Fortress Forever / PC Gamer

[o_fresh]

Read the article, I just decided to ask out of blind curiosity. Got a decent reply from 3 of the PC Gamer Staff.

http://forum.pcgamer.co.uk/viewtopic...989712#1989712

[o_don]

Good work Fresh. Hopefully they will write a nice article. The devs should get in contact with Tim and fill him in on the essential info.

[o_garland-w]

Nice

[o_dammage]

As for Valve refusing to comment on the game; you should be glad about that. Any comment they give could be seen as an endorsement, and since they have a legal obligation to protect their intellectual property - of which Fortress Forever is in clear violation - the only comment they could really give is in the form of a cease and desist letter.

Even in cowboy badlands clean-room implementations are fully legal. And FF is surely clean-room.

If you could do it, fresh, please make it clear on pcg forums.

As of trademarks,

Team Fortress is owned by Sierra (Dunno what the relationship of sierra and valve is right now)
see http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield...ate=4kl06f.3.1

then Team Fortress Classic is surely a trademark of Sierra and/or Valve as it has been used by them.
A fast lookup didnt result and results though. Still, the TFC-name is surely protected due to the usage.

Now let's see Fortress Forever:
Never used by Valve and Sierra, not officially registeres. Google searches result in Fortress-Forever posts only. Usually it shows the usage and thus that trademark in gaming branch should be already claimable by the dev-team (and usually it is enough to use the name).


Now let's see Fortress:
There are lots of them registered. Claimed on security systems, interrior, clocks, pools etc, but I seen no entries on computer games. Remember that same trademark can be claimed by different parties if their operation branches do not overlap. (No danger in confusion)
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield...h=Submit+Query


Remember those were fast searches on officially registered trademarks in U.S. and I'm not a guy who sold his soul to the devil

Just wanted to make clear that there is no law against clean-room implementations and if you do a clean-room implementation, the originator has no claims against you in the USA and Europe.

Few examples would be samba which is a clean-room implementation of the windows share service or also wine which reimplements winapi. Even Palm and YellowTab cannot have any claims because Haiku is implementing a clean-room BeOS-compatible and Microsoft cannot do anything against ReactOS because their system will be NT-compatible.

[o_nezumi]

High five to fresh. Good on yer.

You should remind them that this isn't a straight conversion.



Also, what's clean-room? I don't get it.
I did find this link on the Trademark Website: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?...ate=3kfblg.1.1 which links to the search engine. Fortress Forever is owned by valve (it says).

[o_rebo]

Nice one Fresh, we did have some contact with PC Zone before great bunch of guys but unfortunately nothing came of it.

[o_geokill----->]

Nice one Fresh, about time someone stood up for FF

[o_ivaqual]

Very nice, except FF isn't banned anymore on the Steam forums (when will people finally drop that one I don't know)

[o_luminous]

Originally Posted by rebo

Nice one Fresh, we did have some contact with PC Zone before great bunch of guys but unfortunately nothing came of it.

im sure i saw a mention in there once, cant remember :S

[mirvin_monkey]

yeah they mentioned us an issue or two ago when talking about dod:s

[o_dammage]

Also, what's clean-room?

Easy: clean-room implementations are done by looking at something how it works without hacking into the internals of the original.

I'll give a small easy to understand example (don't think I hold anyone for dumb with the example, i just don't have a better one right now ):

a firm produces balls.
You want to produce balls, but don't have access to production patterns of the originator. As the laws protect firm secrets, you are not allowed to break into his factory, steal one of his production machines and use it to produce your own balls.

Instead you take the fact that a ball is round and engineer your own machine which produces balls.

That would be a clean room implementation of a ball production machine - you look at the result and implement backwards the base needed to create this result.

In opposition to it we would have other types of implementations. E.g. someone created an algorithm and by heck you cannot reimplement it by just looking at the results. So you decompile his executable and look at the algorithm and/or copy it into your own implementation. It is not clean room. You have broken the copyright law - you have copied someone's protected work (and the fuckfaces called managers tend to tell "you have stolen intellectual property" [whereby you have copied it - thus copyright]).

[mervaka]

and patents stop people copying even the idea that a ball is round

[o_robg]

Good example is the manufacture of IBM-compatible chips. Compaq couldn't just rip off IBM's BIOS, so they got one set of engineers who had access to the BIOS source to note down exactly what it did (without saying how), then another set to build a chip which conformed to the I/O spec. that the first lot of engineers produced. That way no-one broke any rules

[Lost]

If Valve had any legal power against the gents running this show, then they would have already flexxed that muscle and put the mod down. Especially if they're really working on a TFC:S or TF2.

[o_dammage]

Originally Posted by Mervaka

and patents stop people copying even the idea that a ball is round

I extra didn't mention software patents as neither does Valve posess any I know of nor do they have any value (unfortunately it might change in EU soon) in other countries.

I just say: Novell has a patent on context menus, Amazon on 1-click-purchase and Microsoft on double click. And there are hell lots others, even recursive downloading (wget -R www.fortress-forever.com) etc.

Patents for materialistic inventions - OK, they are not covered by the copyright (and you cannot really cover them by the copyright, but there are also laws against plagiats), software is covered by the copyright. Ah, well, I just stfu on this topic.

[o_frenchtoast]

Originally Posted by Lost

If Valve had any legal power against the gents running this show, then they would have already flexxed that muscle and put the mod down. Especially if they're really working on a TFC:S or TF2.

I disagree, 'cause that would make them look like assholes. If they're really working on TFC:S or TF2 then they're gonna let this mod come out and make sure their game is better.

[o_mescalito]

Which isn't possible, so... yeah.

[Lost]

Valve understands the challenge of attracting players to a mod, new idea or port of an old game. If they put out TFC:S after FF, and FF is as popular as I think it will be, they would probably expect it to flop, just like DoD:S. There are only so many Fortress players; its in their best interest to aquire the game or let it go its own way, instead of put the money and resources into their own version and hope for the best. The fact that they haven't put it out yet leads me to believe they have no intentions of doing so. TF2, maybe, TFC:S, not gonna happen.

And as for looking like assholes, they're in the business for the money, while PR is important, looking like assholes to a couple thousand FF fans wouldn't mar their image much, considering the few million other people out there who use Steam and haven't ever heard of our lovely little game. Yet.

[o_photeknix]

Originally Posted by Lost

If Valve had any legal power against the gents running this show, then they would have already flexxed that muscle and put the mod down. Especially if they're really working on a TFC:S or TF2.

thats not entirely correct. Valve actually contacted Q3F during its development, in which Q3F had to change some things... like they weren't able to use some naming conventions, so they no longer went by Quake 3 Fortress, but strictly just Q3F. and they had to change class names (like scout to recon, hwguy to minigunner, etc). basically just some naming legalities, i believe.

[o_ekim]

Which is frankly absurd, anyhow.