An Idea

[Colette]

Start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone!

Gather 'round, children. We all know how many bootleg DVDs get made in China. We all know about P2P piracy. This is a different era. It's an era where the copyright of your intellectual property still depends partly upon the lawyers you can afford, but now also partly upon the goodwill of your audience.

For example, I boycott movies like The Hunger Games, because I admire the original novel by Koushin Takami. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale) If some paid corporate liar dared plagiarize one of Larry's or Misty's novels, I'd be similarly up in arms, and I'd expect y'all to follow, with the usual pitchforks and blazing torches.

Lawyers can only do so much. When a film named "Night of the Flesh Eaters" was changed, a typo left off the copyright notice, and the retitled Night of the Living Dead inadvertantly entered the Public Domain. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead) The moral? Don't put too much faith in lawyers.

If you've thoroughly ticked off your audience, to the point they're cheering the fall of your stock, don't expect that your IP will be respected in this brave new world. Assuming somebody magically put up a pirate server tomorrow, with fancy IP redirects and a server that shifted physical location every once in a while? Just what could NCSoft do about that? From South Korea? With their financial plots starting to dry up? Get serious, now.

By contrast, John Delancey just put up a documentary, and specifically asked the audience not to pirate it. It seems to be working so far, because he enjoys the goodwill of his audience. If you have established a rapport with your audience, a relationship, if the creator of a work you appreciate is part of your "monkeysphere," respect and affection is the most secure copyright of all!

'Cause the loser now will be later to win, The times, they are a'changin'!

[srmalloy]

I don't recall the details, as it's been some years, but I remember a court case where the judge ruled that reverse engineering was legal to restore  functionality to software whose use was controlled by an external piece of hardware that had become nonfunctional and which the software publisher no longer supported. I will concede that using that ruling to justify reverse-engineering a game server is a bit of a stretch, since the ruling was about dongles,, not servers, but it does provide a precedent for invalidating a prohibition on reverse the engineering in an EULA.

[Ironwolf]

You can reverse engineer.

You just can't reverse engineer to publish the same software. You can make changes to it and publish it even using the original developers to take you to alpha state - the finished program has to be original.

So you could redo the game tweaking some graphics and call that huge metal headbanger a Freakshop and be completely legal.
Carnies of Darkness
Tsumo
Nazi Bastages

and other such fun names that the PLAYERS used to call the mobs would be quite acceptable.

[TonyV]

Jeez, and I forgot Paragon Wiki, which copied over entire parts of the dialogue.

They changed this WAY later, but at the time the Paragon Wiki was created and the vast majority of its content written, there was a clause in the Terms of Service that specifically allowed fan web sites to use assets from the game for non-commercial purposes.  I think that only changed as recently as the launch of City of Heroes: Freedom, when they removed that clause.

...

Ah, here we go.  Thank you, Wayback Machine!

Members are permitted to make use of Game Content in noncommercial contexts, including in connection with the creation of noncommercial fan fiction and fan sites and using game audio and video for creating noncommercial media.

It was changed, but given how much people had already invested in fan sites and whatnot, we all pretty much assumed that the new Terms of Service in which such sites weren't explicitly allowed would never actually be enforced to construe that fan sites aren't allowed.

[Colette]

So Tony, could you pass that idea of mine to our fine team of hackers 'n crackers? A little guide to tailoring the graphics files wouldn't go amiss, I'm sure.