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can we drop the "legal" #### now?

Lawyers are pain in the ass, arent they?

However, KVG...

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/18196/legal-implications-of-cloning-a-board-game

Major points are:

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By copying the rules (by which I mean the written rules that the user reads, rather than the mechanics of the game) you will be committing copyright infringement.

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Minor changes will not suffice to avoid copyright infringement - the revised rules will be a derivative of the copyrighted work, and creating derivative works is an exclusive right of the copyright owner.

So it is a copyright infringement.

But on a plus side they probably are not going to care even if they knew about it. These small platforms never get an official clone. But better not ask money nor take any donations.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

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there is absolutely no reason what so ever for this to be a problem with this title /game as unless some mongo Amiga hater decides to "tip" someone at the parent company....

There's plenty comppanies like this. It's not 90's anymore, whole thing is pretty much automated...

@Itix

Very interesting website that answers.onstartup.com by the way. And very good topic you found from there.


I think it might be that people confuse Rules and Mechanics together, when they think that you can make a copy of another game.

Mechanics are for example in Carcassonne, putting tiles, connecting them together, putting people on tiles and even in several ways and then scoring them after tiles have been put or building have been built up, etc.

Rules on the other hand are the exact types of ways you can put your people to the tiles (Farmer, knight, robber, a monk), mechanic can be that you can have for example a robber, but having all those exact same possibilities, and especially no more, would be rule. Rules are also the amount of points you get when things happen, as well as are the exact types of tiles avaialble at carcassonne and amount of each tiles, the order in which things happen, the ways you can use your people...

So for example if some alternative Carcassonne games, like the "Ark of the Covenant" http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6779/the-ark-of-the-covenant had been published by someone else and all the references to Carcassonne had been removed, I guess it might not have been copyright infringiment despite the similarity with original Carcassonne (not sure thou).



Another question that would interest me is how is it decided which countries copyright law should apply to a game?

Is it based upon where the creator of the game lives, or is it based upon where it is distributed, or where it was made or what?

What I am after with this is that is it enough that someone would take one week trip to China and compile all his codes into executables during that trip and then distribute them on some Chinese server and have no copyright problems at all?

Or is it maybe even enough to just have the server in China?

@all
OK, on next release I remove all references to Carcassonne game. I need someone to write nice fantasy history to game and manual how play, because my English is too poor to write long manual, and can't be longer described "play game like Carcassonne". For safety screenshot with original game theme should be removed from any news service, still will be possible theming game but it not be clearly described, like now.