Atari didn't put in the effort, but Chris Sawyer did. Now Atari paid Sawyer for the rights to the game. I do not think Atari is a parasite here just because they paid for the game instead of creating it.

It seems to me that the logical outcome of your interpretation is that Sawyer's leniency towards the OpenTTD devs would be punished by losing exclusivity to his IP. Essentially, you are asserting "squatter's rights" to IP - if IP rights are not enforced, then they lapse. This is an interesting idea in principle, but I'm concerned that it might have prevented OpenTTD from ever being created. Original creators would be incentivized to chase off derivative works to protect their IP.

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TuxMark5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My issue with this argument is that I'm not sure how much of OpenTTD is their IP. OpenTTD has been development for so long that I doubt that any original disassembly remnants remain in the latest version of OpenTTD. The only true piece of IP that OpenTTD may use is the name (the TTD part of OpenTTD) and the graphics, the latter of which being the more important one. However, as far as I know, OpenTTD devs have created their own version of all the assets that are also much higher resolution compared to the original. As a result, I see OpenTTD as an entirely separate game, that's been heavily inspired by original, but is its own separate entity.

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streptomycin 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Making a clone of a video game, even with some substantial changes, may not actually be legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

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fwipsy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you take an essay, and rewrite every paragraph and also add some new words, then it's still plagiarism. Perhaps not under copyright law, but ethically. OpenTTD goes beyond "heavily inspired" because it is intended to reimplement the original game.

I am sympathetic to arguments of the form "It was abandonware," "Copyright lasts for too long anyways," etc. But I don't think you can claim OpenTTD owes nothing to the creators of TTD. OpenTTD was meant to replace TTD and would not exist without it.

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singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also "TTD" is hardly a name you can claim. It's three letters that don't make a word.

	▲	Chaosvex 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As long as it officially stands for nothing, perhaps. See DotA vs Dota2.

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Chaosvex 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Atari that may have paid for development no longer exists. This is a skin suit of a legal entity.

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singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What "leniency"? It's not like OpenTTD contains any TTD IP