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i found it strange when a friend told me there was a group on facebook trying to save tabula rasa and form a private server . but when i look lo and behold there it was . even if it did only have 205 members . i do remember years ago the internet had that it called abandonware games which i believe ( maybe wrongly ) were in the public domain and free to download . so at what point does a defunct game go into the public domain ?. i personally cant believe a tabula rasa private server would be legal even though it has been abandoned . but then again facebook is normally quite hot on taking of dodgy groups .
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It is not legal.
It's public domain when the owner declares it is or the original copyright is revoked. The reason why Abandonware is so rampant is because:
A) The game is so old the owner doesn't care.
C) The owners have made the game free for download, sometimes with stipulations.
Copyright can last for as much as 70 years past the life of the original author. Copyrights can of course be renewed and transferred.
Somebody is still going to have the copyright for TR, if anything does evolve I'm sure they'd get notified about their activities.
If a company goes bankrupt, then the creditors own the game. If the game goes under, and the company still exists, then the company still owns the game.
The reason they would do a cease and desist order is because they still own the intellectual property, and it may still have value. They may decide to do a sequel, make a movie, license it for books, comic books, a tv cartoon show, or who knows what.
Sometimes you can get away with it because the owner or creditors just dont' care or have the resources to go after you, but it's never legal unless the copyright has expired.
If a company goes bankrupt, then the creditors own the game. If the game goes under, and the company still exists, then the company still owns the game.
The reason they would do a cease and desist order is because they still own the intellectual property, and it may still have value. They may decide to do a sequel, make a movie, license it for books, comic books, a tv cartoon show, or who knows what.
Sometimes you can get away with it because the owner or creditors just dont' care or have the resources to go after you, but it's never legal unless the copyright has expired.
This guy has got it dead on.
MUNDO!!
It kind of depends on the company behind the game and if they allow it or not. Emulators have always been a grey area in the MMO market. Some companys are ok with it (Ultima Online has dozens of sever emulators and EA has given them the green like to do so. Heck theres one UO server emulator that has on regular over 2k people on playing.)
So at the end of the day it really just depends on the company behind the game. Does it hurt the company and how much would it cost the company to fight a server emulator. At this stage NCSoft really has nothing to lose with letting a TR emulator come about. NCSoft has zero plans of trying to bring the game back in any form what so ever. So in essence they have washed there hands of the game and just want to move on. Now that doesn't say the TR IP is free and open to anyone. It's still in NCSofts hands and they could issue a C&D but its highly unlikely given the terms that TR is in right now.
The terms of creating a software that a client can connect to is not ageanst the law. The issue is editing the client software to connect to the server. That falls under client alteration.
It's just one of the reasions why most companys will just let the emulators be unless the emulator operators are trying to make money off of it. (Case in point was a Lineage 2 private server that was collecting money from its players. NCSoft stepped in and hand it shut down... Yet there are still dozens of Lineage 2 private servers in operation that do not collect money from there players..)
What sucks is that even though they closed it, the second someone else starts to do something with it and has a little bit of sucess, they will be all in your ass trying to reap the rewards
My sig is just as logical as your posts are
It doesnt' really suck. It's just simple economics.
They spend 100 million dollars making TR.
You spend ZERO dollars making TR.
you open up an emulator and start taking "donations", like all emulators do. Well guess what? You couldnt' take those "donations" if the company didsnt' spend 100 million dollars to make the game.
Why should make money off their 100 million dollar investment? Don't you think they'd like to get some of that 100 million dollars back?
It doesnt' really suck. It's just simple economics.
They spend 100 million dollars making TR.
You spend ZERO dollars making TR.
you open up an emulator and start taking "donations", like all emulators do. Well guess what? You couldnt' take those "donations" if the company didsnt' spend 100 million dollars to make the game.
Why should make money off their 100 million dollar investment? Don't you think they'd like to get some of that 100 million dollars back?
They had their chance a year ago. They decided to bail, while quite a numbet of people were still playing. The demand for it is quite high now, so why not?
I hate WoW because it made my plush hamster kill himself, created twin clones of Hitler, punched Superboy Prime in reality, stared my dog down, spoiled my grandmother, assimilated me into the Borg, then made me into a real boy, just to make me a woman again.

It doesnt' really suck. It's just simple economics.
They spend 100 million dollars making TR.
You spend ZERO dollars making TR.
you open up an emulator and start taking "donations", like all emulators do. Well guess what? You couldnt' take those "donations" if the company didsnt' spend 100 million dollars to make the game.
Why should make money off their 100 million dollar investment? Don't you think they'd like to get some of that 100 million dollars back?
They had their chance a year ago. They decided to bail, while quite a numbet of people were still playing. The demand for it is quite high now, so why not?
If they buy the license of the game they can do whatever they want but it's not their program they are taking a game from another company and also gathering donations in other words illegal.
While not legal, NCsoft doesn't bother to really prosecute private servers as evidenced by the many multitude of L1 and L2 private servers that currently exist.
Doubtful anyone at NC will care.
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Well as far as I know on private servers if they don't become popular they don't do nothing BUT if x private server becomes popular meaning more money gotten illegal I think they would shut down those servers.
If a company goes bankrupt, then the creditors own the game.
While this is generally true, there are specifics that might affect the discussion. When creditors get possession of the companies property the court doesnt just say "creditors get possession", but rather the court actually specifies who gets what. IOW the court says "creditor A gets this, creditor B gets that, etc". There may be unvalued property such as wastebaskets and staplers that dont even get distributed. The stuff that is worthless. My point is that unless the court said specifically that "creditor A gets copyright to The Game" then it is indeed possible that no one owns it. A person would have to read the court ruling to know for sure.
