I dare-say it's not monetary concerns that would drive Tom to try and discuss a way forward with copyright holders, but more a conceptual thing P:. Hopefully we're on all /that/ cynical of authority figures at this point?

Basically, I expect, it comes down to this: As much as Tom would like for his service to be available to the widest range of socially acceptable content possible (and, fan-games are socially acceptable), his hands are somewhat legally tied, and Funimation aren't going to be terribly interested in his discussions in favour of appreciating this games pose no threat to their business and make no appreciable revenue, for the developers, or BYOND especially.

I think to suggest Tom doesn't care about the goings on within his service would of course be rather fickle, given he's been the primary proponent of open listings that permitted fan-games (despite numerous arguments made about copyright concerns within and outside the community), for near enough 10 years now, and he took a lot of aggro off developers for holding that position. It's a little short-sighted to suggest that since receiving a valid legal notice with strong backing, that his relatively recent (2 years, tops) decision to pull the curtain on fan-games is a sign that he simply does not care anymore. It's a sign that it was decided for him.
In layman's terms, it's not that he doesn't care about fan-games. It's that he does care about thousands upon thousands of pounds of court fees if he doesn't just remove things when asked, and then bar people from putting them back up.
While it's important to note that copyright notices, issues of proper license holders between two entities, and generally speaking, anything to do with content owned by a company are sometimes abused by companies due to the nature of most legal systems world-wide (never mind the sometimes absurd structure of the laws themselves), it wasn't so much the case here.

If you want a case where legal action was unjustly taken, see the whole Tera/NCSoft/Lineage 3 thing. Where NCSoft outright said early on during litigation that the only actual reason they were pursuing legal action was because Tera was killing their profits overseas. In that particular case, NCSoft was essentially trying to bully a smaller less established company into either non-existence or out of competition with them.


The problem was that a few games were profiting off of copyrighted materials. Which is definitely ethically, morally wrong, and most certainly legally in the wrong. This is also obviously a big no no as far as copyright, fair use, and just about anything to do with licensed materials go.

Given that Funimation previously had, from what I recall, given their blessing to fan-games many years ago, I imagine this was a tipping point for their legal department to exclude that right to Byond.

It should also be mentioned that Funimation has always been a bit testy about fan-games, too. However, in the past they usually left them alone (And i'm saying this as a universal case, not just in the case of Byond.) if they didn't cross a few specific lines.

For instance, anyone who recalls a certain old, yet popular mod on steam that aped DBZ might be interested to know that they received a C&D during release/development. After changing a few of the names to satisfy the license holders, the license holders for DBZ had no problem with it.

The fact that Funimation won't withdraw the blanket ban order probably means that, internally, either they have new policies to handle this sort of thing, the nature of Byond as a distribution service means they feel it's unlikely that it will be able to police every bit of material that is submitted, or that they feel that the service is untrustworthy in terms of handling the situation themselves in case of future issues.




Going forward, it seems like the best thing for Byond to do to ever keep another blanket ban/C&D order from happening again would be to just crack down on people trying to actively and directly make money off of licensed properties. Doing so would vastly reduce the likelihood of future issues with outside companies, and would also protect the owners of the service from any possible lawsuits.

It's a bit unrealistic to expect a company to take offense to someone making a fan game (There are thousands of them out there, and that's just on main-stream websites.) or fan materials (Even more-so. Good luck tracking down all of that.). And really, most companies don't care about the existence of them so long as you're not trying to make money off of their works or cut into their "piece of the action", to coin a phrase.

The smarter companies even realize that fan-games are basically free advertising for one of their products. Pursuing legal action is also often costly, too. Especially in the case of something like this, where there's unlikely to be a return on the investment if the case is successful. So most companies will only go after particularly heinous cases of something violating copyright laws.


Either way, speaking personally, I figured something would happen eventually to deal with the situation, what with a few of the games out there making a fair amount of money off of DBZ and associated copyrighted materials. I just didn't expect it to get ignored for so long that a C&D order came down from the license holders of the games in question. And this is coming from someone who hosted and developed a popular fan-game on the service.


TL;DR: What Nadrew said, basically. The ball's entirely in Funimation's court. Failing that, it's up to a developer of a Funimation owned fan-game (On an individual basis.) to contact Funimation and get permission from them.

