All mods ending with A (BA, CA, NOTA, ...) are illegal warez, and should not be in any repository. Stuff like Spring1944 and KernelPanic are mostly CC, and can be packaged without any hesitation.
Copyright starts with the original holder- in this case, Atari. Cavedog, like any developer for a big publisher, would have had to give their rights to Atari (or whoever owned Cavedog back then, who would have sold those rights as part of Atari's purchase, etc.).
Even "innocent infringers", who thought what they were doing was legal, aren't immune. For example, there are lots and lots of retro-game sites that have had to remove many games, due to DMCA requests. There have been many, many, many instances in which Nintendo has either shut 'sites down, or eradicated the distribution of Super Nintendo ROMs, even though they haven't made the hardware and no new games have been published in years. They'll probably stop someday, but not yet- I read, the other day, a ROM 'sites declaration that certain titles, like the Final Fantasy series weren't being distributed because they'd been threatened by lawyers. The people distributing these works weren't the hackers who got rid of copy protection or copied the ROMs. But they're still infringing.
In short, no, that section's not providing a fig leaf for CA. Just because Caydr was the original copyright violator does not mean that further violations are all right- otherwise, people putting out hacked copies of games would just change a few things and say it was theirs, for example, which is clearly illegal.
It would be great if Atari sent Spring a cease & desist order about the Totala Annihilation Intellectual Property (lol at the term), because it would mean the termination of all talks and mentionning of TA based mods, and so a forced to switch to Expand & Exterminate, PURE, Gundam, or any other of those great games I can never find an open battle for.
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LordMatt
Post subject: Re: OTA Ownership
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2008 12:28 am
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zwzsg wrote:
It would be great if Atari sent Spring a cease & desist order about the Totala Annihilation Intellectual Property (lol at the term), because it would mean the termination of all talks and mentionning of TA based mods, and so a forced to switch to Expand & Exterminate, PURE, Gundam, or any other of those great games I can never find an open battle for.
Not really. The spring dev team does not distribute OTA content any more. And while some sites might have to stop hosting it, there would be others beyond the reach of the C&D to keep hosting TA mods and content. If somehow TA mods were prevented from being played, there would suddenly be a whole lot less players playing spring.
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