So do you basically just have a DvD that says Tabula Rasa on it that does absolutely nothing that costed you $50.00?
I think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
As long as the server/backend is created without using ANY copyrighted source material (i.e. they have to create a server from scratch. this is the really hard part and where most private server games fail the legality test), the players have purchased copies of the game, and no one charges anything, its legal.
I think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
I'd still be pretty mad personally since I don't like Aion. Especially if I was a fan of Tabula Rasa and wanted nothing to do with Aion. Bad deal. Shame on NCsoft.
I think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
I'd still be pretty mad personally since I don't like Aion. Especially if I was a fan of Tabula Rasa and wanted nothing to do with Aion. Bad deal. Shame on NCsoft.
You could always sell or trade it for some other game account duh.
If a company goes bankrupt, then the creditors own the game.
While this is generally true, there are specifics that might affect the discussion. When creditors get possession of the companies property the court doesnt just say "creditors get possession", but rather the court actually specifies who gets what. IOW the court says "creditor A gets this, creditor B gets that, etc". There may be unvalued property such as wastebaskets and staplers that dont even get distributed. The stuff that is worthless. My point is that unless the court said specifically that "creditor A gets copyright to tabula rasa" then it is indeed possible that no one owns it. A person would have to read the court ruling to know for sure.
If the creditors don't get it in bankruptcy, then the developers still own it.
The intellectual property rights don't disappear just because a company went bankrupt.
If they dissolve the company, they would then state during the dissolution what happens to the IP, whether individuals of the company, like the CEO now owns it, or whether they will allow it to go open source, etc.
The owners still get to decide ownership of the IP if it's not distributed during bankruptcy, and if the company is dissolved, a proper dissolution would state what happens to all assets like the Intellectual Property rights.
NCsoft would have to be dissolved, and fail to state what happens to the IP for it to be truly abandoned. The usual case would be that a company goes bankrupt, goes out of business (different from bankruptcy), and fails to dissolve the company because there are no funds left to do so, and no one still working at the company.
Even in that case, members of the company could later come forward and make a claim to the intellectual property rights. In other words, you would never be safe to invest millions in an "abandoned" IP because you could never be sure without litigation that you'd have a right to use it. You'd want to either buy the IP rights, or to see in writing from the bankruptcy court, or the original IP owners, that the IP was now open source.
NCsoft is still in business, so you can still be sued for violating their copyrights to TR.
They could wait till you make a few hundred thousand, then come after you for that money PLUS damages.
I think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
I'd still be pretty mad personally since I don't like Aion. Especially if I was a fan of Tabula Rasa and wanted nothing to do with Aion. Bad deal. Shame on NCsoft.
Yup NCsoft is pretty much garbage. They are a crap can of a company. The only decent thing that has "NCsoft" on it is Guild Wars, which was done by ArenaNet. They ripped people off plain and simple.
Yes.
And if you read the EULA you agreed to before you installed the software, you'd see it said "We make no guarantees or promises regarding absolutely anything. We can rewrite the game code tomorrow so you're playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure" and the only thing you can do about it is not renew your subscription. We can shut down the servers and we owe you diddly squat. Deal with it."
Perhaps not in those exact words, mind you, but that's what it said.
As a quick note, there is no such thing as "abandonware" as a legal concept. Ever since the Berne convention, just about anything you create in almost every nation is automatically copyrighted to you at the moment of creation. This post I'm writing? Copyrighted to me as I type it. I own in, and unless I explicitly state otherwise, I will have the sole copyright to it until 90 years after my death. I am 99.99% sure that when I signed up for this board, somewhere in the page-o-text was an agreement that I grant the board the right to store and copy this post -- otherwise, it couldn't do what it has to do, as a board. This probably covers the use of quoted text in replies, though short segments are covered under "Fair use".
When a company goes under, someone, somewhere, ends up with the rights to the IP. This may be a very complicated legal mess and end up in a situation where the cost of finding out WHO owns the IP is actually more than the IP is worth. This doesn't mean that the IP is "unowned" and that anyone can claim it.
Emulators, as others have noted, are a very interesting grey area. Going all the way back to the first IBM PC clones, the established law is that if you create your emulator via "clean room" techniques, i.e, mimicking the signal/response while writing your own server code, you are protected -- you've violated no copyrights. However, you run into all sorts of shaky ground when it comes to things like trademarks, the use of server-side stored images and graphics, etc, etc, etc. It's messy. "It's not worth suing over" or "We don't care" is not the same as "It's legal". Some EULAs explicitly state "You will not use this software with a non-official server".
The whole "Well, the game's out of business, so who cares?" argument is akin to "Hey, no one's living in this house, I'll just move in." How long you get away with it depends on when someone decides to do something with the property -- phyiscal or intellectual. Odds are, eventually, someone's going to lay claim to it and take steps to protect it.
That's not true with most modern MMORPGs. It's a myth perpetuated by people that want to run emulation servers, or play on them.
"End User License Agreement and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Another legal issue is the EULA. Today most commercial MMORPGs require the user to sign a clause not to create or use server emulators when installing the client they bought."
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Server_emulatorI think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
No they didnt
I think they gave a free digital download of aion for those that had bought tabula rasa and lost their money.
LOL no bro. They were giving beta invite keys and you got a link to download the client. By downloading and using it your still following the legal stuff.
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Oh then I was wrong I heard they gave something to those that had ordered tabula rasa.
they did give something back if i recall it was 3 months in cirty of heroes and 3 months in lineage . which i though was fair enough . i did think they could have tried the rmt model first before they gave up on it or maybe leased it out to a third party company . i only ever played it when it was free at the end while it was nt the best game in the world i thought it had enough potential to survive in a different payment model just as ddo is doing now .
edit there may have be access to the aion beta as well