If you had that, assuming that the issue here is protecting Byond from legal action, I imagine you would most likely be fine to develop a game on the service. However, you'd probably need to provide the necessary documentation to Byond saying that you have permission to do it, and possibly also under what terms.
The thing about the C&D that BYOND received was, it wasn't listing games that were making money -- it was listing games that were POPULAR. I think they were looking from it at a competition standpoint and not a monetary one.
It wasn't even the games that were popular. It was just all of the games that were listed publicly.
The impression I got from the affair was also that money wasn't a factor, it was simply that these games existed in a public capacity utilising the FUNimation-owned license.

In BYOND's case, there's no particular legal "risk" in going after fan-games. Policy appears to be that when a copyright holder comes calling, if a game actually is violating their licensing, it just gets removed from the website entirely.

Making money off these things is a no-no anyway, and it's current moderator policy to look for license-breaching games that are accepting funds and either negotiate with the respective owner to stop, or remove the game from the public eye.
In response to Super Saiyan X
Nadrew wrote:
The thing about the C&D that BYOND received was, it wasn't listing games that were making money -- it was listing games that were POPULAR. I think they were looking from it at a competition standpoint and not a monetary one.

Super Saiyan X wrote:
It wasn't even the games that were popular. It was just all of the games that were listed publicly.

This is more accurate, yeah.

To put it more bluntly, a few people ruined a good thing for everyone.

A company's legal department, if it decides it wants to get rid of a few games infringing in a commercial manner on their license/copyright, typically aren't going to say "____ game is alright, but this one isn't!".

They're just going to issue a C&D saying to stop the production of all games related to the given media they have purview over. Especially if the game in question is being hosted by a service like this, that essentially acts as a distributor of that game.

This is notable, because the developers of the games themselves did not receive the C&D notice. Byond did. Technically, the cease and desist (And i'm assuming it was a cease and desist directed at Byond, and not something else, since I never saw the document itself.) was not aimed at stopping the games from existing, but instead putting pressure on removing them from the service and shutting their development down.

My experience with copyright law is admittedly limited (It seeming completely mental in how it's currently set up kept me from diving down that rabbit hole too much.), but I believe that as a distributor, technically a case could be made for them being held liable for supporting the existence of games that are profiting off of someone else's work.

Especially since they provided the tools to make the game, and didn't police the service to ensure games that were illegally charging for things they didn't own were removed. Hence why the notice went to Byond's developers instead.

There may have also been "ease of do-ability" issues there, too. Since they probably didn't want to have to mail one out to every developer on the service, if they could even get their identity off-hand without issuing a request from Byond.


Some companies do take issue with user made media. But many of them, especially the "anime" companies, tend to not care. It's part of why the concept has caught on so well overseas. Otherwise obviously there wouldn't be so many of them.

From what i've seen, the only time they tend to start reaching for the pen and ink and start issuing C&D's over fan made materials, is if the materials are directly competing with their interests.

That includes stealing profit from them, naming a product in such a way that it infringes on their services (IE: Naming a game "Dragonball Online!", similar to the professionally developed, actual DBZ MMO that's out.), etc, etc.

Unfortunately, in regards to the issue of profiting off of copyrighted materials, there were a number of games on the service doing exactly that, and in a highly illegal manner to boot.

Worse still, they were typically showing up as some of the most populated games on the service, which made them highly visible to anyone who was unfamiliar with the service that might, say, be assessing the games listed on it to decide whether or not to take them all down.


Either way, I don't think the issue was likely to be as much about "killing off competition" as it was protecting the copyright and license holders interests.

Permitting those games to stay up not only violated laws regarding the use of materials in a for-profit manner, but could potentially set a nasty precedent if they knew about games that were doing that and didn't act on it. It certainly wasn't done maliciously, as much it was just "business as usual" for their legal department.

I doubt whoever assessed the games on the service at the time even considered doing as it a means of killing off the competition. They were just told to go find all the games that had the word "Dragon", "Ball", "DBZ", or any familiar derivatives there-of and then issue a C&D with their name tagged to it. Hence why a game or two that had nothing to do with DBZ got caught up in the C&D/blanket ban order that Funimation issued.


