He was making an open source recreation of Warcraft 3 in Java, he even made it as an emulator to avoid trouble, any assets that are copyrighted he just pulls them from a legit installation of warcraft 3's MPQ files (basically zips that contain all the internal warcraft 3 assets), yet Bobby are still threatening him to cease and desist and take down the project.
1v1 gameplay:
Video of the "emulator" playing a custom game online with another person
You wanna know the funny thing? this guy is so known in the war3 community because the Reforged team kept asking him about how to solve bugs and issues with warcraft 3 even though he had no access to the source code lol.
>a lawyer sent a scary latter
so fricking what? Depending on the jurisdiction what he did was perfectly legal.
This. It's just a fricking port. Ports are not illegal.
The issue is that I don't know if he will want to go to court against Blizzard even if it's obvious it's legal, Idk how much court fees would cost and how much time
Again depending on the jurisdiction, if blizzard sues him and loses they have to pay their legal fees. He should consult with a lawyer, but assuming this is legal, they might not even end up filing.
The problem is not that. If you are dragged to court they can still make your life hell. Dev is right to be worried.
And you can be dragged for many bullshit reasons.
Not really, it's really hard to drag someone through civil court on a baseless allegation. Takes a lot for your claim to survive and actually get to trial.
It's not a baseless allegation. They will claim that it's a derived work because it's based on reverse engineering the original game's code (which is subject to copyright just as much as the art, music, etc).
They might not win, because there are certain carve-outs in copyright law that allow reverse engineering for "compatibility", but I doubt it would be thrown out of court. It would be a costly legal battle.
with israelites you lose
What's the point of an open source recreation of Warcraft 3?
the first is ability to not rely on blizzard's servers and battlenet bullshit in general which is awesome in itself
Is it gonna have a centralized infrastructure for hosting custom maps? Kinda like Garena was back in the day?
I see, a like a pirated original version but more customizable.
1) Multi platform (you could run it on Linux)
2) It can be rid of Reforged 30gb nonesense assets if you want since you can modify it yourself
3) You can do any modification whatsoever that you want to it, stuff that a regular custom map on wc3 wouldn't be able to do because engine limitations, you can just modify the code and do it yourself
4) If the game ever goes on abandonware state you can keep doing patches to it for competitive
Your friend's legally in the right but Blizzard has money so they can just bully him and take him to court to bankrupt him if he doesn't stop. Society, etc etc
>You wanna know the funny thing? this guy is so known in the war3 community because the Reforged team kept asking him about how to solve bugs and issues with warcraft 3 even though he had no access to the source code lol.
Fricking what?
i mean if he still has those messages that would be a shit storm in of itself. are blizzard THAT incompetent?
>are blizzard THAT incompetent?
Do you really need to ask?
they turned a game playable and perfectly functional on older systems into a mess that leeches 3gb of ram on fricking main menu alone lol
what do you think?
To be fair part of that team are members of hive workshop who weren't really responsible for the state of warcraft 3 (they were doing the editor/melee balance and shit) so I doubt he would want to put them under fire since they all got fired already and there's a new team there now.
However even to this day for the new PTR he still has to do baby level videos to explain them the problems with the patches
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/ptr-custom-hd-map-asset-format-issue/28067/13
These are people from the new team or whatever who also are unable to do debugging on their own.
That's wild. He comes across as smarter than the people Blizzard employ.
but its a known fact that even people here are smarter than Blizzard employees and this place is the moronic central of all internet
Of course it's fake.
>are blizzard THAT incompetent?
the main menu now runs in a chrome browser
contact some video game archiving people. they have the connections for the legal defense on this
Why didn't he work anonymously on it? Did he want the attention or what?
He can easily dance around this by just not distributing the copyrighted files. I know that sounds moronicly simple, but most ports that require 3rd party copyrighted files spesifically request that you own the game so that it's not the porters fault.
Why shouldn't he just do the same?
He does this, they still DMCA'd him, this is the github repo which is open source:
https://github.com/Retera/WarsmashModEngine
As you can see, they took the title of the repo for the cease and desist letter, they clearly saw the repo, they know it contains no copyrighted files, they still are threatening him
Oh, then they're fricking moronic and won't be able to do shit. Every civilized planet in the world would laugh Blizzard's stupid ass out of the courtroom if he's not distributing illegal copyrighted material.
