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From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Legal action against STrabble game.
Message-ID: <1991May29.195434.16735@wam.umd.edu>
Date: 29 May 91 19:54:34 GMT
References: <1624@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> <3089@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <10107@suns4.crosfield.co.uk>
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In article <10107@suns4.crosfield.co.uk> magna@crosfield.co.uk (john hartridge) writes:
>In article <3089@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> neil@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil Forsyth) writes:
>>In article <1624@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> warwick@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>>>So what?  I think if someone is willing to give you something BETTER for
>>>FREE, then they shouldn't be punished. [...]
>>
>>It could hurt some companies every bit as much as piracy, which is the illegal
>>version of free software. [...]
>
>Surely any company that tries to produce and sell software that is not as 
>good as something an individual working on at home can produce and give
>away does not deserve to remain in business.  A software company does not
>deserve to do well (ie make a lot of money) out of what must be a very
>inferior product.

The more that games programming moves into the realm of higher level
languages and away from the realm of arcane assembly language voodoo
(heh-heh), the more you will see "individuals working at home"
producing games that give the professional houses a run for their money.

I strongly suspect that in the next few years we will see many more
games written by former "mere hobbyists" that are of professional or
near-professional quality.  The main thing that separates commercial
games from those done by amateurs at this point is art.  If you get two
friends working together for fun on a PD game, one a programmer and one
an artist, you can get amazing results that rival the professional
games in quality.  Don't think for a minute that algorithms to move
shapes around the screen quickly are "secrets."  There are already
several examples of Shareware and PD games for the ST that "have the
technology."  Have a look at LLamatron or Nova.

Of course the professional houses will always have the edge in
extremely complex games like flight simulators, Ultima N+1, etc.
simply because games like that require huge amounts of data.  But games
in the "shoot everything that moves" and "ninja chop-socky warriors
part 19:  revenge of Foo" genres come down to basic straight-ahead game
mechanics and glitzy art.

>Although I have not personally seen the STrabble game in question, it
>does not sound like a particularly difficult game to code (more difficult
>getting the dictionary together I would have thought), and yet it is being
>sold for the same price as some of the more complex games (anything involving
>a lot of high speed graphics, say).

Scrabble is QUITE difficult to do well.  Not as hard as chess or go
perhaps, but then there's quite a bit of literature written on those.
Making an intelligent Scrabble opponent has been the subject of at
least one PhD dissertation.  Add to that the difficulty of just getting
the dictionary of words into the program in a space-efficient manner,
and you've got quite a challenging project.

>I therefore see the PD world as not only providing the "little" utilities
>that are not worth writing yourself, and not worth paying money for, but
>also for keeping the "Big" software houses "on their toes" and ensure
>that their latest "masterpiece" is actually worth the money that they are 
>asking for it.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing a game that rivals
professional games in quality.  The problem comes when you cause the
professional software houses to lose sales on their own products
because you copied them.  That's the main issue here -- that STrabble
performs all the functions of a commercial Scrabble playing program
(and quite brilliantly, I might add) and therefore steals sales from
the people who bought the rights to produce the official version.  If
STrabble were a game only _similar_ to Scrabble, then Spears would just
be out of luck, but then STrabble probably wouldn't hurt Spears' sales
if it weren't an implementation of the famous board game.

Like Neil, I think that Spears have every legal right to ask Warwick to
stop distributing the game.  (Note that I said _legal_ right.)  However,
it IS an unfortunate trend.  It makes me unhappy to see someone who
is just trying to provide quality software to the ST community essentially
for free getting raked over the coals for it.  On the other hand, however,
if I were Spears and saw that my sales were being hurt after I'd shelled
out the bucks to write the legitimate version, I'd probably feel that
trying to stop distribution of the shareware version were my only
recourse.

If Scrabble were a game no one cared about any more (like Pacman), I'm
sure this wouldn't even be an issue.  The problem comes when a
shareware author copies a game that still has sales potential.  The big
bombshell in this area is of course Tetris.  It's a simple concept that
is unbelievably easy to implement.   Easier, even, than Pacman.  Since
it's so easy, it's been copied all across creation.  But this does
indeed affect sales of the official versions, and sure enough, Spectrum
Holobyte (supposedly) attempted to kill all the shareware versions of
Tetris for the Amiga.  (Perhaps an Amiga owner will correct me if it
wasn't Spectrum Holobyte.)

To see things from the other side, ponder this:  How would you feel if
you'd come up with the idea for Tetris, written the game and put it out
there (commercially), only to come across equally good PD rip-offs of
YOUR game idea?

Copyrights and patents are intended to protect intellectual property.
The fact that the laws are only severely enforced when someone else is
getting hurt by an infringement is a virtue that allows people to have
an ancient (but fun) game like Pacman or Robotron on their ST's even
after there's no commercial potential for it.  Who would write Pacman
for the ST if it could only be released commercially?  It just wouldn't
sell.

This whole legal mess should be taken VERY seriously by PD/Shareware
authors.  Whereas shareware and PD started out as a vehicle for hobbyists
to release anything they wanted to, it has now become a threat to big
business.  Shareware authors should realize they're now walking through
a legal mine field when they infringe on others' copyrights.

Dave Baggett
dmb@wam.umd.edu