ID:37405
 
Keywords: design, society
A blog response to Masterdan's off-base post.


You're wrong, Masterdan, because your work is what is called a "derivative work", specifically a work that uses a horrible and almost unquantifiable beast known as "intellectual property".


Many people share some ignorant belief that if you use the name of an anime in your title that you have no right to any of your game's content. That is incorrect.

You're right, here. You can create a game with someone else's trademark in your title and that doesn't automatically make your game their copyright (although it is definitely trademark infringement and actionable if they care enough to do it).

The moment you start implementing elements from their collected works, however, you step into copyright infringement.


Also people think you need to register a copyright in order to have exclusive ownership of it and the right to legal charges, this is an incorrect assumption.

No one needs to register a trademark -- and there's no such thing as registering a copyright. However, if you don't have some concrete evidence that you were the first person to produce the work or use the trademark, it's legally flaccid and it's subject to the whimsy of the judge and whomever has the better lawyer; and if you're using someone else's trademark, especially if it's registered, you're boned and the trademark office would reject any registration attempt.


Therefor the graphics and code are copywritten, i am the employer so I'm the only owner of them, and your not permitted as is stated on the site. While we do not take claim for the scant naruto content (the name which is trademarked) we give credit to kishimoto and shonen jump on our hub and use it only in fair use as an educational demo of game design and is a not for profit endeavor.

First off, there's no such thing as "copywritten". The word you're looking for is "copyrighted". Copyright doesn't mean "write a copy", it means "the right to produce copies". (This is understandably confusing, however, as there are people called "copywriters" whose jobs are to print off copies of ads/papers/pamphlets with the permission of the original copyright owner.)

Etymology aside, this is where your argument falls apart. Your work is a derivative work, in that the Naruto literary basis is the main gist of your game. To make your game a non-derivative work now, you'd have to start from scratch; once something becomes a derivative work, you can't remove the elements that you derived it from and call it an original production any more.

I haven't played Naruto GOA and have no designs to do so in the immediate future, but I'd wager that most of what you can see in the show you can do in the game, and that if you were to take away everything from the show (names of combat arts, artwork made to resemble that given in the show, and the like) you wouldn't have a game left.

Educational demo? That's completely impotent; your work is obviously not intended for educational purposes and a judge would laugh at you. I haven't seen anything that suggests you're showcasing your game project and its source code to game designers as an example to live up to (most professional designers would probably laugh at you too).


As such even though trademark infringement is a separate argument anyway, we are safe and if a cease and desist order occurs i will rename the game "Grand Online Adventure".

Renaming the work probably wouldn't suffice, especially if any of the intellectual properties from the show appeared in it; if they had sufficient cause to believe that your game was a derivative work, a cease and desist order would demand complete destruction of the entire work. Saying "oh, I'll just rename it" will have them say "oh, we'll just be taking your house".


Regardless our rights are guaranteed to us and your entirely wrong in your accusation that we don't have ownership of our graphics and code.

Derivative works don't count for that. Derivative works are works which are derived from someone's existing copyright, and fall under the jurisdiction of the existing copyright.

Human beings as a species have been around for a long time, and property rights and ideals have been around for almost as long. Sadly, this doesn't bode well for anyone's chances of discovering a convenient loophole that allows them to make a derivative work and claim full ownership of it.
This I tried to show him, and he called me an idiot for it. If you care to notice what he had the sole keyword for that post as, you'll see what I mean.
i understand your point but you miss a few important things, ill just list a few errors.

Trademarks do have to be registered.
Copyrights can in fact be registered just for good measure to seek statutory damages against those who infringe them.

Outside of that you are treating my game as a collective being, and i am claiming copyright to the individual graphics that it consists of. There are only 1 or 2 items in the game that i can think of that are directly related to naruto, the mountain with the faces which obviously i have no right to despite it being an original drawing of them, and the Kage buildings. The thing is there are hundreds of houses and trees and fire effects and ice effects and literally hundreds of skill effects and even more random turfs. And i do have ownership of those. Also my code doesnt have Naruto imprinted into its core, its just a name and really theres not much naruto does that regular ninjas dont. So really i think your counter post was made hastily. Maybe not 100% of the content i have can be copyrighted, however i do believe that almost all of it individually can and is, under my name. So thats why we have the disclaimer, that everything outside of naruto is our property, that naruto is property of shonen jump and kishimoto and thats all our hub suggests. Which shouldnt have been challenged to this extent.


See the graphics in the game are not derivative that is the issue here, they were drawn from scratch. The png files that i have on my harddrive and are hackable from the RSC that are cached on peoples computer belong to me, I have copyright alone. So thats what i was alleging. Not that i own naruto, or anything related to naruto. I hope this clears that up.
Eternal_Dread wrote:
This I tried to show him, and he called me an idiot for it. If you care to notice what he had the sole keyword for that post as, you'll see what I mean.

your still thick.
Masterdan wrote:
See the graphics in the game are not derivative

D'you even understand the definition of the word "derivative"?
Popisfizzy wrote:
Masterdan wrote:
See the graphics in the game are not derivative

D'you even understand the definition of the word "derivative"?

Yes, arguing that we derived the Tree, the cliffs, the hundreds of ability effects or the grass or water or the flowers and houses and well you get the idea. The point is that the game is very loosely based on naruto, and since your somebody who would never play it, i believe you should have to take my word on that.

By the way, obviously it means to derive from, to come from.
Oh, I joined once. The first god-knows-how-many-minutes of the game involved some stupid test that is on ever other Naruto game on BYOND, so I got annoyed and left. I'm assuming that that is from the show, meaning your first experience plunges right into the annoyance of that fucking show.
Popisfizzy wrote:
Oh, I joined once. The first god-knows-how-many-minutes of the game involved some stupid test that is on ever other Naruto game on BYOND, so I got annoyed and left. I'm assuming that that is from the show, meaning your first experience plunges right into the annoyance of that fucking show.

The test is to make sure you understand how to play the game, it doesnt test you on stuff from the show i wouldnt worry. Its more a matter of we want to be able to keep OOC restricted for new players to only one comment per 20 seconds until after they are forcefully made to listen to the FAQ npc basically.

Masterdan wrote:
Copyrights can in fact be registered just for good measure to seek statutory damages against those who infringe them.

A copyright, in itself, isn't tangible. It's a thought or idea, not an object of some sort. You can't technically 'register' an idea or thought, just as you can't register your right to not have to testify against yourself under the fifth amendment of the Constitution of the United States (when living in the US). You can, however, claim that said thought or idea (or right, in the case of the fifth amendment) is applicable in the situation. Therefore, Jtgibson is right in what he said.

You, however, are also right. A copyright can be 'registered', which is to say that you can notify the proper authorities (In the US's case, you notify the Library of Congress) that you hold such an idea or thought, and they record that. Should an issue arise, you then have legal backup. Putting the product in question in an envelop and mailing it to yourself with the date in pen on the front and keeping the envelop sealed, however, is also acceptable for 'registration' of a copyright.
your well versed eh. And yes i heard about the mailing to yourself trick for cheap copyrighting. However a copyright to register is sort of tangible. I suppose if i was to put the graphics in a usb stick and mail it to myself i would be best off for proof. Also photo copies would be smart too. However its more a matter of having ownership, i dont think any game that stole icons would be worth taking down anyway.
Trademarks don't have to be registered. Sticking the symbol ™ after any word or phrase denotes your intent to use that as your trademark. Anyone who attempts to use the same word or phrase in a similar context is making an infringement. For instance, I couldn't just do JT™ and try to punish anyone else who called themselves JT; primarily because it's a common-enough name that I hold no legal right to it, but also because there were many JTs before me. But if I were to make a game called JT™, then I could bring up civil court action against anyone who also tried to make a game called JT (even if they didn't claim a trademark on the name).

They're legally more effective if registered in that you can sue for criminal infringement, but you can still protect an unregistered trademark in civil court. (Trademarks are also unique in that you must protect them to keep them. Copyright does not need to be protected and is inalienable.)

You're right that copyrights are registrable -- I didn't fact check that. However, as soon as you've printed it, saved it to a ROM-type of disc, or otherwise committed it into a tangible and unmodifiable format, that's pretty much all the registration you need. Using a government body to register it simply amounts to doing the same thing and letting them witness it, giving you the power to enforce criminal infringement.

Your icons are included in a derivative work, and thus they are part of the derivative work. Derivative works are promiscuous, in that if you insert any component into a derivative work, that component becomes derivative itself... compare with inserting a derivative component into an original work, where only the derivative component remains derivative -- although because the whole includes a derivative component, the law would rule it as an infringement if the maker of that derivative component asked you to remove it.

Anyway, long story short, because the derivative work is owned by someone else, you don't actually own anything that went into its creation. It's true that no one has the right to steal your icons and source code, but that's because that right belongs to the companies that made Naruto.
no i dont believe ive ever encountered a law like you just said. The company that owns naruto has no legal right to the graphics made for a game under the same name. Especially not the source code. There is an employee/employer inheritance thing for copyrights made within the course of regular business but theres nooooo way that sticking naruto in front of my games name somehow confers ownership of the content therein to the licensee of naruto. I think thats more an assumed law you made i would have to see evidence of that.

