Planning an open-source Final Fantasy based game, what are the legal concerns?

[falkTX]

Hey there everyone,
I'm planning on developing an open-source, Final-Fantasy based game in the long term (I know I would at least 1 year before having anything to show off).
I know Python, C and C++ and recently started learning some OpenGL. I know Qt4 pretty well, so that can do the launcher, settings, etc.

I'm creating this topic because I'm looking for advice. I know you guys are not lawyers, but I believe you should know some stuff better than me.

The history would be like an FFVIII clone, but with different characters, monsters and cities.
I choose FFVIII because of the Garden situation, where you have students that need to pass a set of trials, get into SeeD, and then they're dispatched to the whole world.
On a initial state the player could only start in Balamb Garden, but once things advance it will have the chance to start a new adventure in Galbadia or Trabia Gardens. (maybe even White Seed or in Esthar?)

Anyway, what kind of things should I be aware that are off-limits?
afaik, names of cities, magic, attacks, etc are not copyrightable, so they are fine to copy I guess? (plus damage calculations)
ideally, the FFVIII world map would be copied too, then added a few extras here and there.

I know I can't use textures from the real game, and I don't plan to.
But what about these projects?
(I'm looking mostly at the menu icons)

Thanks very much in advance!

[halkun]

Nope Nope  Nope Nope

What you are tying to do is make a Derivative work. That will get you in lot of trouble if you want to publish it. Besides the fact the title "Final Fantasy" is trademarked, (along with the names of the Characters, cities, places, monsters, and such - therefore you can't use those), you don't seem to be changing enough to make it a "Transformative Work"

Here's is an example of a Transformative Work.

The movie "Tommy Boy" is actually a retelling of "Hamlet"
The TV show "House" is actually a retelling of "Sherlock Homes"

If you are not transforming it like the examples above, you are going to run afowl of copyright issues.

[falkTX]

Note that the game is to be 100% open-source. It's gonna appear some day in the wild (probably github), but will not be commercialized.

Is there anything wrong on saying:
"This is an in-development game, codenamed 'OpenFantasy', which is based on the ideas behind the good old Final Fantasy series for PSX." ?
(I haven't decided a real name for it, but I'm not too much concerned about it).

But really, how come I can get in trouble for using "Balamb" and "Trabia"? (serious question here).
It's just sounds awful, mainly because it's an open-source thing that has no intentions to be sold.
Maybe the "educational fair use" is in place?

One thing comes to my mind, just found a quick video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEVcbcQW3GU
^fair use?

[BloodShot]

SE isn't lenient when it comes to this stuff. You'd have to make something more akin to the dark mod if you want to not get C&D'd.

TDM looks like Thief, plays like Thief, and sort of even sounds like Thief, but it's not thief. Your project could theoretically have characters very similar to FF8 chars in looks, personality, and be named different, as long as they aren't copy-pasted and don't actually take anything from the FF8 characters. I think you can get away with some names, but they could still come at you for that because they have the money and it doesn't hurt them.

If you were to use names, I wouldn't name a place Balamb, and then make it look exactly the same, just to be safe.

So yeah, you could make something inspired by FF8, but you can't have things exactly like it, unless you want to get ass-raped by square-enix, regardless of if they are in the right or not.

They don't care if it's open source and not being sold for a profit. That's their IP you are toying with, and they won't like it one bit if they find your stuff when you have a decent amount of work done.

[halkun]

A lawyer friend said this once to me...

"Fair Use isn't a right, it's a defense"

This it true, Fair use doesn't kick in until *after* you are sued and you can raise it as a defense. If you want to take that chance, more power to you. It will be up to you and your atterny to make that fair use claim in a court of law.

Let me put it like this. The old producer of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, quit Square and made his own Final Fantasy clone called "Last Story". That was about as fas as he could go to get away with it. Too see what can be legally clear, check out how different that game is from than the actual Final Fantasy.

