Square-Enix squashes another another fan project.

[Seil]

As for the other stuff, yes, Square Enix has perfect legal capacity to do this. But this is still understating the positives of fan communities and ROM hacking. Anyone who says ROM hacking is a net negative and "bad" is ignorant of fan translation, which is the only way we've been able to play things like Final Fantasy V, Radical Dreamers, Mother 3, and a bevy of PSX J-RPGs. The kind of ROM hacking we were doing -- creating a new fan-game -- is also of such benignity (and is arguably free marketing) that no ROM hack for an 8-bit or 16-bit game before Crimson Echoes received a C&D letter.

I didn't think of that, that's actually a very good point.

Originally Posted by Krylo

Secondly--Brian is using sprites from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy. You just defined this as theft. Care to comment?

Originally Posted by Krylo

Yes, it's still illegal,but there's a reason most companies let ROM hacks, fan fiction, fan art, and fan remixes fly: it's a net positive. It just seems like Square is unduly protective of the Chrono franchise, and a lot of people feel incredibly alienated right now because this is the third C&D of a Chrono fan project. They aren't C&Ding Final Fantasy ROM hacks, like the expansive Tactics hacks, Pandora's Box (the huge FF6 improvement hack), or all the extensive research going on at Qhimm. So why must the Chrono fan-base get raped like this?

My view is that what Brian is doing is basically fan-art. No offense to Brian, and I do enjoy 8-Bit Theater, but he's taking the characters and putting them to paper... or internet. I think there's a difference between using... I guess I'd say "characters," but he's not really using the characters. He's just using the appearance of the characters. The Crimson Echoes team used the ROM, which is stealing already - but Zea made a good point on that - using the developers coding, music, art and story to create their game.

Video game companies will say it's illegal, lawyers will say it's a fair use gray area--much like creating mix-tapes back in the day, and ROM sites will tell you it's perfectly legal

I agree with the video game companies and the ROM sites. because on most sites - usually where I go (yes, I do the ROM scene) it says something like:

DISCLAIMER:
You may only download these SNES ROMS if you own the respective official cartridges.
If you don't own the snes roms, you must delete the snes roms in 24 hours (or less).

Which is kind of a cop-out, but still they're stating that "Hey, you're entering a legal melting pot, be sure to wipe your feet when you leave." - but I've also seen:

Disclaimer
If you are affiliated with any government, police, anti-piracy group or other related group, or were formally a worker, you CANNOT enter this server, nor access any of its files. If in fact you are affiliated or were affiliated with the above, by entering this site you are not agreeing to these terms and you are violating code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and that means that you CANNOT threaten our ISP(s) or any person(s) or company storing these files, and cannot prosecute any person(s) affiliated with this server.

And that's just... weird. Like - if you have something illegal - anything I say here would derail the thread and open a huge can of worms, so I'll just say anything illegal - you could throw that up and hide behind a statute.

[Fifthfiend]

Do me a favor. Go make some sort of piece of work. One that you value. I don't care if it's a game, picture, song, or whatever. Sell it for profit. Now have a bunch of people steal it. Have people steal your characters, your lyrics, your art, whatever. Have it spread all across the Internet. Now see if you don't care and admire all those people for stealing your hard work and doing with it what they please. Bonus points if they make something really good out of it that DOES hurt your sales.

Okay. I'm J.K. Rowlings and I've made a piece of work that I value. Roughly ten infinityzillion people have "stolen" my work in order to create their own, totally illegal derivatives of my work. I am:

A. totally broke due to being unable to make a profit on my intellectual property
B. the richest woman alive

??

[Meister]

The literary equivalent of ROM hacking isn't just writing fanfiction though. It would be like if you took the entire book and changed a whole lot of stuff around - remove a few chapters, write some (quite a lot in fact) original stuff, break up the vast majority of descriptions and copy them to completely different places in the narrative, and the end result is a text that, while offering an entirely new story, contains numerous parts that are clearly and obviously re-used from the text it used to be.

... I don't think I'm actually arguing in favour of either viewpoint here though, just, y'know, replying to singular points.

