Bubsy 3D

[Maxpphire]

http://bubsy3d.com/

This is a very great thing. It will take all of 10 minutes to play through, but with cheats and stuff it is p.fun.

[AuraLancer]

I was wondering who has the rights to Bubsy since Accolade died.

[Kosheh]

I was wondering who has the rights to Bubsy since Accolade died.

I'm pretty sure no one, lol.

i'm pretty sure this game fits in somewhere between "educational use" and "parody" too

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The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

[Kriven]

There are really heavy restrictions on which institutions can utilize the "education" allowment and for what purposes.

Text book manufacturers, particularly English lessons, often incorporate comic strips or mascots into their books, but they do not receive the benefit of the education exemption and are expected to acquire the proper license to utilize that material.

Edit: According to Wiki, all of Accolades' assets are currently owned by Atari. Portions of their intellectual property may be owned by Prudential Financial, who invested in and had some control of the company.

[Maxpphire]

they are also not making money off of this, it is no different then a megaman or mario fan game.

[Kitsu]

Both of which are also nebulous copyright/trademark infringements lol

In any case, whether something gets punished for infringement is almost entirely up to the IP holder; if the IP holder doesn't care, then no punishment need be carried out (though if the infringement is against the policies of a third-party host or something, like fanworks on ytube, they do have the right to remove it to protect themselves).

But why does this matter in this thread? It's a thread about a weird 3d fangame; you should play it, because, even if it's supremely weird, it's funny. In a "this is really dumb" kinda way.

[E-Man]

Edit: According to Wiki, all of Accolades' assets are currently owned by Atari. Portions of their intellectual property may be owned by Prudential Financial, who invested in and had some control of the company.

Considering how Atari is not the mega video game giant it used to be many years ago and it was responsible for almost killing the video game industry when it was still young, I'm wondering why Atari would want to bother with an intellectual property that wouldn't do a thing to make their situation any better.

[Kriven]

Who knows why they'd want it. Intellectual real estate, I assume, regardless of quality. If I had the means, I would also purchase abandoned or failed IPs. Particularly with all the new download services that specialize in classic games.

[Maxpphire]

My point was mainly that as long as people don't make money off of it, most companies don't care about fan games.

[DioShiba]

Kat's pretty much on spot with how companies don't care about fan games being distributed if they're not doing it for profit.

Only thing I don't understand is that even if they were doing this for profit I don't see how a defunct company can do much about it. Unless that falls under something to do with Intellectual properties living on pass that point where a company is liquidated (which might be the only thing I can't grasp or am just missing here) I just don't see how accolade can do anything about it.

regardless I'm surprised people still give a fuck about bubsy given how it turned out sequel after sequel.

[Kitsu]

simple:
accolade wouldn't do anything
but bubsy's current IP holder could

remember that IP, just like any other sort of property, can be handed around, bought and sold, traded, etc.
And when companies liquidate, they often end up selling their IPs to whomever wants to buy them. So yeah, company-held IPs continue to exist and be owned by companies as long as companies buy them.
I guess if no one had bought it, then it would be treated like a person dying? That is, the copyright/trademark would persist for a limited time afterwards before becoming public domain.

but lol I'm not IP lawyer, so this is all idle speculation on my part

[Kriven]

If the IP were not bought, one of three things would happen:

One - The rights would be attributed to the creator(s) of the product as opposed to the unified corporate entity.

Two - The rights would revert to the investors.

Or three - The work would become an "orphaned" work, and exist as the bane of all individuals everywhere.

The orphaned work is the most likely of the three, jsyk. What this means is that it's kinda public domain unless somebody throws a fit. It isn't recommeded to really touch an orphaned work, because it's too unpredictable and usually a larger entity will claim ownership over it, and there isn't much you can do to stop them.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works

Elaboration before anybody does something stupid: by "kinda public domain", I mean there's a chance you can utilize the material without being bothered. Not that it's actually free-to-use.


Also, Logic: I didn't actually want to prove a point about copyright or anything like that. I mean, I corrected that while I was here, but I really just wanted to answer AuraLancer's question about the current ownership of the franchise.

Sorry for derail? Kinda?

[psychospacecow]

I remember this from a couple weeks ago. It takes a turn for the needlessly creepy.

[SchAlternate]

no relief

[Saltonara]