Re: jim kitchen headed for a great big lawsute?
American Dad, there are a lot of differences to consider here.
First, as many others have said Jim Kitchen is not selling any of his games. While that alone won't protect him from a lawsuit over copyright infringement it makes such a suit unlikely. If a person isn't making money off the copyrighted material it is less likely someone will attempt to sue because they know it will likely cost them more to take the case to court than they are likely to get if they win.
In USA Games' case we were already actively selling Montezuma's Revenge, AKA Montezuma's Return, and Utopia objected to us using their trademark commercially. In hindsight we could have just removed the trademarks and probably went on with the project, but chose to start over from square one. In any case it was settled out of court.
Second, thing here to keep in mind is anonymity. Even though Jim Kitchen has been developing games for twenty plus years he still isn't likely to be known to anyone whom he borrowed sounds and music from. There is something to be said being a fairly unknown person when borrowing sounds, music, and yes even game ideas. It lets a person get away with a lot that is not strictly speaking legal.
Third, there is the possibility of bad public relations. A lot of people probably aren't aware that all of the games he creates have copyrights owned and held by other companies. Its not legal to just go and write a Monopoly game because Hasbro Inc. holds the copyrights to it. thing is if Hasbro were to openly sue Jim Kitchen it could become a public relations nightmare so even if they know Jim was using their copyrights they might not want to touch that one with a ten foot poll.
Finally, as for the Star Wars license we never had one to begin with. that's the entire trouble. We tried to acquire one through legal channels and found out that Lucas Licensing expected a ridiculous amount of money to acquire a commerci al license. That wouldn't necessarily rule out the possiblity of writing free Star Wars games, but it wouldn't strictly be legal to do so. If we got caught we could get in hot water if Lucasfilm or Disney wanted to persue the matter in court.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
