legally, this is the sounder strategy. But you may be talking about the ethics of it. We'd have to define what we mean by ethics before really diving into that, but consider - if they were to ask permission, even if everyone involved in creating the game, even if the CEO of the company, were all on board letting them translate it...the lawyers likely wouldn't be. Actually, the lawyers might WANT to say yes, too, but feel it their legal duty to say no - "If we give them the okay others might etc etc and it would weaken future cases in court and etc etc". And based on that the company would say no, even though -everyone involved- there wants to say yes. Not asking, then, gives the company plausible defense later should they need to assert their copyrights, without actually telling the translators 'no' now.
In short, not asking, regardless of how the company feels about it, risks only that the translators will later have to scrap their work. It does not risk the company anything (and in fact gives them the option to allow their work to reach a broader audience AND to assert their copyright any time they choose). As long as the translators are okay with that risk, it presents a win-win.
Now, what makes sense to do -in Japan-, I couldn't say.
> But you may be talking about the ethics of it. We'd have to define what we mean by ethics before really diving into that, but consider - if they were to ask permission, even if everyone involved in creating the game, even if the CEO of the company, were all on board letting them translate it...the lawyers likely wouldn't be. Actually, the lawyers might WANT to say yes, too, but feel it their legal duty to say no - "If we give them the okay others might etc etc and it would weaken future cases in court and etc etc". And based on that the company would say no, even though -everyone involved- there wants to say yes.
I'm talking about the ethics. I think when you're doing something with someone else's creative work, you have to give someone an opportunity to say no. And while it's possible they may want to say yes but not be in a position to do so (for whatever reason), that's ultimately their problem; not asking them because you think they would say no but secretly mean yes is... icky reasoning to say the least.
So this is why I said we have to define what we mean by ethics. You said "when you're doing something with someone else's creative work, you have to give someone an opportunity to say no". Why, other than that's how you feel?
I'm arguing from a utilitarian aspect - ethics as a means to maximize overall utility would dictate not to ask. But I'm curious what perspective you're speaking from, other than, as mentioned, gut feel (which will leave us at a bit of a conversational impasse I'm afraid).
I could make a rule-utilitarian argument for why authorial control is a good principle, but honestly my position is more deontological. Reason is the slave of the passions, all ethics discussion must bottom out in human instincts, so my only real argument is that most people seem to think this is a good rule: it's widely accepted that the author of a creative work should have a lot of control over how that work is reused. Most countries have copyright laws that let a creator control the production of derivative works; many go beyond that and have non-transferrable "moral rights" that let the author control derivative works more strictly than intact copies of their original work. Even the FSF, largely anti-copyright, gives the author options to strictly control how their work is presented in the GFDL (e.g. invariant sections).
Japanese media publishers are notorious for being unforgiving for unauthorized copies. The only reason this has little impact in the West is that most media produced for the Japanese market in whatever form do not even make it to Western markets and are a true niche interest here.
The company here can decide for itself whether it is in its best interest to allow an unlicensed fan translation of one of its programs. If it is, then the company does nothing. If not, then the company will tell them to stop what they're doing.
According to this fan wiki I found (https://kairosoft.fandom.com/wiki/Kairosoft_Wiki), Kairosoft hasn’t touched PCs since 2001, and has been doing mobile stuff. They have done more than a few games that seem to be in the same general genre as this one, but haven’t done a new version of Book Store Story.
Maybe this will result in them seeing this outpouring of love for a 24 year old game and deciding to do a remake to their modern standards!
Or maybe a Cease & Desist letter from a lawyer. We shall see.
I strongly doubt a fan translation of a game from 1997 is going to reflect on or tarnish -anything-. Fan translations are very common, and without them games would be forever unavailable to people who don't speak that language.
Kairosoft is a company of about 20 people with capitalization of 100 million yen (not sure what that means exactly). [0]. They make games for current game consoles including Nintendo Switch and Sony Playstation 4, and games for iOS and Android. [1]. That's not the kind of company that doesn't care about its reputation or protecting its brand image and trademarks.
Kairosoft also produces English translations of many of its games. [2]. According to this photo from the article, the translation appears to be incomplete and leaves much of the text appearing as strings of question marks. [3] I don't believe that a company that produces dozens of games, including for current systems and many translated into English, would approve of an incomplete fan translation of one of its games.
> And if doing things without an author's permission upsets you don't ever take a look at fanfiction.net.
It doesn't upset me. It's just that no one making fan fictions or fan translations should be surprised when they receive a cease and desist letter, DMCA takedown notice, or copyright infringement complaint.
edit: Actually, it does bother me that some of us think that it's perfectly okay to distribute fan translations of other people's work. It seems like when the work is a game or is in a language that few of us understand, like Japanese, respect for the rights of the creators goes out the window. This causes real problems for the creators, particularly individuals and small companies, that might want to enforce their rights, but don't have the budget or legal resources to do so. So, many of them are victims of international "fans" who do whatever they want. Here, there's no indication that the fans even tried to contact the company about doing a legitimate licensed translation; they just did whatever they wanted to without any regard for the rights of the creators.
I'm of the opinion that a fan translation is acceptable, so long as it requires the end user to have purchased the original product.
In some visual novels, patches are distributed via delta patches that are designed to be used on the binaries provided by the original installation. Or in some other cases, the group only provides certain modified archives which are installed by overwriting the original installation.
In both cases, the end user who doesn't understand Japanese (or in some other VNs, Chinese) are able to play while the publisher/developer still gets compensated for their work.
Honestly, if you're not translating for market X, then I can't see a moral reason to object to making a complete fan hacked release in that market. If the company is interested enough to do their own translation, that's a different issue.
But for things which you'll not be able to enjoy in a legal way, even if you want to spend the money? I'm all for piracy of software / books / music / art in that situation.
Fan fiction does infringe copyright most of the time—at least under EU copyright, which does not have fair use. Under US copyright, defending fan fiction as fair use isn’t quite the slam dunk either.
If publishers aren’t quick to litigate fan fiction away, I’d say it’s because they decided that it’s actually beneficial to them. It keeps the community invested in the fictional universe, and the canonical works only gain in respect—and these are the only ones making money. So it’s a social contract between fan fiction authors and publishers. That is why fan fiction communities try to moderate submissions to keep their end of the bargain—i.e. no selling of fan fiction, and no fan fiction that could be seen as detrimental to the image of the work (for example erotica is not allowed in many places).
Related to this, the novel 50 shades of grey had a pretty interesting genesis where it started out as a twilight fan fiction, which was booted of fan fiction sites because of its explicit content. The author then created her own website. Because she gained a massive following, she realised that she could commercialise the novel. That’s when she changed all the names in the novel to no longer refer to Twilight characters. Because she had already transposed the characters to another universe, at that point there wasn’t much of Twilight left and she was free to market and sell it.
Japanese understanding for copyright is like enforceable shrinkwrap software licensing entitled to authors, literally “authorship rights”.
American version is like rights holder’s right to protect mostly financial interest, almost literally “copy-rights”.
When ones from different sides meet a misunderstanding like this happens; one side says “it’s not going to hurt your sales”, the other side says “how dare you mess with someone else’s binary” and the discussions go nowhere.
As for resolution, an emerging choice is to make the author monetize the pirated translation and let them take down the free version. Don’t work always as sometimes the rights holder consider that a negligible gain or minor loss with high reputation risks to day jobs.
So, “it’s not going to hurt sales” won’t work. “Do you have any idea to make it official” is probably better.
(edit: Nothing about permission in article.)