See that's the beauty of it, they don't have to be in the right. They just have to drag it out until he can't afford to fight them anymore and has to settle it out of court, where they can demand he shut it down as a condition of settlement.
Copyright law is for the big guys only. You do not get to benefit from it.
They can't file a lawsuit unless they specify which copyright specifically was infringed. From what I examined in the github repository it doesn't contain any copyrighted work.
So I would just ignore it. And if they do file eventually it will be easy to get it dismissed (it's a pain, but sometimes you gotta be a man and stand up to bullies).
They know they have no legal grounds to stand on but the whole point of doing this sort of shit is to maintain a precedent. Some moron shit with the US legal system where you have to challenge any and everything to defend your ownership of a thing. Just another reason why copyright law needs to get fricking axed and replaced with something not made by and for morons in Hollywood.
>Some moron shit with the US legal system where you have to challenge any and everything to defend your ownership of a thing.
This has never been the case and the Nincels who parrot this FUD to defend Nintendo aggressively harassing fan projects are an embarassment
Why the frick do attention prostitute modders always put their identity out? Be uncontactable and untraceable.
Job offers, money, and building a brand. Anonymity is easy if you don't have to worry about keeping a roof over your head.
He wanted the project open source on a repo, that implies that if they really want to they can sue or w/e on court
I wish the guy luck. Hope Blizzard fricks off.
if the port isn't distributing any copyrighted material and he isn't using blizard trademarks he should be fine. Should remove all mentions of warcraft/blizzard to be safe. I'd contact something like openra and see how they managed to keep EA at bay with copyright stuff
I wait for the day some fan dev stops being a homosexual and stands up to Blizzards legal bullying. 100% he just gives in and kills the project despite being in the right.
One easy way to stop legal bullying is make private citizens unable to sue non-private citizens w/o giving addresses.
>posting public videos before finishing
he fricked up.
decompiling isn't illegal
he didn't even decompile war3
Blizzshit strikes yet again, blizzard is dead
Legal aid exists if you can't afford it yourself.
>could easily make something new or slightly different to avoid this kind of attention
>decides it's better to put up with a potential shit shit and continues to copy someone else's work
yada yada he's technically in the right, blizzard bully reee
doesn't mean he isn't moronic. make something else and make it feel like WC3, problem solved.
>shit shit
shit show
No you are just moronic. He has created an open sourced emulator / mode engine (https://github.com/Retera/WarsmashModEngine) that can run warcraft 3.
It is prefectly legal, it's not even a gray zone. If people listened to you, we would still be living in the caves.
Take it to Phil Spencer. Microsoft owns Blizzard.
>on Java
Fricking ew though.
>Take it to Phil Spencer. Microsoft owns Blizzard.
No' yet
>on java
How do you think Minecraft was made?
poorly
Why do you think Minecraft run like dog shit?
GC languages are shit for games, specially if your purpose is to make a better version of an existing game.
Just download more ram bro!
The sheer stupidity that is
>java
posts will never cease to amaze me. It's like an easy tool for brainlets to out themselves.
Its his fault for going public before its finished. If he is not willing to fight lawyers, then he should have had the foresight to avoid the confrontation in the first place by keeping his project secret until it was done.
Why would you leak something like that before releasing it so that no one would be able to delete it from the internet or to stall your progress or to rape you with never ending lawsuits?
Why do you need to compromise your long and hard-earned efforts for a little dose of attention instead of capitalizing on it bigtime in the future?
This is beyond moronic.
Goddamn that's some shit music.
Why was your friend traceable to his real life self? Why was this project public before it was done?
I understand that the USA copyright system is fricked up.
But this happens so often, that I'm curious: what if the person doing somthing similar to this lives in a different country? What would the big companies do?
Depending on the country you are fricked. They might as well just hire people to scare you. Nintendo hired stalkers to follow pic related.
can't nintendo be sued for this? specially with him living in EU, i know for a fact stalking laws exist, just don't know the extent of they would work in this case
which wc3 ver? 1 26 right?
It will be even worse one Microsoft owns Blizzard next year.
You mean C# port is already in progress? How horrifying.
probably was too stupid to use warcraft or anything similar in the sources, the genshin emulator gays were smarter
funny thing is that he wont make his own ip instead copying someone else game
You dont need new games if you have wc3