@Sirrian @Nimhain
The suggest a troop was suspended because of legal questions, which Also implied that any other suggestions on anything else are on the same legal ground. any update on that?
I’d hate to see you have to cancel good ideas just because someone suggested you would be liable.
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trust me i got you fam, have you seen the “rage quit the map” thread?
Ideas are not copyrightable, trademarkable, or patentable. Concrete representations of them (algorithms, terms) may be, and certainly that’s a factor when cribbing from community suggestions. Fan-submitted artwork, naming of troops, and the like is a murky legal area, and likely why the troop design contest had to be halted; but simply saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if idea xyz” doesn’t somehow place it on an untouchable pedestal and off-limits to the developers. Otherwise, no company ever would run any sort of official forum, and they’d have to run around with their fingers in their ears and their eyelids taped shut in order to avoid accidentally polluting themselves.
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While that’s a nice post and it makes sense. But that’s not true. Law is complicated lol
im actually also very concerned about that and in doubt should i make detailed fearture requests or not. at a times my creativity is being suspended due to that.
-Holds a sign: will work for crescendo!-
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I never said it wasn’t complicated. What I did say is that ideas are not intellectual property, which is most definitely true, and has been upheld by many court rulings. Without an accompanying invention (for patents) or work of art (for copyright), an idea is just an idea.
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What could happen short of some binding signed legal document is, they would make the troop then someone could sue them over it being their idea first. Not saying it would hold up in court, but i’m sure they’d be worried about that happening in the first place.
Most of the time this is why companies pay the person giving the idea, plus having them still sign an agreement, so they can’t go back on their word.
That’s fair (though game rules are also not patentable; specific troop art would be subject to copyright, however). Forum suggestions don’t put an idea out of reach for the developers, though. Like I said, if that were true, the devs would not be able to host a forum at all. In fact, a large function of a forum is to collect feedback, including suggestions for improvement. If people are going to deliberately withhold idea sharing out of some fear that it’ll prevent the dev team from implementing it, that’s unfortunate.
Probably has something to do with us giving loose ideas, then they go and do the work. With the design-a-troop it’s basically like we did the work, they just have to put it in the game. So i’m not really sure legally speaking, what is the actual trigger.
Could have something to do with troops being something someone might actually pay for in the game. Unless someone signs a legal document, they should receive some of the money made for that troop.
my problem is when i give a feature request i like to make it so detailed that it counts to ‘i do the work’ rather? so im worried :S
It might be so. In any event, I just realized I am talking only about US IP law. I have no idea what it’s like in other countries, and for a multinational forum and a game with multiregional support, the answer is probably less clear than I stated it to be. Regardless, as @killerman3333 indicated earlier, the devs occasionally do lift feature requests and troop ideas directly from the forums.
Yeah, but they never actually claim themselves that they took that person’s idea. It just shows up in the game and if they were ever questioned about it, they could just claim they were already working on it long before that person said it. The design-a-troop idea came straight from the devs. At that point they can’t deny that it wasn’t their idea.
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As convoluted as the law may be there must be a short disclaimer to cover it.
Just like the delay for the last console update when privacy issues arose… Battlefield 1 has a simple pop up when you first play, letting you know that others can see your progress and activity etc, press A to agree blah blah.
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It’s almost certainly one of those areas where there’s probably never going to be a problem, but one litigious jerk would make it a disaster. Even if the devs end up 100% in the right, the process of getting there would be a mess.
My not-even-vaguely-close-to-being-a-lawyer thought is that some type of explicit waiver of ownership would be needed up front…which would still involve lawyers to draft it. Whee?