XeNTaX

I know namco seems to have a history of legall bitchslapping any modders that are going through their resources and doing whatever.

Are there any other companies (or smaller businesses, or even independent devs) that have taken legal action against modders or modding communities? And whether they were successful or not?

i never heard of namco going after anyone the only one i know of is people who messed with team ninja.

Hmm I remember there was something about a game company going after modders..

EDIT: oh lol it was tecmo
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/10 ... e_hackers/

Yeah - Ninjas rule

I think both Activision and Square-Enix have sent cease and desist orders to modders.

The only C&D I know of in the case of SE was for that Chrono Trigger remake project a long time ago. I think in the majority of cases, you just end up with software authors getting sick of peoples' bullshit, or getting paranoid that they might get in legal trouble, and suddenly stopping their work. Then people just start speculating and starting rumors that it was for legal reasons or over a C&D.

Tecmo ended up dropping that lawsuit after a private settlement. I have no idea what the settlement entailed.

What about this site(xentax)? Have the site admins recieved any threatening letters, considering people are uploading copyrighted files and such?

What about noesis? I'm sure it's probably been recognized as a massive intellectual property {reversing} tool lol
And it's also hosted on xentax. Lol

I haven't heard anything about either of them; probably the closest that's happened for Xentax would be a few years ago, when a company contacted Mr.Mouse threatening legal action if he didn't take down the description for a format from a game of theirs. He replaced it on the wiki with a "Off display pending decision on legal status of information." notice , and I haven't heard anything more since.

lol i was just looking on their site, why would you want to hook a fleshlight to a pc lol?

I've never heard from anyone about Noesis. And even though you're joking, you really shouldn't call it a giant tool for theft of any sort, because threads like these are likely to get Google hits, and all it takes is a lawyer coming across a statement like that to prompt them to investigate what this "Noesis" thing is and issue a C&D under completely unreasonable terms. Noesis falls legally under pretty much the same category as emulators, in that it can read proprietary data, but all of the code distributed in the binary is mine or legally licensed (in the case of 3rd party libs and such), and I've made an effort to not directly include any reversed/disassembled code in it. Legal precedent set by emulators thus far would tend to indicate that I'm in the legal right here, but as I've mentioned before this is a not-for-profit hobby project and it's not something I'm going to try to defend in court. I'm mildly surprised I haven't actually had any companies blindly C&D me already, I guess it's lucky that Noesis is still a fairly obscure tool.

Same here. If companies would complain about MultiEx Commander or the forum and seriously threaten with legal actions/court, I would not take it to court, but simply comply and shut it down. I don't have time nor the energy to start defending a mere hobby, even though I'm right and they would certainly be wrong.

If that were to happen, though, I'd hope you would at least release the source first (even if you did so covertly to mitigate the possibility of them suing you for that).

Dinoguy1000 wrote:I haven't heard anything about either of them; probably the closest that's happened for Xentax would be a few years ago, when a company contacted Mr.Mouse threatening legal action if he didn't take down the description for a format from a game of theirs. He replaced it on the wiki with a "Off display pending decision on legal status of information." notice , and I haven't heard anything more since.

Can you offer any update at all on this, Mr.Mouse? It'd be nice to finally have a resolution.

Actually, this was in 2006, and I long since put it back after a few years. But then the database was hacked and we had to revert back to an older database, where it was still locked. Mind you, it had been back up for a few years without further complaint. It's now back up again. http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/GRAF:3D_Sex_Villa_BXP