Potential Legal Problems

Can anybody think of possible legal issues to look out for, so we do not run into these troubles later?

As long as we have our content under license and using original names, I don't see anything.

not keeping it too similar to spore is important

As long as we don't use a copyrighted Spore name with one or two letters different, we are free to go.

Commander Keen wrote:

As long as we don't use a copyrighted Spore name with one or two letters different, we are free to go.

I think they can sue us. Spore was made in the U.S.A. Thusly, I don't see the need to have all of spores stages, or have a game even at all similar to spore.

Maybe they can't.

If making games of the same genre would be sue-able, there would not be gazilions of FPS and RTS games. We aren't making an exact clone of Spore, so it's okay.

It's not an RTS or an FPS... its the fact that we have an evolutionary chain exceedingly similar to Spore.

Cellular->Creature->Civilization->Space

Not to mention we'll have vehicle editors, organism editors, spaceship editors, terraforming, creature sharing, etc.

Does anyone else think this could be troublesome?

You can't just sue anyone because he makes a game of the same genre. It doesn't work this way.

But you CAN sue McDonalds because they made you fat..

Um... What are they going to sue us for? All the money we made? Once it's released, no lawyer is going to be able to stop it. It's open-source. It's the internet. The bloody NSA would have trouble stopping it, and they're not going to care in the slightest.

I suppose we are open source

There is such thing as cease and desist, however.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Um... What are they going to sue us for? All the money we made? Once it's released, no lawyer is going to be able to stop it. It's open-source. It's the internet. The bloody NSA would have trouble stopping it, and they're not going to care in the slightest.

Cease and desist

Bashinerox wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Um... What are they going to sue us for? All the money we made? Once it's released, no lawyer is going to be able to stop it. It's open-source. It's the internet. The bloody NSA would have trouble stopping it, and they're not going to care in the slightest.

Cease and desist

That means stop, right?

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Um... What are they going to sue us for? All the money we made? Once it's released, no lawyer is going to be able to stop it. It's open-source. It's the internet. The bloody NSA would have trouble stopping it, and they're not going to care in the slightest.

Cease and desist

That means stop, right?

That means "if you don't stop we're going to sue you."

And you don't need money to be sued.

it just means you then OWE alot of money.

Exactly.

roadkillguy wrote:

It's not an RTS or an FPS... its the fact that we have an evolutionary chain exceedingly similar to Spore.

Cellular->Creature->Civilization->Space

Not to mention we'll have vehicle editors, organism editors, spaceship editors, terraforming, creature sharing, etc.

Does anyone else think this could be troublesome?

We are taking a very different approach than spore. We're in no position to get sued. We don't have "stages" like they do, we handle changes in gameplay entirely differently through our modes and God tools, and we're not directly competing with them, because they really won't be making money off of the original spore by the time this is released.

Noöne could sue us for using nature as the baseline for our game. And we're also not making any profit off of this game thereby putting us into a slightly better position. And the fact that it's also Open-Source probably helps. Though I'm no legal expert...

Alright, alright, I suppose we should continue as planned.

We were going to continue anyway.

~sciocont wrote:

We were going to continue anyway.

I suppose so

I think not anything serious. Small chance of Maxis/Ea sueing you,but that just doesnt make sense. Its the same genre.

as long if we make this game different in many ways i don't think ea is going to take legal action and anyway isn't this a free game so why would they sue you guys aren't getting money so don't think EA would be this stupid

mike roberts wrote:

as long if we make this game different in many ways i don't think ea is going to take legal action and anyway isn't this a free game so why would they sue you guys aren't getting money so don't think EA would be this stupid

they were enough to make spore look like it does right now....

nice one but if they do sue u guys there dumb

Who are they going to sue? We're a bunch of faceless teenagers on a web forum. Plus, we make no money off of this. What are they going to sue for? It would cost more than it would make.