Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content

An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm."

You got it wrong

These are Summer Olympics, that game is called "Snow Day". How could it be a copy?

Yawn!

Knockoffs from China... What next? Lies from the WhiteHouse?

They should be grateful

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

Coca Cola did the same... but sortof fixed it.

Coca Cola did the same last year by ripping off "Ninja" [7secondsoflove.com] by Joel Feitch (the guy behind Rathergood.com [rathergood.com])

Two weeks later it was reported that Joel Feitch got well compensated for it (exact amounts were not disclosed as part of the agreement).

Read all about it here [robmanuel.com], with accompanied footage.

Probably off-topic but what the hell...

A friend of my father-in-law's owned for many years a hotel in France called 'Hotel d'Olympique'. He still owns the hotel but it is no longer called that as he was sent a 'cease and desist'-type letter by the IOC.

FWIW I am not interested in the Beijing Olympics. Any lingering interest in the event has been soured by the appalling way that Chinese citizens have been treated by their government and, by extension, the IOC. No sports event in the world is worth evicting, beating, imprisoning and killing your own citizens for.

Heavy Handed Hypocrisy

This is especially ironic since many of the Olympic Committees sue anyone using the word 'Olympic' or press governments for legislation protecting their precious name. For instance a few link samples:
US: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15360 [dvorak.org]
CA: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1777/125/ [michaelgeist.ca]
UK: http://blogs.reuters.com/uknews/2008/02/06/olympic-tussle-over-a-name/ [reuters.com]
Given the IOC and each local Olympic committee's approach trademark ownership, they should have no problem removing the game.
This is unlikely because, they will not treat other's work the same as they want theirs enforces. Hypocrisy at its finest.

That's not the only copy...

...it looks like the Sailing game (http://en.beijing2008.cn/funpage/game/sailing/index.shtml) is a ripoff of a game called Arctic Blue on orisinal.com (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/arctic.htm)

Not just a copy...

They actually re-used the code, not just copied it. From TFA:

I'd also like to point out that this is not just a clone of my game. They didn't see my game and set out to make a similar game. They actually stole my game. I'll say it again:
The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Re:Chinese copies?

Even if you don't make a bit-for-bit copy of a game, you can still be liable for infringement. See also K.C. Munchkin. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, and whether a copy of that expression happens mechanically or at the hand of a person, the result is still either direct copyright infringement or the creation of derivitave work (which is also copyright infringement).

However, they clearly did decompile the original Flash file and just swapped a few (though not all) art resources. The clouds aren't suspiciously similar... they're the same. The snow, mechanic, ice art, launching art, health bar, etc aren't just similar, they're identical. The tuning seems to be the same, with the same launch times, etc.

It's true that the Chinese are known for copying things. And that flash games get copied a lot more than they should. But the olympic games are notorious for enforcing their copyrights over the slightest infraction by others. Having the Olympics casually steal other developer's work in this fashion seems extremely self-contradictory.

Sorry

Seems there are duplicate files in the SWF files of each. So although the code might be new, the content isn't completely.

Re:Fair use

Which is 16% of the original work, and the majority of that is the song which was used in neither the original work, nor the derivative.

Wrong. Clearly, you have no idea what "fair use" is. You should look it up.

In a nutshell, "Fair use" means taking another's copyrighted material for academic or critical purposes. Instead, this (assumed) copyrighted material has been taken for neither of those purposes - instead, it is used to make a website more fun for kids.

And furthermore, 16% of a document/book/program likely goes far beyond fair use for even academic, scholarship, or critical use.

If these "copyrighted materials" had no value, then the developers should have simply included their own materials instead of someone else's content.

FURTHERMORE, to say that 16% of a book, movie, song, or other work is "small enough" to be considered fair use is simply ludicrous. The percentage of material is irrelevant to the copyright. A film is made of over 100,000 still images, yet a single 35mm photograph doesn't have 1/100,000th the copyright protection of a film.

Re:It is NOT fair use, or even close to it.

From your link:

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law

This is China. Not United States. If you post a relevant link to the Chinese copyright laws and their notion of fair use, that would be informative and interesting.

Re:It is NOT fair use, or even close to it.

If you post a relevant link to the Chinese copyright laws and their notion of fair use, that would be informative and interesting.

Here y'go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Trade-Related_Aspects_of_Intellectual_Property_Rights [wikipedia.org]

Note that China is a participant in TRIPS (follow the link at the bottom t'see all participating countries). Software copyright is addressed (it is treated as a literary work under this agreement), and fair use is very limited.

Re:Bullshit.

