NAMCO Demands Takedown Of Pacman Game Created By Kid Using MIT's Scratch Programming Language
from the create-your-own! dept
An anonymous reader sends over the story, found on Reddit of how Namco Bandai sent a letter complaining that a kid recreated Pacman online using Scratch. If you're not familiar with it, Scratch is a very simple programming "language," basically designed to teach kids how to program (or think about programming) from a young age. And what's one of the best ways to learn to program? It's to recreate an app that already exists. But that's not allowed:
This is how kids learn. They recreate what they know. Kids learn to play music by copying the music that they know. Many learn to draw by copying drawings that they see. They learn to write by copying the writers they like. This is how education works. But in a world where copyright trumps all, learning takes a back seat apparently.
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I guess the Namco lawyers don't know their history. I doubt that any game developer could successfully "throw the first stone".
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Very True...
I know one of the things I used to do when I first started out writing (hell, I still do it occasionally), was to emulate some of my favorite authors. I'd get to a place in a story and I didn't know how to proceed, or something seemed off about the subsequent pages, or something just didn't feel right.
Then I'd remember a similar type of progression in a favorite book I'd read. So I'd go find the book, open it up, review what the author had done in the similar situation, and then I would try to do something similar to see if the results made sense. I would even occasionally keep the book open as I wrote for a few pages to make sure I was emulating faithfully. Once past that section with something I was happy with, I'd go back to writing as I normally would.
Is this wrong? Am I being unartistic? I would think that to suggest such would be to fundemantally misunderstand how art is created in the first place....
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Re: Very True...
Also, while we're on it--humans learn poorly from instruction (or "lecture") unless, of course, you're attempting to teach them how to lecture.
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Re: Re: Re: Very True...
Yep. I teach at a law enforcement academy and we can give the recruits all the lectures in the world but nothing drives home the lessons like actual practice.
Forgetting to check their corners when clearing a room and taking a sim round to the back (and enduring resulting bruises and aches that come with it), along with that "oh shit" feeling of knowing they screwed up is something they won't forget for the rest of their careers. The lesson sure stays with them much longer and more vividly than a classroom lecture or watching a video.
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Re: Re: Re: Very True...
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Do they realise
Here is a small sample.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/tron/232913
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/bigB/15121
ht tp://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Toasty/1223458
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/eoinj/1222098
http:// scratch.mit.edu/projects/Isaac2010/1216401
Perhaps they should be looking for the rights to "whack a mole"?
In any case pacman is pretty generic. No one has copied their code and the idea of a pacman game is too broad to be subject to any exclusive rights.
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Re: Do they realise
If they change the characters and don't call it Pacman, they should be fine.
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When can i pick up a brush?
Is it any wonder more and more kids take a "why bother" attitude towards art, music and anything else creative?
I saw this interesting disclaimer someone put on the Reddit boards. Though I doubt it would do anything to stop a DMCA take-down notice, it does go to show just what level of legal knowledge we seem to be asking of young creators in this brave new world of copyright economy:
(from a reddit comment)
How many kids would want to bother doing the prior art research whenever a new inspiration strikes? Does the brain even remember what influences it is using when inspiration happens?
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Re: When can i pick up a brush?
Children should be indoctrinated from birth, you heard me, from birth, that is right, the moment they open their eyes the first thing they should see is the "©" sign, and as they progress they should play games that instil the concepts of copyrights into them like blocks of lego that when market with a copyright mark will explode or give out tase them if they didn't ask for permission first from someone and didn't pay, stuffed animals should come with recording asking them to pay something before they can play with them and tell them stories of how copying others is bad and if they don't listen, dark shadows will come and get them.
Parents that teach their kids that sharing is caring are being careless and educating their kids on how to be thiefs.
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Re: Very True...
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Re: Re: Very True...
BTW, I used some 10 pac-man clones from scratch, and I really don't get what NAMCO is worried about. Most are simply unusable. 124Scratch's (one of them) is probably the best (with tron's), and still not pac-man by a long shot.
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You're saying this kid is actually Zero Cool reincarnated?
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http://www.physorg.com/news199887375.html
Next step to this kid is to buy a AR(Augmented Reality) ready phone to play pacman on the streets LoL
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You mean that patents and trademarks don't go through the United States Patents and Trademarks Office? Well, you live and learn.
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So...
Like Free Capitalist says its not wonder that people are starting to shy away from the creative arts. Its getting harder and hard to engage in them without fear of getting sued or threatened to be sued or demanded to remove/take down content.
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Man I remember my first graphical game it took me 2 years to do it, because of all the stuff I had to learn and it was no where near this cute when I finished.
Scratch is wonderful in that it puts programming in the 21 century, no more text API's.
