Mango@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How do grown ass adults look at this and think anything other than “damn, that’s pretty cool!”? Literally nobody and no company has any conceivable money to lose over this and couldn’t convince me otherwise. Law should have nothing to do with all this pussyfooting about legality.
Why do grown adults keep using IP copyrighted by big companies? Unofficial ports, unofficial remakes, unofficial sequels, etc. get taken down all the time and yet constantly the creators think “no, my project is special. It’ll be spared that fate” and almost every time they’re wrong.
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on…
A Portal-like game without using Portal assets and Valve had no leg to stand on…
This wasn’t taken down because it was based on Portal. It has nothing to do with Portal or Valve, really. It was taken down becuase it uses the official N64 SDK, which is still for some reason considered “confidential.” Valve said to take it down either under duress from Nintendo, or because Valve expected to be under duress from Nintendo and didn’t want to be. If it had used the libdragon API library instead of Nintendo’s official one, then this wouldn’t have happened and Nintendo would have been told to bite rocks.
You have no clue. It was Valve who issued the DMCA takedown. Yes, based on the wrong argument that APIs are copyrighted by Nintendo but Valve cannot take down random software. They are only involved because it uses Portal assets.
I think you need to read the comment you replied to again.
Here’s the bullet points:
Valve doesn’t want Nintendo getting involved
Valve think Nintendo will get involved because the project is using confidential Nintendo code
Valve think Nintendo may litigate (or are already) against them because Portal is Valve’s IP
Valve want it down so Nintendo can’t mistake it to be Valve’s responsibility and so Valve don’t get the blame
It wasn’t a DMCA. They advised the dude to take it down due to Nintendo bring Nintendo.
It started out as a fun project by just a normal guy.
It is literally not possible to make a game like this any other way.
I would bet the concept goes underground and continues tho.
He uses Valve IP, therefore Valve was even the position to make any demands in the first place.
Valve cannot just go through the homebrew community and demand takedowns of random games. They could in this case solely because they own the assets. How is this so hard to understand that I have to repeat myself over and over again?
Do you think it’s hard to explain?
I don’t think you understand that it was started as a fun side project to see if he could actually do it. He wasn’t trying to make the next AAA game
Why would a grown ass adult put so much effort into an unlicensed dupilcation of copyrighted IP (Valve) and build it on top of a system from a company known for ridiculous enofrcement of IP that had a walled garden of access to their game system IP that is protected by the copyright cabal supported DMCA?
There’s more sides and nuance to all of this.
He could’ve made Portal in the style of a 90s console instead of directly declaring it N64 and only had to tend qith permission for it as a mod from Valves sometimes permissive pov without crazy assed Tendo being involved.
Because that’s cool as fuck.
If he did it your way, that defeats the purpose of the constraints in the exercise.
It’s ‘cool as fuck’ right up until he gets personally sued out of existence by Nintendos balls crazy legal team.
The excercise maybe made sense 10 years ago, before we all became were aware of just how uninterested Nintendo gets over cool shit that used any of their licensed technology.
torvusbogpod@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Valve removed it because it used official N64 APIs that Nintendo holds as classified information. I think if it had totally been bottom-up crafted from scratch, it would have survived. But Valve does NOT wanna deal with a Nintendo lawyer.
boaratio@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Classified?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
APIs fall under fair use: arstechnica.com/…/how-the-supreme-court-saved-the…
yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hi, Android dev here. This is a different issue albeit a tangential one. But ultimately it has no bearing on the matter.
The Oracle v Google case revolves around Google’s reimplementation of the Java APIs on the Android platform. This is key. Back when Android started, they used Apache Harmony to provide the Java API set on Android. Harmony was an open source implementation of the Java API set. Sun (the creator of Java) didn’t care, they held the copyright to the Java implementation, but made their money in different ways, so they let the Harmony project live.
Fast forward a decade. The Apache Harmony project is dead. Android is stuck at Java 6 level APIs because of it, Android devs are annoyed they can’t even get Java 8 features. And Oracle bought Sun, and is monetizing the shit out of Java. They started charging money for the official Java SDK. Google didn’t want to pay Oracle, so they started reimplementing the newer Java APIs into Android, to pick up where Harmony had left off. Oracle saw this, found some code in Google’s reimplementation that was similar to the official implementation from Oracle (which is out in the open in the openjdk project) and sued the shit out of them looking for the payday they didn’t get when Google refused to pay Oracle a license.
Ultimately, the SCOTUS ruling says that APIs themselves are not copyrightable (ie you can’t copyright the .toString() function name). But you can copyright the implementation of that function. Ultimately Oracle still won a bit, because they found something like 6 function reimplementations that Google could not successfully defend as clean room implementations.
Why this is irrelevant to the Portal64 issue, is because the dev is not using the open source reimplementation of the Nintendo APIs. He’s literally using the Nintendo owned implementation of the APIs. That’s why he says he needs to switch to open source libraries. Those open source libraries have the same functions within them, but the implementation of said functions aren’t the same as the Nintendo ones (or they are and Nintendo just hasn’t sued the project into oblivion yet, I have no idea about the details).
hikaru755@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Wait but why is Valve involved at all, then? Not like it’s their fault that some people they have nothing to do with are building a game based on those APIs, so shouldn’t Nintendo approach the developers of the port directly instead?
viking@infosec.pub 10 months ago
Valve holds the copyright to Portal, so Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nintendo have their own litigation-happy lawyers. With the exception of the Portal Collection release for Switch, both companies have nothing to do with each other.
mint_tamas@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nintendo sues everyone they encounter in the faintest context of their IP with the power of a thousand suns. See also, the failed launch if Dolphin on Steam. Valve is justifiably cautious here.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Valve doesn’t distribute the port.
Mango@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Right, but what the heck is up with Nintendo clinging into ancient obsolete stuff? They’re not stupid right?
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Yes, Nintendo is stupid. They see capitalism as a zero-sum game, and so any time someone has or keeps their own money, that’s the same as Nintendo losing that money, so they do whatever they’re legally able to do to ruin people financially, going as far as taking 30% of your income for the rest of your life if you do wrong by them.
ShustOne@lemmy.one 10 months ago
No but Nintendo is fiercely protective of all of its IP. We know there’s not really harm being done here but it is within their rights to block this and that is the road they always choose.
Demdaru@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I may be overinterpreting this but it almooost seems, if you stretch it a bit, as if valve saved poor guys. Valve said stop, Nintendo’d say pay up.