Here ya go.. an extremely enlarged view of the icecube images used in both flashes

cubes.png [palli.nl]

You can look hard you can see the gamma is a little different between them, but how are they not the same image?

Are you willing to tell me that these are images made by two different persons that just happen to make it look exactly the same?

Re:Bullshit.

The funny thing is that the chinese source code looks cleaner than the original. If I had to choose a company by looking at those two samples I'd probably go for outsourcing in china.

Smells like trouble for the US job market :)

Re:Bullshit.

Odd that the variable names are the same in both scripts. What's the possibility that two different programmers working independently and exclusive of one another, would come up with the same abbreviated variable names for the same functions and same elements in two games that appeared to be same and played the same? What are the odds?

Odd that the graphics are just about all the same in both games. The differences are trivial.

Looks more like someone purposefully made the scripts different, so that they could point and say "Lookee, it's different. See? It's not the same at all. Look at the code. Different." As if they knew ahead of time that there were potential copyright conflicts, and were trying to make an end run around copyright law.

Re:Chinese copies?

Have you? Its actually a complete rewrite with a few copied images and sounds (which are not even used).

I'm starting to think they just tweaked the source code to make it look different, specifically to dodge legal trouble.

I mean, think about it -- in the Chinese game, your goal is to make the clouds *go away* so you have blue sky.
So, obviously, you hit them with ice cubes. And they go away?

NO, they start snowing on you.

The fact that they didn't even change that detail from the original game -- and it would have been a fairly trivial change! -- looks pretty bad to me.

Re:Chinese copies?

The author of the 'orignal' claims that he has decompiled them and that the games use identical resources, even down to resources that the original author accidently left in but isn't actually used in the game.

If true that's beyond coincidence or imitation.

Re:Chinese copies?

You don't decompile flash, FYI. It's code and play, no compilation needed. I've grep'd the sources for both, they're nearly identical.

Re:Article presents no evidence of copying??

Perhaps it is a rip off, but then either way the Slashdot article should provide evidence of this.

Ummm... what? Did you read the article? It specifically does exactly what you say it does not do. It includes screenshots to show that many of the graphics are stolen (pixel for pixel exactly the same, not an approximation). And it includes text from the creator of the original game, documenting how he reviewed their game code and discovered that it was completely stolen, not clean-roomed. From the article:

I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

I'm pretty sure that if the game the Olympics is using contains sound files that are basically leftover stubs from his other games then that's pretty damning evidence.

Re:Article presents no evidence of copying??

He also mentions that the Olympics site contains games very similar to those wonderful Ferry Halim games from www.orisinal.com - of course, they might be licensed from him. Anyone asked Ferry?

Any lawyers out there fancy taking on the Chinese Olympic Committee? Might not be a good idea... [guardian.co.uk]

Actually, It works EXACTLY like that.

Disregard that the games is similar. The reality is that the music, the clouds, the ice cubes, etc were STOLEN straight out from it. Not a bit changed. This is akin to somebody lifting 100 pages out of 120 page book. Copyright is designed to prevent just that. How did you get modded up?

Re:Copyright doesn't work like that

Copyright works precisely like that. Maybe if you didn't shoot your mouth off so quick you would have noticed that the article is talking about theft of assets, not code. And then maybe if you knew anything about the history of copyright you wouldn't have tried to claim "fair use" on the art assets because of their byte counts. The inclusion of unused assets from the original demonstrates beyond any doubt that this whole game is a derivative work. There's a reason why legal reverse-engineering is done with two sets of engineers and a spec handoff.

This is good old-fashioned copyright infringement, with no ambiguity at all. And not only are you wrong, you're being a dick about it. What do you have against the author of the original game?

Re:Don't get mad, get even

I would suggest that is not sound legal advice. Maybe it would be, up until the bit where you say they should use Olympic copyrighted stuff. I think that would result in only the lawyers getting any money out of this.

Re:So let me get this straight

It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?

You are looking at two different uses of the word 'copy', or rather, at two different levels of copying. Scrabulous copies the rules of Scrabble in a game developed by different people, and if there was a lawsuit for every internet game that - to put it mildly - took a great deal of inspiration from another, none of us would be able to move for the boxes full of litigation papers. This, on the other hand, is different, because it copies actual code and graphics from the original. You cannot legally protect game rules, but you can legally protect code and artwork.

There is also an irony issue here, in that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always gone after people even vaguely infringing *it's* copyright with all the teeth-baring viciousness of a rabid attack dog, so to have a website associated with them involved in blatant copyright infringement is more than a little amusing, but that takes a back seat to the difference between the actual legal issues of the two.