On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 08:17 +0200, david blanchard wrote: > Now, another aspect : as you may know, we are currently facing legal > questions related to copyright due to the fact that we are using the real > web sites in our game. We are currently investigating the question with > lawyers, and on another hand, some game choices will have impact (proxy > versus plugin might have legal consequences for instance) on that matter - > but basically the point is that there is currently a risk on this that we > don't fully apprehend.
Yup - the meeting with Olivier Hugot on Thursday was very enlightening here. David is going to post minutes, but in a nutshell - we are not doing anything wrong legally speaking. : ) There are a few things to be careful about, but generally speaking the risk, even if there is always one, is minimal. > Be if we feel that the risk is acceptable, there are two paths : > 1) one possible option could be to go with what we have currently at > the risk of being sued because we believe that we can make the case law > (jurisprudence in French, not sure about the word) evolve and win the > lawsuit. > 2) Another option would be to still look at how to change the game so > that there is no legal risk, without losing the core experience of the game. > I'm not sure how to do that, but it's a discussion we haven't had yet, there > might be ways. Well, there is no such thing as zero legal risk IMHO - especially with new concepts such as Hackit's. And if we try to get rid of features to try to reach that "zero risk", we'll just make the concept more empty. > The flaw with the first option is that if we are sued, even if we have > a good chance to win at the end, it will be a lot of money (good > lawyers are expensive !), time and energy spent on that, that we will > not spend on the game. Independently of legal considerations, there > is a risk here to lose our focus on the content of the game itself. Olivier said something important about this: the cost of a lawsuit in France wouldn't be very high (5-10K), and in any case it takes a lot of time to be judged. So I don't think we should be afraid of getting lawsuits, as long as we feel confident that it has good chances to hold in court. It wouldn't be too time- or money-consuming. I think the right approach for a potentially controversial feature is: 1) we look at what we want to do 2) we look at the buzz it can create 3) we see if this feels "right" to us, independently of the legal part 3) we check the level of legal risk 4) if the lawyer feels he can defend it in court with good chances of succeeding, we do it > For me, the question here lies on where we want to provoke reactions : on > the game itself and its content (second option), or on the way we display > this game and how users actually -in the real world- behave towards > ownership on the web (first option). Both! They are equally important, it's like trying to decide if game design is more important than marketing or vice-versa. They both contribute to the success of the game. Xavier. _______________________________________________ Hackit Bar mailing list - [email protected] Wiki: http://community.hackit.cx/ List: http://community.hackit.cx/ml/ Forum: http://community.hackit.cx/forum/ Ideas: http://community.hackit.cx/ideas/ IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#politis