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by Seil

My view is that what Brian is doing is basically fan-art. No offense to Brian, and I do enjoy 8-Bit Theater, but he's taking the characters and putting them to paper... or internet. I think there's a difference between using... I guess I'd say "characters," but he's not really using the characters. He's just using the appearance of the characters.[...] using the developers coding, music, art and story to create their game.

And Brian is using Square's art and the basic framework of their story to create his own.

Define the difference in your view between his 'theft' of art and story, and the ROM hack's

I agree with the video game companies and the ROM sites. because on most sites - usually where I go (yes, I do the ROM scene) it says something like:

As that the ROM sites say that it's legal if you have the game already--which you agree with... then you agree that owning the ROM is not theft so long as the members of the development team owned a legitimate copy?

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by Krylo

I think Square actually hates Chrono fans.

As proof I present Chrono Cross, the obviously unfinished but released anyways piece of trash that so obviously could have been great had they actually given two shits about it.

To add to the point, I present Chrono Trigger DS, a port of the original SNES game with additional content intended to better connect it to the obviously unfinished but released anyways piece of trash that so obviously could have been great had they actually given two shits about it, thus retroactively tarnishing the first game in the process.

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by POS Industries

To add to the point, I present Chrono Trigger DS, a port of the original SNES game with additional content intended to better connect it to the obviously unfinished but released anyways piece of trash that so obviously could have been great had they actually given two shits about it, thus retroactively tarnishing the first game in the process.

To further add to the point, I present my bitter, heartstricken tears.

[Seil]

And Brian is using Square's art and the basic framework of their story to create his own.

I don't think I can properly argue this and as such will eat my words. (Brian is worse because he's profiting from sales of 8-Bit merchandise, while CT:CE is distributing their game for free!)

As that the ROM sites say that it's legal if you have the game already--which you agree with... then you agree that owning the ROM is not theft so long as the members of the development team owned a legitimate copy?

In my own words, yes, if they have a copy of the game, and paid for it, there's no problem with them owning the ROM as well. But just for the sake of argument, they own the cartridge, the how ever many dollars worth of plastic and microchips and whatnot. Square still owns the game itself, with all its little blips and nuances, so I still find Square - even though they're still tools - in the legal right.

[Mike McC]

Originally Posted by Meister

You'd think a team capable of creating "~35 hours of game play, 10 multiple endings, and 23 chapters" would be relatively easily also capable of making their own completely original game.

As he already hinted at, it's a bit more complicated than that. Modding an existing engine is one thing, coding a new engine from scratch is a few levels higher than that.

I think Square is so viciously defending it's IP because it has no ideas actually left. I mean, most of thier star creative power has long since left to other companies, and they've really got little left except for expanding thier old franchises like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Oh, and the team that makes Dragon Quest, and, well, I think they'd rather keep on making Dragon Quest. Until the cancer that is Square infects them, that is. The recent DS retreads have me worrying.

[Jagos]

Ironically, Toriyama is ON that team making Dragon Quest and he has no more to do with Chrono Trigger.

So SE owns Chrono Trigger. Square thought it up, made it and released it, to wide popular acclaim. It's theirs.

Here's the entire problem in a nutshell. You have a right to buy a license to play this game. You Don't (even though you do) have a right to reverse engineer it, tweak it, mod it, on your own free time (80s and 90s law here) but if it gets out to one other person, automatically you're a criminal. Does anyone else see the logical problem here?

Seriously, the messed up logic in saying you have a license and nothing else is so retarded, it's affecting how our entertainment works. It was a derivative game as an homage to Chrono Trigger. It would have been great if Square were doing SOMETHING for it. But CT DS wasn't the best that Square could do. Perhaps a fan could have done better. Now, we won't know. At least not until a fan decides to fight it in court.

[Seil]

So because they're not doing justice to the property, they lose ownership? It's still theirs. They can do whatever they want with it - doesn't mean we'll like it, but it's still theirs.

What you're suggesting - a court battle - comes off weird. The judge will look at the legality of it, not "Square's doing a bad job with this franchise! Make 'em stop!"

If that actually worked, we'd have decent Sonic games.