Ask yourself this, why doen't Capcom or Microsoft make an RPG based in the Final Fantasy universe... What's preventing them from doing it?

[falkTX]

If you were to use names, I wouldn't name a place Balamb, and then make it look exactly the same, just to be safe.

So yeah, you could make something inspired by FF8, but you can't have things exactly like it, unless you want to get ass-raped by square-enix, regardless of if they are in the right or not.

They don't care if it's open source and not being sold for a profit. That's their IP you are toying with, and they won't like it one bit if they find your stuff when you have a decent amount of work done.

that sucks... what if someone wants to a sequel to the history?

by the sound of it, I'll probably wait until FF8 is abandonware and most people don't care about it anymore.
Or I can get rich/billionaire, so I can buy licensing stuff or whatever from them I guess

Anyway, I'm still gonna do it privately.
When the time comes I'll worry more about this - it's a learning experience (I actually prefer coding over gaming...)

[halkun]

you can always go the "50 Shades of Grey" route. Make it, and then at the last minute change all the names.

(50 Shades was a Twilight fanfic that got really popular and the author chanaged all the names to get the book published)

[Mako]

To be fair only things related to the chrono series has been shut down... There are a number of full final fantasy fan remakes  out in the wild, including a full engine remake found here. Also two very high profile 2D remakes. One crappy 3D unreal FF7 remake hit almost every news site some time ago.


But you just so happened to join the one community (mostly coming from Halkun) that thinks Square is out to get them. In-fact there is not even a single case where Square interfered at all in anything related to it's Final Fantasy IP.


**
Course it could happen. But so could getting stuck by a meteor. Cept' getting stuck by a meteor has actually happened, Square sending a C&D to a Final Fantasy project has not. So odds are much much lower.


Good Luck!

[BloodShot]

Well, in those cases, it's not like any of the 3D stuff or engine remakes are full releases ready to be downloaded and played by a ton of people. I'm just speaking from experience, there are other companies that shut down mods based on their IPs at the drop of a hat, despite supporting and running complete mod communities, just because it was their IP and wasn't made on their engine/game.

I'm sure if someone made a PSX era FF sequel into a full game that was good, free, and got enough publicity that square would shut them down, especially if it's better than their stuff. Maybe if the game really is forgotten about then they wouldn't care, but FF8 is kinda in that "fine-line" category, where you can't be too sure of what direction they'd take, because while it's definitely not the most fondly remembered FF, it's clearly not forgotten about either.

And something like Q-Gears once it's done would probably be the least likely to get shut down because the ultimate goal is a new engine that can run FF7 and make games like it, not a new game that freely distributes much of FF7's content to make a different game.

[Mako]

...I thought Lost Odyssey had Final Fantasy written all over it. Also in a interview Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to break away from Final Fantasy with Last Story as much as possible:

Mako's Cool Quotes:
"a new form of RPG by choosing the universal theme of human emotion"

Blue Dragon also played allot like Final Fantasy. Example: replace the dragons with a job system, rename the title. There ya' go! perfect Final Fantasy.

[BloodShot]

That's why I suggested something like The Dark Mod above. It basically is Thief, but they've changed enough that it wouldn't cause any legal issues.

I was working on a mod a while back when we basically got a very polite C&D through the form of a couple of PMs from Gearbox suggesting that we wouldn't be able to release a mod attempting to make Duke Nukem Forever if it were made in 1998 with either the Quake or Unreal engine. It was right around the time I started putting the few models I had made and several other member's assets in-game, and in the early stages of mapping. I'm not saying Square-Enix would do this (or if they did that they would do it that nicely) but it should just be known that regardless about how SE feels about this stuff, it's the legal department that makes the cases.

Just look at Bethesda, they love the guy who made minecraft and had several meetings with him, and yet, the legal department tried to sue Notch for having the word "Scrolls" in the title of one of his future games, despite scrolls being just a word. There are some companies that have departments that know nothing about how the parent company treats or feels about their IPs and people using their stuff, and just attempt lawsuits because they can, even if it holds no weight.