Before some crazy person comes here and tell me how wonderful bash, C and assembly are I want to remind everyone that those are just API's for the underlying opcodes of the processor.
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Re:
Ummm... that's true of all programming languages, including Scratch. It's more true with the low- and medium-level languages (C, assembly) than with the high-level languages (C++, bash, Scratch, Java, etc.) of course, but still...
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Re:
and so have hundreds of visual programming languages decades ago. What is new?
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Suck it Namco.. I'm not buying your shovelware anymore.
I hope that NAMCO's bullying doesn't deter the student to create programs.
To NAMCO, consider me one less buyer.
These bullying lawyers need to be put in check. Go and pick on someone your own size. These provisions in law were put in place so that you could litigate against people who continue to take your copyright after you've asked them to stop...
Instead of firing off this god-awful NASTYgram, NAMCO should have send the student a letter asking him/her nicely to please stop creating/distributing his take on PacMan. But asking nicely has gone to the wayside, apparently. Apparently these big corporations have forgotten the word "please". So until they re-learn that word, they can go pleasure themselves, as far as I'm concerned.
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Re: Suck it Namco.. I'm not buying your shovelware anymore.
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Re: Suck it Namco.. I'm not buying your shovelware anymore.
The kids is not profiting off his version of PacMan. MIT is not profiting off his version of PacMan either.
One thing is to copy to make a profit. That is outright copyright infringement.
If the kid had pirated the ROMs, that is bad as well.
But what this lawyer wants us to believe is that one cannot emulate something else, even when we are not making money off of it, because of hypothetical "profits" that never existed.
This is nonsense. By this reasoning, hobby modeling should be illegal, since it is violating the copyrights of some corporation. No one should ever make a Star Wars outfit at home because George Lucas would be losing that royalty money.
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Re: Re: Suck it Namco.. I'm not buying your shovelware anymore.
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Re: NAMCO Demands Takedown
Yes, I realize that he had to recreate the game before it could be offered for use, but it was the public deployment of the game for users in general, not the recreation of the program, that drew the takedown notice.
The educational benefit derived from recreating the program was obtained before and separate from the public deployment of the game, and this educational benefit was not diminished by the takedown notice.
So bash copyright all you want (and I agree with many of the points made in other postings). But PLEASE read the documents you are bashing and make sure you bash the correct aspects and don't get off on unjustified tangents like this posting and most of the follow-on comments do.
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Re: Re: NAMCO Demands Takedown
It clearly goes against copyright, it is infringement, but it should never impede education as it is hard enough to find ways to inspire children already.
If this is allowed, education in the U.S. is effectively kneecaped.
We should teach lawyers the importance of inspiration for future generations as a means to maintain the levels of education inside a country, we should teach lawyers what culture means and it doesn't mean unsharable values.
Companies exist to support the population not the other way around, they are base on the needs of people if those people can do it by themselves why there are laws forbidding it?
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Re: Re: NAMCO Demands Takedown
What we should teach those children?
That someone came up with this idea and for 200 years nobody can use it?
Thank God some people have waken up and are producing free options so those kids will at least have a way of creating their own culture that will be threatened by companies following them around trying to make them buy stuff they don't need.
Big Bucks Bunny FTW.
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Re: Re: NAMCO Demands Takedown
That said, if it's called PAC-MAN then there's a case of trademark violation. Maybe.
There are a world of clones of pac man out there, always have been, curious for a game that required at least 3 beer before anyone would play it, but still. ;-)
Please, repeat after me, "you cannot copyright/patent an idea", only a particular expression of one.
Trademark, yeah, I'll give him that. Not, I repeat, not copyright.
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Re: Re: NAMCO Demands Takedown
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Kids now have the ability to program games they like for themselves, you don't need years of training anymore.
Are these companies saying they can't compete with children and do a better job?
WTF!
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This is stupid.
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Uh... So... Namco... Your move.
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Re:
http://www.webpacman.com/
and
http://www.pacmangame.net/
and about 10 million other hits on Google - at least 1/3 of which seem to be versions of the game.
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Cease and Desist... wakka wakka wakka
In all seriousness though, I think the belligerent enforcement of Trademark is ridiculous, but also understandable from their perspective. NAMCO didn't build the variable mine-field that is copyright law, but they've had to exist within it. I think the real shame here is the lack of vision on the part of the owners. With a character as iconic as PAC-MAN, there's real opportunity to embrace these types of educational / non-profit characterizations and elevate themselves to a new level of relevancy to a whole new generation -- an overall move I think would be much more profitiable to them moving forward.
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Re: Cease and Desist... wakka wakka wakka
No it didn't. There are literally thousands of other versions available for free on the web. Little Johnny's contribution is an insignificant drop in the ocean. Unless NAMCO have pursued a reasonable proportion of these fellow infringers I think their conduct towards Little Johnny can reasonable be viewed as harassment.
