Hey all!

This is my first message here, so I better introduce myself. I'm
viejo_archivero from Karoshi Corporation, an MSX development team: we
started our history four years ago, and today we have a total of 12
released games and several applications for the MSX development such
as a full assembler. If you want to know more and download our games
for free, you can check http://www.karoshicorp.com

Every year, a big international game development contest is to be
held: the MSXdev contest, where lots of new MSX games are released
(last year, 21 MSX games!). Well, for this year Karoshi Corporation
has announced two games to challenge the contest: Speedjet Racers and
Malaika - Prehistoric Quest. Well, imagine our feelings when we found
someone that was actually making demos using the game logo and splash
screen but with a modified copyright text. You know, more than
others, than developing for an old system is hard, time consuming,
and sometimes projects never get finished and, to find that modified
image, was a bit shocking to me.

Anyway, I can understand someone making a port of the image as I
agree with him in that is a complex and technical one, with a well
studied mix between sprites and background graphics, and so it is
nice to prove the capacity of a gfx chip. But anyway, I think that
he'd never had to modify the credits in the image or that when people
started to give him positive feedback about the gfx design he must
have pointed the authors. Note that we only develop freeware games,
so feedback is the one and only way people can "pay" us for our work.

Now I only have to thank the admin of the group and the webmaster
of 'sometimes' website for taking the demos down. I really don't know
the opinion of "MSX Invaders!" author (another work-in-progress
game), but about those demos including Malaika's graphic I will have
np for the author to put them online again, AS LONG AS he credits
from where the graphics have been taken (in the shot of the demo, or
on a .txt file bundled with the binary archive). Just a text
like "GFX: 2006, Karoshi Corporation - http://www.karoshicorp.com"
will fit ok.

Again, thanks. When the project Malaika - Prehistoric Quest is
finished I will surely report it here for you to check the final
game!.

Best regards,
Jon Cortazar Abraido
(aka viejo_archivero)
Karoshi Corporation
http://www.karoshicorp.com
http://forum.karoshicorp.com









--- In ti99-4a@yahoogroups.com, "Tom Wills" <tom@...> wrote:
>
> Excuse me? Where did you ever get that impression from. I have
ALWAYS been agaist copyright and license violations. What I was
saying here is that lots of demos are done to get people to buy their
programs. They encourage people to share them so the product sells.
In this case, that was not intended. They should have made that more
apparent on their site. We have two different ways that the same
thing, demos in this case, are treated in different ways. It would be
great if there were standard definitions for things like "What is a
Demo?"
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Original message
> From: "Jon Vogel"
> To: ti99-4a@yahoogroups.com
> Received: 11/15/2006 3:53:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [TI-99/4A] You aked for it, now you have it (was:
Cover girl ... )
>
>
> From: "Thomas A Wills" <tom@...>
>
> > This may be one very good example of how we really need to
> > be careful
> > of what we say as now the whole world can read our
> > archives. I sure
> > hope this settles down and gets resolved in one big hurry.
>
> I think that I'm reading this very strangely, Tom. It looks
> to me like you're suggesting that it was ok to do copyright
> infringement, as long as no one outside this group knew
> about it? I'm mis-reading this, right? Open archives or
> not, we shouldn't be doing illegal things on this list or
> condoning them, right?
>
> As far as any "ramifications" of this: there aren't any.
> Someone made a demo that looks just like a game someone else
> is developing. The demo doesn't do anything. The demo
> isn't for sale. This e-mail list can't be sued for
> copyright infringement or anything silly like that, it's not
> an entity. So, I don't think that, as another person
> suggest, legal advice is necessary. The most that can
> happen is that the offended parties ask that the server
> hosting the demo take it down. And, they can probably
> refuse, though it might not garner good will. There's
> little legally that can be done or is really worth pursuing.
> But, whatever happens with that server, it's out of the
> hands of this list, which, since it's not an entity, has no
> control over that server.
>
> So, let's all take some meds, calm down, and get back to TI
> stuff.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jon
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>