[Mako]

There are some companies that have departments that know nothing about how the parent company treats or feels about their IPs and people using their stuff, and just attempt lawsuits because they can, even if it holds no weight.

Agreed, SE does not fall into this category (yet) though. Never happened is just that. =/ Even if he did, he would be the very first.


**
The Notch thing is vastly different. He haz munnys. Lots and lots of money. However, if Notch was broke, he could release that game anywhere at any time and bethesda would not care. So unless falkTX is secretly Bill Gates, I don't think he has much to worry about. Square has much bigger fish to fry, like actually turning a profit.

[BloodShot]

Well, the worst thing about the not having munnys is that if by some off chance that they DO pursue legal action against you, if you don't have money you basically have to do what they say since you can't afford to counter them, even if they are wrong, which is why most companies throw C&D orders so quickly in the first place, because it's like backing a financially troubled person into a corner.

I doubt that will happen though.

OP could easily just remove all story similarities, names and references if he does get one too, so i doubt it would be that much of a problem

[LeonhartGR]

This guy is using a lot of ff material. He has created a ff8 sequel in the game's engine. Is this considered "legal"?

[falkTX]

OP could easily just remove all story similarities, names and references if he does get one too, so i doubt it would be that much of a problem

I think I'll go with that route - ie, using the same names and maybe some graphic similarities to start with (that will surely get the project a bit more attention ). If someone (from SE) complains, I'll change them or remove the source (I'll still have the game to myself anyway).

[falkTX]

This guy is using a lot of ff material. He has created a ff8 sequel in the game's engine. Is this considered "legal"?

Those are just videos. He could either do them via mods/hacking or using a video editor.
I haven't heard of single case of Youtube gameplay/mod videos being removed so far... (except when it has background music with copyright)

[Tempus]

But you just so happened to join the one community (mostly coming from Halkun) that thinks Square is out to get them. In-fact there is not even a single case where Square interfered at all in anything related to it's Final Fantasy IP.

That may be true. Perhaps it's also true that Square(-Enix) has a worse reputation than deserved when it comes to shutting down projects. However, I'm not aware of any Final Fantasy equivalent of Chrono Resurrection. That is, a project based on Square's IP that looks better than its source material. When Chrono Resurrection and Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes received their C&D orders, they were 4 months away from release and "98% complete" respectively. This, to me, indicates that Square(-Enix) doesn't worry about projects based on its IP because many of them fail, are sh*t, or don't get released. When it's a good project that looks like it's going to be released though, they pay attention.

Course it could happen. But so could getting stuck by a meteor. Cept' getting stuck by a meteor has actually happened, Square sending a C&D to a Final Fantasy project has not. So odds are much much lower.

That's not how probability works Calculating odds is difficult without relevant data. I mean, how many decent, cohesive and fully playable Final Fantasy projects (not mods of the original game) that look better than the source material are there? None that I know of... Most of them are bits and pieces, low quality, etc. (again, that's only what I know of though). You would need a FF project that has the same relationship with its base game as Chrono Resurrection did to its base game to be able to know whether Square's shutting down of that project was a one-off thing or a consistent policy it intends to enforce.

Personally, as someone who's worked (technically still working) on a project based on Square(-Enix)'s IP, I'd rather not take the chance of investing many hours of work into a project only to have it shut down. I don't know what the likelihood of that happening to Mako Dawn would've been, but I did plan on making a high quality product. As Bloodshot mentioned above, I don't have the resources to fight a C&D even if I weren't doing anything wrong. Besides, it's so much more flexible to have your own IP to work with, which is the biggest selling point for me. You get to take the elements you like and change the ones you don't.


PS: I may be wrong about some or all of the things I've said. I reserve the right to not stand by anything I've said.