Edit: I should also point out that the two games that were charging for copyrighted materials were taken down by the C&D order. The rest were probably just collateral damage/a means of ensuring that Funi didn't have to pay their lawyers to handle this situation on their end again in the future.

I say this because I recall Funimation having no problem with fan-games many years ago.

A few people even pointed it out to me in the immediate aftermath of the C&D order. I think it was mentioned on the forums, too. So I imagine it was the games that were charging money for stuff they had no legal rights too that were the tipping point for Funimation stepping in. Given past incidents that I read up on regarding them, that seems to be fairly well past the unspoken line they have when it comes to tolerating them.
Holy crap. You guys like writing books about this subject.
DBZ is a very passionate topic, isn't it?
Archonex runs one of those not-DBZ games we have now, so I suspect he's intimately familiar with the matter.
In response to Deathguard
Deathguard wrote:
Archonex runs one of those not-DBZ games we have now, so I suspect he's intimately familiar with the matter.

I have a bad habit of being extremely wordy. Though what DG says is also a thing, too, I guess. The game he's referring too is slowly being reworked into our new project, game, and setting while we keep it up in a legal format. This is so the people who were playing before can enjoy something they're vaguely familiar with. Also, so we don't shell-shock existing players in our userbase by introducing a vastly different game overnight.

I also say slowly, because we tend to go through iconners like a nicotine addict goes through cigarettes.

Right now we're at a stage where we really need to focus on obtaining new icons in order to progress to more complex things, like adding in new map dependent features like territory control, procedurally generated content, events, world/setting building stuff, etc, etc. That appears to give the impression that we're trying to be "not-DBZ", instead of our own game. Presumably due to the slow development speed we're currently restricted too.

Anyways, to get back on topic, I was concerned for awhile before the C&D came down that something like that might happen. I just had no idea who to contact in the Byond administration to try and get a resolution going before a company decided to pull out the nuclear option. So my thoughts on the subject are fairly long.

Either way, apologies if I spammed the page. Just thought I should chime in on the discussion.
TIMEOUT-TIMEOUT..I like to first state that like many of you guys out here.DBZ games was what drawn my big brother here and from there he drawn me, lil bro, and cousin here.My whole family on here lmao.I been here for like 7 years coming and going now and then.Ever since the downfall of the dbz game(by Masterdan) that brought us all here.I stood up and said i wanted to create one of my own.
Albro wrote:
Holy crap. You guys like writing books about this subject.
DBZ is a very passionate topic, isn't it?

The heck it is.What other game do you know that you can Kamehameha the SOB when they get you pissed?Furthermore, many animies were derived from DBZ.It was the beginning of a new era in animie and im sure other will agree with me that there is a lil dbz in every good anime.

DBZ games i have noticed have changed around here.We are not going enterly on the Dragon Ball Anime.In my opinion the only DBZ about the one that got me hooked on BYOND and the one that i am playing is the names of the characters and moves.Everything else is 100% orginal, you dont have to fight the bad guys ir even look like the characters from thew show.Its just you,your clothes,your powers.You dont got to live the life of Goku or Vegeta you are doing whatever you want so technically its not exactly like the anime.

I dont even know why i should stay here.DBZ was my only life on here, i was even thinking about making a bleach game because i like the show too.I assuming that people are coming to play games on here instead of going to buy the actual ones from FUNdamentals.Bleach and Naruto got a weaker game base and im guessing thats why they are not gone too but when they do i bet they come for them as well.
It was the beginning of a new era in animie and im sure other will agree with me that there is a lil dbz in every good anime.

This is actually incorrect; DBZ is standard shonen and plenty of its characteristics had been done before. The things it's most known for; multiple transformations and energy attacks, for instance;

Transformation sequences are as old as the Magical Girl genre, but I can think of one series I've watched myself, Bio Booster Armor Guyver, which began in 1985 and had this as a staple for protagonists.

On the 'Ki-Blast' front - still sticking to just series that I've personally watched, we have the '84 'Fist of the North Star.' - some of Raoh's attacks, the Gento fighters, or Hokuto Ryuken.