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Re: Re: Cease and Desist... wakka wakka wakka
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Re: Re: Re: Cease and Desist... wakka wakka wakka
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What about Google's Pac-Man easter egg from a while back?
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Re: What about Google's Pac-Man easter egg from a while back?
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UNFAIR!
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Google
http://www.google.com/pacman/
Take that down.
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Re: Google
"Re: Re:
BearGriz72 (profile), Aug 2nd, 2010 @ 7:09pm
http://www.google.com/pacman/ !?"
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Namco is right, but in a rather ham-handed way.
As for the Google Doodle Pac-Man? That was done with full permission of Namco. (Which is in itself slightly ironic, considering by its mere implementation in AJAX, *ANYONE* can take the code and reproduce it simply.) I'm guessing Google paid Namco a licensing fee.
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Re: Namco is right, but in a rather ham-handed way.
Companies *SHOULD* also learn the value of goodwill, and if I ran Namco, I'd be looking to offer students more material to learn from, because they will soon be my best employees. But the difference is that I am forward thinking enough to realize that my future profits as a company are based on the small pool of "infringers" that currently exist, instead of thinking that my ability to afford yet another mansion now is more important than the future of my company.
Companies *SHOULD* also learn that the law should apply evenly to all people (and not just people and not companies (which shouldn't be people in the eyes of the law anyway.)) Why are companies going after kids for trademark infringement when companies like Disney can copy movies wholesale from Japanese animators (who, unlike the lawyers in the American system, view such blatant copyright infringement as flattery.) If a company copies something, they should have the same (relative) outcome that those they sue who copy their works.
While this is a trademark case, and not a copyright case (the lawyer is an idiot if he thinks he can fight the copyright aspect here, an idea cannot be copyrighted,) the DMCA is pretty clear that educational use. This cease and desist should be filed in the circular file cabinet where it belongs.
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Re: Namco is right, but in a rather ham-handed way.
The code? no
The iconic depiction of the pacman and the ghosts? I think that might fall under trademark, but it's that much a part of our culture, that I think Namco will be hard pressed to make that case stick, unless they are willing lose that much free publicity.
The sounds? Perhaps, unless he recreated the sounds himself... but then the game didn't have to be taken offline, and the C&D should've focused on the sounds rather than the game.
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Are they doing any harm by making a pacman project? It's amazing how insensitive large corporations can be.
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Srsly?
If I wanted to make a Pacman(tm?) game, i guess it would be banned unless I filled the description with something like "PAC-MAN(tm) and all related charactors are property of NAMCO (etc...)" instead of a fun description like "Eat all the circle-things without touching the ghosts!"?
Namco, You just lost one more customer.
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this is what i would do
if i were to *ever* get a notice like this, i would take a trip to the lawyer's office. wait outside and get some pictures of him as he left his office. get some pictures of him as he got in his car (with license plate). follow him home and take some more pictures of his home, complete with mailbox number.
i would then send him a nice reply saying :
"thanks for the message, glad you liked my example of X. it would be a shame if anything happened to you in your car on the way home from the office. education is far more important than $$, if you sue over this--i'll be broke, but i bet that you'll be far worse off than me in the end.
kind regards"
after all, eye for eye right?
threaten my livelihood, and i'll respond in kind.
i can guarantee that the first report you see of a copyright lawyer being sent to a hospital will immediately cause the rest to carefully consider how they take and handle these cases in the future.
these "laws" are just legal ways to gain a monopoly, and i hope that one day i get targeted so i can put my above plan in effect.
aww hell, maybe i'll just do it anyways since someone has to be first.
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Re: this is what i would do
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Not enough concrete.
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Meh
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I love namco. it's not their fault.
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Thousands of Pac-Mans
Enough has been said, there is no way to do anything about Pac-Man now. It only gives ideas and fun.
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namco
here i'll make a name up for them:
sllabym nowolb
done
lol
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namco
here i'll make a name up for them:
sllabym nowolb
done
lol
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I looked up trademarks and they have the name Pac-Man trade marked, but not "Pacman". I found one trademark entry for "Pacman" by some Korean clothing maker. This could explain why I never heard from them, I'm not sure. It does resemble their game, only with guns, dynamite etc.. I have been working on a new version, but want to rename it, it's so difficult to find a name that isn't trademarked, it's crazy, the simplest name is trademarked. Greed is rampant it seems. (my game is free, not that it makes a difference)
It could be difficult to get rid of my game now, it's all over the net. It has sometimes concerned me. I guess this is the good thing about not having a lot of money, they can't get blood from a stone. ;)
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RAWR
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Pacman
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