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Closi 4 hours ago

Also even if it is a ground up rewrite, the look and feel still matters.

Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)

20k 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Clean room reimplementations of software projects have been tested in court and are legally fine

4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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anthk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

- OpenArena

- Chip's Challange and custom levels pack

- Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic

- LibreQuake

- Supertux2

- Oolite

- Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets

- Frozen Bubble

- Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.

anthk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

dang 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. You can make your substantive points without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bjt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.

anthk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sony vs Bleem. They already lost this case in court.

comex 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That was a very different case.

Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here.

The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent.

If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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InsideOutSanta 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think I'm even older than you, because I remember what Nintendo did to the Great Giana Sisters.

haunter 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good luck making an open source Pokemon game clone and see how it goes