(i was not paid by the owners of naruto, i was certainly not an employee. Yeah so i think i understand where your logic lies but i dont believe theres a law for it, im sure i can remove the infringing content and claim the rest as mine if i wanted to)
Hidden ninja villages (and all things related to them).
Organizations (just Akatsuki, really).
Genin, Chuunin, Jounin, Kage (most of the titles).
The shape and name of the daggers. (lots of the other weapons as well, like the windmill shurikens, and the usage of things like the needles)
Clothing (the vests, head protectors, plenty of others).
Chakra (not the concept of chakra, simply the usage).
All of the clans and bloodline names.
And every single "jutsu" (technique) (no, real ninjas don't shoot balls of fire, have eye techniques called the Sharingan, AND have groups called Akatsuki. Unless these ninjas belong to the world of Naruto)

Just a small list of things that can be traced back to Naruto (basically the entire series).
Just so we're all hip to it.
You're using the words as written on Wikipedia to suggest that only an employer/employee relationship can make a derivative work. Intellectual property is much more insidious than that.

If a product is made to resemble and imitate an existing work and includes aspects of that existing work as fundamental design concepts, it becomes a derivative work -- it is derived from the ideas.

You might be able to settle in court for protection of the components that aren't directly related to the show, but believe me when I say that their presence in a derivative work also makes them derivative. I'm not a lawyer and I don't have those huge volumes of precedent to give you specific examples, but I've known and heard this for a very long time.

Medievia, for instance, is a derivative work of DIKU Mud, even though it no longer contains any DIKU code. The only reason the DIKU haven't enforced their copyright is because of how prohibitively costly it would be to do so.

Hidden villages would need to be renamed
the ranks would need to be redone although currently we dont make much use of them.
none of the clothes are really similar to naruto
i dont see how chakra is copyrighted, in any way, or the usage of it for skills.
The clans and bloodline names, yes. but those arent as significant as in WOTS.

Some technique names yes would need to be changed, most wouldnt. Grand fireball isnt copyrightable. Ice explosion isnt.
We dont have akatsuki!

Your right though, thats a list of the things that do influence the game from naruto. Basically thats all of it in a nutshell. Use your imagination on how i could if i was pressured, change it to be free of copyright infringement? Easy enough.
Jtgibson wrote:
You're using the words as written on Wikipedia to suggest that only an employer/employee relationship can make a derivative work. Intellectual property is much more insidious than that.

If a product is made to resemble and imitate an existing work and includes aspects of that existing work as fundamental design concepts, it becomes a derivative work -- it is derived from the ideas.

You might be able to settle in court for protection of the components that aren't directly related to the show, but believe me when I say that their presence in a derivative work also makes them derivative. I'm not a lawyer and I don't have those huge volumes of precedent to give you specific examples, but I've known and heard this for a very long time.

Medievia, for instance, is a derivative work of DIKU Mud, even though it no longer contains any DIKU code. The only reason the DIKU haven't enforced their copyright is because of how prohibitively costly it would be to do so.

I fully understand what your saying. However while the software itself if using stolen code and was reprogrammed, it would be derivative. If the graphics were stolen or edited, then they would be derivative. However the png files are completly artwork, and are not consolidated into a product in such a way. Similarly how bid for power, a dragonball mod changed its theme from dragonball to simply some made up anime when recieving a cease and desist. I mean you have to think about things as element components.

Gotta go to bed guys. Was interesting at any rate. I think we can all agree that fangames break copyright law, but people still own the works they make, so long as on an individual basis, they do not in and of themselves conflict with copyright law. (individual files)
Nice shot spuzz, but you really can't talk sense into this guy.
fan games are always infringing anyways, stop trying to claim your's doesn't.
Masterdan wrote:

I fully understand what your saying. However while the software itself if using stolen code and was reprogrammed, it would be derivative. If the graphics were stolen or edited, then they would be derivative. However the png files are completly artwork, and are not consolidated into a product in such a way. Similarly how bid for power, a dragonball mod changed its theme from dragonball to simply some made up anime when recieving a cease and desist. I mean you have to think about things as element components.



you don't understand the idea of intellectual property do you?

this is not surprising
You're just begging for 100 posts on this -.O..Last night this same topic got carried over 3 blogs...and 100+ posts (probably 2-300 if you count the deleted ones)..And I don't think he got convinced..
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