[tcaudilllg]

Particularly with regard to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSTpkMB9kNk&feature=related

[DeveloperX]

I think that SE has done wrong to their fans. CE was a great project and its fucking terrible that it was shut down.

I think that ROM hacking in and of itself should be supported by the developers. The SALE of any such hacked ROMs should not be allowed, however. Any fan-made stuff should be seen as supporting the original game and IP, not as degrading and infringing on copyrights.
I'm fully against the bullshit that far too many developers dish out about IP infringement.
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Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[RampantCoyote]

Well, as the raging capitalist pig-dog and long-time veteran of the mainstream games biz, I guess I'll weigh in...

I think Square-Enix shot themselves in the foot on this.

But I also think they had every right to pull that trigger.

If you make a game (or movie, or story, or pictures, or whatever), your ability to distribute it in any way is completely at their sufferance. If you don't like it - make your own story / game / whatever with your own characters. If you can't do it without their IP, then whatever you have isn't enough to stand on its own two feet anyway, and you are definitely riding on their coattails.

There's a reason Paizo publishing is producing the Pathfinder RPG, now that Wizards of the Coast has pretty much pulled the rug out from under the third parties who expected to be treated a little more equally as business partners. While the D20 SRD / OGL stuff is now forever available, Wizards of the Coast has a lot of muscle to make things hard on people who don't play ball with their new edition of D&D. Pathfinder allows Paizo to carve their own destiny, without being dependent upon the benevolence of their one-time partner.

That's just the way it works.

As the owner of the IP in question, it is your right and business decision as an IP holder to shut this off (or not). In fact, it may be all but required. If you don't vigorously defend your trademarks, for example, in U.S. law you can LOSE IT. That's right. If LucasFilm didn't take reasonable steps to protect it, the "Star Wars" trademark could go into the public domain. Ditto for Chrono Trigger. Zelda. Whatever. (Note that this isn't the same as copyright - that's a whole different issue and a completely different set of laws).

Anyway - all that being said - it was a probably not the wisest business decision. There are ways to protect your trademark besides issuing cease and desist orders. I think you really want to support this kinda thing and foster it - and issue boilerplate requirements that protect your IP for all related fan materials, saying, "adhere to these rules or be shut down." You do that, and suddenly you turn your rabid fans into an all-volunteer marketing arm. That sort of thing is AWESOME.

This decision sounds like it was being handed out by accountants and lawyers. Bad idea.

*Probably*

As far as I know, SE could very well have been in the middle of working on their own intermediary game and they were really, really worried about being shown up by and having sales lost to this freebie. They *could* have good, business-savvy and marketing-savvy reasons for this decision. We can't know. I rather doubt it - this sounds more knee-jerk-y - but them's the breaks.

So I guess this was a long-winded way of restating what I said in the first three sentences. I mean, ultimately, I agree with what DeveloperX says, but I believe it's still the developer/IP owner who gets to decide whether they are going to be a butt-munch or not.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[DeveloperX]

Of course its the choice of the owner of the IP whether or not to shut down any fan-driven campaigns to breathe new life into games.

And I seriously seriously doubt that SE had ANY plans of making any games to restore the old _good_ games. In-fact, ever since Enix got involved in the mix, the company has faltered too much for my taste.
Squaresoft was king. And damn the fool who decided to change it.
Eh..off topic ranting again..ok, so yeah, while the owner of the IP has every right to pull the plug, that doesn't mean at all that they should.

If CE was something that was being SOLD, I could see a cause for a C&D, but its just stupid to stop a freebie rom hack that would draw more and more attention to the original IP.
Think about it, if someone who never played or heard of the original games, came across the rom hack and enjoyed it..don't you think that they would want to play the original? I do.

Yeah..so I know that I'm ranting when you even said you agreed with me..I guess I'm just consuming too much alcohol to think straight right now lol. ok /rant
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Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[Rainer Deyke]

ROM hacking is probably legal.

Copyright restricts the right to copy, distribute, perform, broadcast, and create derivative works. It does not restrict the right to modify your legally purchased copy of a copyrighted work.

I can legally buy a book, tear out the pages, rearrange them, write in the margins, and use white-out and a pen to replace all instances of "Harry Potter" with "Superman". Likewise, I can legally buy a piece of software and modify it to my liking.

What I cannot do is distribute the modified copy. The modified copy counts as a derivative work, which is covered under the original copyright.

However, it would probably be legal to distribute a patch against the original software and tell people how to apply this patch to their own legally purchased copy of the software. Since the patch contains no part of the original, the copyright of the original shouldn't apply to it. Probably. If you have a competent lawyer.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

[RedSlash]

In case anyone didn't remember, same thing happened to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxxwZSafh3E

[tcaudilllg]

My theory is that they stopped it because they saw it as competition. If people are playing a free game, particularly on a massive scale, then that's time they are spending not playing (and possibly, not buying) SE games. They essentially have a monopoly on the JRPG market at this point, seeing that they own just about everybody.

I think SE is a monopoly, plain and simple. It's probably not driven by passion anymore, but pure profit. SE is not Square, but Square-Enix. They changed when Sakaguchi left; it's just taken us a decade to figure that out. :\

I was absolutely stunned by the quality of that hack. They actually advanced the ages of the characters in a way that was believable. That's talent. It's not impossible that there will be an official sequel given that the guy behind FFIV: the After has been christianed with the honor of bastardizing our fav games. What it's taught me is that nostalgia can be exploited, so you should be very careful about what you let get close to your heart, lest you learn to long for something which others are unwilling to give, or worse, will exploit.

[RampantCoyote]