It may have been the first anime I watched to codify all these tropes into a single form, though.
In response to Archonex
Just as a little interesting tid-bit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you changed every single thing in your DBZ game to be not-DBZ, FUNimation still owns the rights to it. I believe there is a field that deals with derivative works like this. In this case, you've created an entire world based on a world that someone else owns the rights to. As such, any kind of change or addition you make to the game falls under its derivative nature; the work exists because it was derived from the owned work.

I'm not sure how this kind of thing is enforced, but I do remember a particular case in the MUD-community where a rather popular MUD had used the Diku source to build off of. The DikuMUD source had a license with it that required you keep a notice on the login screen that the game was based on DikuMUD, and that you keep the license with the source. One day, the developers removed the notice from the login screen of the game, proclaiming that they had removed 100% of the original DikuMUD code.

The only problem was that, legally, they couldn't do that. They were a derivative work, so everything they ultimately changed, no matter what they did, still qualified it as a deirvative of DikuMUD, which legally bound them to following its license.

Ultimately I believe the MUD was removed from the particular MUD site, because the DikuMUD license holders are something like 40-some years old and probably can't be bothered with filing a law suit for it.

Just thought I might bring this up.

[edit: it like deleted half of my post before I pressed save]
In response to Deathguard
Deathguard wrote:
In layman's terms, it's not that he doesn't care about fan-games. It's that he does care about thousands upon thousands of pounds of court fees if he doesn't just remove things when asked, and then bar people from putting them back up.

No, BYOND cares about fan-games! This is very much the point people seem to lose in all of this. They seem to hold this opinion that either BYOND hates fan-games, or simply couldn't care less (usually thrown in a negative light). BYOND of course, values your net dream. If it didn't, you'd have to wonder why it provided hub related services at all!

However as much as Tom probably would love for everyone to post their various works and achievements here (fan-game or otherwise), there are legal concerns, and he can't dodge those.
In response to Stephen001
Stephen001 wrote:
Deathguard wrote:
In layman's terms, it's not that he doesn't care about fan-games. It's that he does care about thousands upon thousands of pounds of court fees if he doesn't just remove things when asked, and then bar people from putting them back up.

No, BYOND cares about fan-games! This is very much the point people seem to lose in all of this. They seem to hold this opinion that either BYOND hates fan-games, or simply couldn't care less (usually thrown in a negative light). BYOND of course, values your net dream. If it didn't, you'd have to wonder why it provided hub related services at all!

However as much as Tom probably would love for everyone to post their various works and achievements here (fan-game or otherwise), there are legal concerns, and he can't dodge those.
Hi,many people come for byond because of Dbz and Pokemon games i as well come for dbz and pokemon games.If you allow dbz game again im 100% sure you membership and donations incress 10 to 20%.And this will incress Tom monthly profit aswell.Hope dbz allow again.

I'm sure Tom would love that! The law says we cannot do that, sorry!

I used to play DBZ games myself, back in 2003, good times, and used to run BYOND Anime, so I do miss a lot of the good developers who took part in Dragonball Online II, Naruto Universe, stuff like that. Loads of great artists too! But ... the law means we would probably get a DMCA notice if we listed DBZ games again, so we don't want to take the chance. Sorry.
It's not BYOND's decision whether to allow DBZ or Pokémon games again, and even if this 10-20% increase happened, it wouldn't be worth it.

BYOND was told to get rid of FUNimation's games, by FUNimation, on copyright infringement grounds. It can't just choose to say 'No' and list them again, because FUNi will take legal action.

It's not that Tom hates DBZ games - quite the contrary, he used to play them too! It's that FUNimation got all strict with him.
Damn FUNimations.They so evil.Is there anything, any single light of chance that we can bring it back? How can i built my net dream if there is no dream.Last but not least why did they take it away?We were cutting into their profit?
Is there anything, any single light of chance that we can bring it back?

Very unlikely.

How can i built my net dream if there is no dream.

Make something original! Your mind is full of unbanned content!

Last but not least why did they take it away?
We were cutting into their profit?

We're not sure and can only speculate.
It make's me wonder why that DBZ mod on Steam was allowed..

ESF it was called. (was fun too).

But that game and this game didn't seem to have much trouble... and they are still available publicly and perhaps even still worked on.

Perhaps BYOND just gave it easily I don't know if Tom even asked questions at all.
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