Spring RTS Engine

And...

Caydr wrote: Harvard can go suck a lemon as far as I'm concerned, you don't just take a few years and suddenly you can pounce on any names that haven't been used.

Oh god who the hell are you to question the freaking no1 law school and it's LAW PROFFESORS. Supreme court judge?

--

A am a person with a brain, hear me roar. You cannot declare something still in stores to belong to you.

Even if something's not in stores, you can't just wake up one day and say, "from now on, I own such-and-such." If you or anyone else here seriously thinks you can do that, you need to be sterilized to protect future generations.

I know dick all about copyright law, but I would bet my life and the lives of my relatives for 10 generations hence that you can't just say an established name belongs to you and suddenly it does.

no1 law school

You think because it's the best school in that little corner of the world that it's the best anywhere? Holy shit, people call me arrogant. Sorry if I question your little school, but guess what, america isn't the law of the world and if one of their esteemed professors tells me the earth is flat, I'm not going to believe him.

I'm not a student there or anything, I'm not even an american, I just wanted to dig up a source that was more credible then wikipedia so that it could be taken sort of seriously.

(EDIT: hence why I thought it was a bit ridiculous to immedietly say the source sucks)

I can appreciate that, but you must be taking the individual's statements out of context or something. The United States is right on the frontier of "forever plus a day" copyright law, there's no way any respected individual would make a statement like that.

You may be right that TA could still be considered in use, I think that's the central question here.

Also Trademarks are different then copyrights, as I understand it they are intended to stop plagiarism of popular brands, fooling customers to buy fake coca cola bottles for examples. If you look at it from this perspective, it makes sense that when a trademark hasn't been used for a long time it can be taken over by someone else.

(beaten by Zpock)

IANAL.

Trademark != Copyright

Trademarks can be lost by inaction and failure to defend them. However, even if Atari has/does lose the Total Annihilation trademark, and someone else does pick it up, they could create a game Total Annihilation 2, but could not sell the original TA. It is still protected by copyright until Atari (or whoever they sold it to) does something active to remove the copyright (or a very long time has passed).

Remember, copyright is there to protect the producers; trademarks are here to protect the consumers. It prevents two products from using the same trademark and confusing consumers as to which comes from which company (and therefore the quality of the product). If one product ceases to exist, another can (after a reasonable time) use that trademark.

International law isn't something really clear anyway, IMHO most of the time it's "the right of the biggest" and "Maybe, but you can't catch us anyway" that is the rule...

IMHO, whoever owns the rights on TA is no Blizzard, would have a hard time to sue Spring... (especially now, when Supreme Commander is out) and even if they are somewhat powerful,
if the Project Revolution people did this mod without consequences, Spring has nothing to fear:
http://www.blizzplanet.com/content/560/
http://wc3campaigns.net/revolution/index.php
http://wc3campaigns.net/revolution/faq.php (Legal issues)

IMHO you should not fear to call Spring, Total Annihilation : Spring (was it for this reason the name was changed? Or to encourage non-TA mods?)

Though that doesnt mean we should TRY and break into those communities because AFAIC Spring has some of the worst PR of any free game ive seen. I used to search the internet for free games often and never heard of spring- a friend had to tell me about it.

Yes, IIRC I heard about Spring when searching on youtube for SupCom videos... still, it might be good to improve the ease of singleplayer and solving the UF problem (CADownloader?) before launching a massive advertising campaign...

Starcraft to Warcraft 3? This is madness!

Blizzard threatened Freecraft and made rename the engine and start from scratch on units and stuff... I wonder what their reasoning is on letting people do the same thing, but to an immensely more popular game? Maybe it's because they own both of them...? Still it doesn't really make sense for them to be so extreme on Freecraft and totally unconcerned about this other one.

lol, we had this convo caydr.

Er.... seriously?

I really need more sleep. I don't mean that like a "geek" joke where the guy always says he needs more coffee and has dark rings under his eyes, I mean, wow, I've really got to sleep more. My brain is failing me.

Aha, speaking of which I have to get up in 3 hours. Crap.

Stop being such a fucking stupid drama queen Caydr. You can disagree without saying "HAVARD? I LAUGH AT YOUR PUNY SOURCE". It's more reliable than whatever nonsense you spout, considering you have, I imagine, no education in the area and probably less than a wikipedia level of knowledge.

BTW, Home of the Underdogs, isn't an abandonware site, it's a site for "underdogs" with download links for games that can't be bought anymore (there's a lot of "abandonware" on the site but it's not the purpose of the site). Quite a few games in their database never had a download link, just a link to a store selling them.

Owning the OTA trademark is not enough to make TA2, you could make a game and brand it Total Annihilation but you could not use any part of OTA including the scenario, game design and artwork without owning the copyright to OTA as well.

Someone should just get the contact details of cavedog and ask them about it.

MightySheep wrote:Someone should just get the contact details of cavedog and ask them about it.

Did you pay attention to any of this thread at all?

Cavedog is dead and buried.

tombom wrote:Stop being such a fucking stupid drama queen Caydr. You can disagree without saying "HAVARD? I LAUGH AT YOUR PUNY SOURCE". It's more reliable than whatever nonsense you spout, considering you have, I imagine, no education in the area and probably less than a wikipedia level of knowledge.

My puny drama-queen brain is better than any puny source that says you can just say you own something and suddenly you do. Seriously.... has everyone just completely lost their mind? You've gotta buy a name. Whether it's a license or a copyright or the rights or whatever the legal whatever is.

If not, there would have already been a Fallout 3, and Bethesda wouldn't have literally bailed Interplay out of massive financial ruin by buying the rights to it.

Isn't it like, once you've bought the OTA CD you can use the content for whatever personal use you like, eg putting them in a new mod, or even putting them in a new engine to play yourself.

As long as the makers of spring aren't hosting OTA content for free and use the old "you must own OTA to use these mods" then there's no issue as far as I can see. I don't see why spring would ever need to "own" the Total Annihilation name or anything like that to function as it always has been.

Obviously if some players chose to ignore the warning and distribute or download OTA content then that's an issue for the individuals and doesn't have anything to do with the Spring engine, so long as Spring is not seen to encourage it or provide means to do so.

Well, actually it's the whole actual problem of the context we live in, with the DMCA/EUCD, the MAFIAA, the laws that forbid you to create and use software that could be used to share copyright-protected works, practically unlimited copyright durations, farmers that can't replant the seeds coming from their crops and must buy new ones from Monsanto...

So, of course Spring shouldn't have any problem distributing TA-based mods, as long as it's written that you must own a copy (/licence?) of TA to play them, but it's the same problem with p2p : you shouldn't be annoyed by the MAFIAA if you have on your computer and share via p2p copyrighted works that you don't own, as long as you don't play them! But people still get sued, and in more and more countries you are forbidden to play DVD's under linux, or to use programs like CADownloader...

You cannot declare something still in stores to belong to you.

Which is why, except for perhaps zwzsg, no-one has done so, and neither does the Harvard article claim as such. ~~