Radical idea

[Ironwolf]

However in South Korea reverse Engineering is legal.

In fact companies there ADVERTISE THEIR EXPERTISE!

http://www.kellysearch.com/kr-product-78108.html
http://www.prlog.org/10891985-reverse-engineering-services-by-using-reverse-engineering-software-south-korea.html
http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/cmsc-news/rapidform-releases-latest-versions-reverse-engineering-software.html#
http://www.biztechreport.com/story/638-emerging-engineering-innovations-south-korea

Korea's economic development plan drawn up in 1962 strived to put an industrial base in place that could support both import substitution and export promotion. Foreign technologies had to be adopted as starting from scratch would have not been feasible. The two pronged initiatives taken by Korea involved promoting the inward transfer of foreign technologies and developing the do¬mestic absorptive capacity to digest, assimilate, and im¬prove on the transferred technologies. Korea encouraged reverse engineering, original equipment manufacturing and foreign licensing methods. This increased worker knowledge.

Long term foreign loans were procured, which came with optimized foreign technologies. Korean firms ben¬efited a lot as workers gained technological know-how from foreign buyers who provided the product designs and materials and also monitored quality control in the production process. Workers gained immense knowledge in the garment and electronics industries.

The government realized that to sustain the initi¬ated development there was a need to build indigenous research and development capability. The National R&D Program launched in 1982 encouraged and promoted research activities besides offering tax credits for invest¬ments and worker development. This exposed companies to international competition. Export performance was re¬warded and companies were given better opportunities and access to financial resources.

[JaguarX]

Cool. What jurisdiction do you fall under and or this project would fall under?

[Ironwolf]

Seriously if this was going to be attempted - you would need to spend a couple hundred dollars to have a local law firm verify this is legal and what limitations it would have if any.

Again let me be clear - I am not saying create a copy of City of Heroes and make a personal profit. I am saying you open servers charging a separate fee for hosting/development and any and all profits for the game would go to NCSoft.

I would imagine $10 a month would buy you $5 for NCSoft and $5 for services. All payments and funding would have to be completely open and above board.

[Segev]

There are two separate things being discussed in this thread.

"Reverse engineering" can only apply to the code. This is what's being argued is legal; I will not comment on whether that is right or wrong, as I am not a lawyer.

"IP" - short for "Intellectual Property" - includes all the characters, story, setting, etc. that is "City of Heroes." This is NOT legal to copy and use without permission.

[JaguarX]

There are two separate things being discussed in this thread.

"Reverse engineering" can only apply to the code. This is what's being argued is legal; I will not comment on whether that is right or wrong, as I am not a lawyer.

"IP" - short for "Intellectual Property" - includes all the characters, story, setting, etc. that is "City of Heroes." This is NOT legal to copy and use without permission.

Say, isnt Olantern the resident lawyer who could give more details on stuff like this?

Maybe he did already just point me in that direction, please.

[Olantern]

Say, isnt Olantern the resident lawyer who could give more details on stuff like this?

Maybe he did already just point me in that direction, please.

There's a bit of discussion of these issues toward the beginning of the "Legal Considerations" thread.  Look for the discussion of "the rules of football" versus "The Rules of Football" and related posts.

This is another "don't do this" situation.

First of all, as always, this post is not intended as legal advice.  If you are interested in pursuing this sort of idea and what's been posted in this thread doesn't dissuade you, consult an attorney who specializes in this area.  (It will cost you much more than "100 quid" or the U.S. equivalent thereof.  Attorneys' fees are normally going to range in the thousands of dollars.)  Second, I am not an IP specialist.

That said, I don't believe this scheme would fly, legally.  The main reason, for tl;dr folks, is that the motive for infringing a copyright doesn't matter.  If you copy without permission, you violate the copyright, even if you pay the copyright holder later.

As Segev pointed out, there are two pieces of intellectual property here, the game code and the story material.  Neither can be used without permission because it's owned by NCSoft, and, like the car in the driveway in the metaphor on the first page of this thread, NCSoft has the right to exclude others from using it.  To put it another way, NCSoft has the right to operate a CoH MMO.  No one else has that legal right unless they buy the right from NCSoft.

It doesn't matter that the use in the "pass on the profits" set-up provides no profit to the users.  Whether a copyright (or other intellectual property right) is being violated turns on what rights the holder (NCSoft, here) has, not what the violator does with the property.  Put another way, the law doesn't allow you to duplicate CoH and then pay NCSoft back for doing it because that's effectively forcing NCSoft into a contract with you whether it likes it or not.  NCSoft has the right to pick who develops their game and runs their servers until they give or sell that right away.

The discussion of reverse engineering brings up the limits of NCSoft's rights.  This is easiest to understand with regard to the story and visual material.  NCSoft holds a copyright in the story of CoH, as well as all the original art, text, and music created for the game.  This includes everything from the in-game model for Statesman to the text of the "World Wide Red" arc to the power icon for Greater Fire Sword.  You can't duplicate any of those things because it would constitute a derivative work of the original game made without NCSoft's permission, even if you don't intend to profit by doing so.  "Derivative works" is a broad term, and it definitely includes a pixel-for-pixel duplicate of the existing MMO.  That's the easy part to understand.

The other class of IP is more subtle.  NCSoft also holds a copyright in the code.  Copyright protects material placed in a fixed form, such as written text, pictures ... or lines of code.  Ideas in an unfixed form, just noodling around in people's heads, aren't subject to copyright protection.  (I'm basing this discussion on U.S. copyright law, but due to international agreements like the Berne Convention, the rules of copyright are very similar from country to country.)  The fact that NCSoft holds a copyright in the code means NCSoft has the right to prevent people from making duplicates of the code.  Again, this is regardless of profit motive or lack thereof.

But if code is subject to copyright, how can something like reverse engineering ever be possible?  That's because the ideas that the code implements aren't subject to copyright.  In the Legal Considerations thread, someone pointed out that the rules of a game, such as football, aren't subject to copyright.  That's true, because they are unfixed ideas.  But if I write them down in a book called The Rules of Football, I can prevent people from copying my book because I enjoy a copyright in the book.  This doesn't mean that no one can ever play a game of football without my permission, though, because the ideas at issue can't be copyrighted.

How does that apply to CoH?  The code implements the "rules," but a computer game, unlike a game of football, can't be played without the code.  In theory, you could develop an entirely new code that did most of the same things the existing one does.  To use a CoH example, you can't copy the game code for the concept of Defense, but you could develop new code to reflect an MMO player character's ability to avoid attacks.  If you could do that and not infringe any copyrights in the story, visual, textual, and audio material, you could make your own MMO.  But to be different enough from CoH to avoid violating NCSoft's copyright, it would need to be so different that it wouldn't be recognizable as CoH.  In other words, it'd be a completely new MMO.

By the way, courts' real work on copyrights (and what IP lawyers do when advising clients on these issues) is figuring out where to draw the line between "idea" and content inherent to the fixed form.  For purposes of this discussion, it's sufficient to know that they're more likely to find material copyrightable than not.

So, all in all, this idea isn't workable.  If someone were to try it, NCSoft would be well within its rights to sue.  It could have a court grant an injunction to shut the "shadow CoH" down.  It could also seek damages for violation of its copyright.  Once again, this is a no-no.