Fangaming legal?, The dispute is ON!

What do you think? What if fangaming is deemed "illeagal"? What will become of mfgg? Will it become a black market?

...How the hell would MFGG be a black market, if we aren't selling anything?

And yes, it is a gray area. But I don't know the details of fangaming's legitimacy.

You make a point....oops.

Well, I do know that it certainly isn't wise to do something like email Nintendo saying "look at this cool thing I made without your direct permission, and by *******izing your copyrighted material!".

Bungie recently talked about fangaming and how there some was pretty cool stuff and they didn't mind, but microsoft was a different story.

If a fan can copy a game that way that it can harm the original company (because the fangame reached same or higher quality), the original company shouldn't make games anyways.

This post has been edited by Guinea on Apr 12 2006, 01:16 AM

my brother made some fangames nad put them on ur site...will he get in trouble?

...wtf

his name was goomba dude...ive been asking if he registered. lol u dont read anything do u?

Why would he get in trouble for submitting fangames?

one question first (off the subject osrry) but how do u take what i said and put it in a cool box like that? and then to answer u its cuz the guy at the top of the page acts like their illegal.

wtf, what cool box?

And if he jumped off a bridge, would you?

uhhhhhhhhhh it says quote? like i see this button that says quote but it doesn't create the cool box thing for me

go away, learn HTML and some proper grammar, then come back. Plus you're going off topic.

lol...i googled html...Hypertext Markup Language is the authoring software language used on the Internet's World Wide Web. HTML is used for creating World Wide Web pages. is that html?

Fangaming is indeed illegal. It's considered copyright infringement and the parent company that owns the rights to the characters have the free ability to tell you to pack up shop and leave if they deem you harmful to their company.

But on the flipside of things, Fanart and Fanfiction is also illegal.

Ever wonder why it used to be so hard to find a fansite on The Simpsons? Fox would shut them all down. Paramount would do the same with Star Trek fansites. They considered all forms of what most people consider "Fan Appreciation" as hostile to their business, and shut them down. Fox also gave birth to a popular term in FPS mods called "Foxing". The phrase was coined after Fox shut down an Aliens-themed DooM Mod. Thus, when a mod would get shut down by a parent company, it would be "Foxed".

However, since then, companies like Fox and Paramount have realized they were spending far too much money tracking down these people - I mean, not only are they fans, but, logically, it was impossible for them to shut down every single fansite on the internet. By the time they would shut down one, 100 more could spring up in it's place. That's a lot of money being thrown away into a lost cause.

So, they gave up. Now we have sites like NoHomers.net.

In the end, yes - this stuff is technically illegal, but that's going by the strictest defenition of illegal. The reality of it is, it doesn't matter until the company sends you a warning shot; the ol' "Cease and Desist". However, in recent years, even C&D letters are becoming useless as many companies hire outside law firms to track fansites and potential copyright infringing people on the internet, and these firms send out C&D letters purely as scare tactics so they don't have to waste money in court fees.

Basically, I had heard somewhere - I think it was from OOT2D or maybe the Metroid Prime 2D team - who actually contacted Nintendo to get permission on their games, that as long as you have a disclaimer in your game making it clear you aren't officially affiliated with the original parent company, then you should be relatively safe. I figure this is because one of the primary reasons Fangames might be disliked is over the fact that a company like Nintendo might get tech support calls on a fangame that they don't have control over - which wastes their money.

That's why MarioWeen DX has that big ugly disclaimer plastered all over the game like 40 different times, which says in big bold letters "NINTENDO DID NOT MAKE THIS". I wanted to make it as clear as possible. So far, with all the great publicity I've gotten over the game, and over 200,000+ downloads total, Nintendo hasn't bothered me.

wow...u know ur stuff blaze. should i tell my bro to put disclaimers on his stuff 2? also what happens if u go 2 court?

If you go to court, you go to jail for 50 years.

i dont really believe u since blaze seems smart about this stuff and ur kinda weird lol

...

I am weird on MFGG only. If only you knew the REAL me...