Castle Paradox

[LeRoy_Leo]

[jabbercat]

there should be a emoticon for slapping your head

I have a strong desire to kill you all.
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Moogle no longer owes prizes.

[TMC]

How friendly.

But you can't really stop people from copying your ideas. I believe someone even won a court case in the US so that they were allowed to decompile other peoples programs so that they could see how things were done.
And of course, the other people may have had the idea before you mentioned it, or might use it forgetting where they got it from.

But, people do try to think of something original..
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[LeRoy_Leo]

So most of us are pissed because of copy rights, and copy right infringment. This is, indeed, an intelligent conversation...

Hopefully we can all find SOME common ground...
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "

[madhatter]

According to various things I've read, all stories can be traced back to Greek mythology; all stories in one way or another are similar to a Greek story. So technically it's pretty 'frikkin hard to think of something original, and there's no point to copyrighting it. Maybe we should curl up and die.

I by no means stand by this 100%, this is just my immediate thought.

[jabbercat]

an example of copyright infringement: "Oi!I invented Bob and James stole him! "

but if it's very well known thing being questioned like a Beethoven piece , there would be no question of originality and therefor no legal suit.[/quote]
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Moogle no longer owes prizes.

[Uncommon]

Beethoven is public domain. After a certain amount of time (120 years or something), copyrights are no longer in effect. Thus, we are not infringing upon Greek mythology when we copy stories from them, as they weren't actually copyrighted in the first place and no one really can claim them now.

Anyway, the easiest way to protect something of your own, besides getting a registered copyright, is to prove that you made it, and include dates.

[madhatter]

I didn't mean that we were infringing on Greek mythology, I meant that it is impossible to think of a story that is 100% original, because humans to some degree think along the same lines.

[Me]

Copyrights expire, I believe, after 60 years. I'm not sure on that, though - it might be 60 years after te death of the work's creator or something. Fyre should know - he's into that kind of thing.
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UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT A B START

[Alphaknight]

As far as copyrights expireing yes they do but for instance Sir Artur Conan Doyals family re-copyright his work every 20 years so even if you copyright your work it Will expire but your relitives CAN redo it for you in your absence. As far as the OHR copyrights it is my OPINION that if you are going to use someone elses character or ideas you should at the VERY least ask and mentions them in your game, but that is just my OPINION and we all know the way opinions go. Oh well thats all I have to say.

[Gizmog1]

There should be a limit though on what constitutes stealing an idea. For instance, to use FF6 as an example stealing an idea would be "Group of people join the returners and fight the Empire" not "Let's have an airship".

This is more applicable to the OHR in things like say, a real time system. I think an idea like that should be open to anyone who wants to make it, so long as they write the script themself, not actually steal the script from someone else. But, stealing graphics is always stealing, and for the most part, if you steal a story word for word, then that should constitute stealing as well.

[TMC]

Yeah, no doubt that stealing gfx/music/code that is not public domain is ripping. But gameplay gets tricky. I think that if someone has already implemented that idea in a game, than it shouldn't be considered theft, just really unoriginal gameplay. But if they haven't impletmented it yet... I suppose you could use general ideas, but if your copying all the details too, that's theft.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[Camdog]

I'm pretty confident that none of us really need to worry about some big corporation stealing our ideas. The fact of the matter is, story ideas are a dime a dozen; they're the easy part. Game companies have people trying to sell ideas to them all the time, and they usually don't bite simply because this part is so easy. They certainly don't farm the forums of amateur game creation sites for ideas.

[Rinku]

camdog has it right. if you abstract it to the level of 'terrorists bomb power plant' it isn't copying. but if it's 'terrorists named AVALANCHE including members named cloud, tifa, and barret bomb a city named midgar's power plant which operates by drawing mako energy from the planet' then that's copying. the difference is whether the thing being copied is abstract or specific.

orson scott card put it another way:

"if your fantasy story is 'a group of nine adventurers get together and go on a quest' then it isn't copying lord of the rings. but if the quest is to destroy a ring of power and at the end of it this happens by someone biting off the ringfinger containing that ring and falling to his doom, then the audience will throw down the book in disgust"

[LeRoy_Leo]

I think someone else put it this way as well:

As long as you change something about it to make it different (better), then it isn't copying.

If our imagination wells are running dry, then drink spareingly. That is what I say... *Final fantasy gulps...*
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "