Scratch

I'm wonderring if I should send this email to NAMCO:

My email wrote:

Hello Namco-Bandai,

As you are hopefully aware of, (I hope), you sent a DCMA notice to the Admins of Scratch.mit.edu requesting, and requiring that the project made by 124scratch be removed, due to the fact that it was a pacman project.  Yet in doing this you simply forgot all the pacman remakes on the internet.  They include other games made with the
Scratch program, and flash games.  Yet you simply targeted this one project, and  anaged to anger many members of the scratch community.  These members are probably trying to avoid buying any NAMCO products now. 

One fact you may have overlooked is the fact that Scratch.mit.edu is designed for education purposes, and is therefore protected by Fair use.  Fair use allows any copyrighted materials to be used for educational  purposes.  Due to the fact that 124scratch shared the project to the scratch site, there is in fact no doubt that the project was protected by fair use.  Also, taking into account that the project didn't and
wouldn't in fact damage the financial strenght and integrity of the Namco-Bandai Company or brand.  In reality, it is more likely the Namco-Bandai is more likely to suffer from the many members of the Scratch community neglecting to buy your products due to this one incident. 

Another thing I ask you to understand is that people, kids especially learn from doing things they love. 124scratch probably loved playing pacman, and decided to create his own version of it.  By forcing this project to be removed, you could have possibly harmed him in hiis growth to be an adult.  Not only this, 124scratch wasn't the only member of scratch to make their own version of scratch.  Many of these can be found by going to this link: http://scratch.mit.edu/tagged/shared/pacman not only that, but a simple  search on google with the phrase 'Pacman' will direct you to many flash games of pacman, that are perfect replicas, which aren't protected by fair use, you haven't complained about.  However, when a child uploaded a pacman to a site which was protected by fair use, you required that it was removed.


as you see,  124scratch's project was not infringing copyright law, or Namco-Bandai's intellectual property. It was quite wrong for you to send that DMCA notice,  and may even have broken a few laws yourselves.

Now before I end this, I ask you this:  If you had a child yourself, would you have done  the same thing to them, or let them continue with what they love doing?

Sincerely, (Name) (Name) (SSSS on Scratch)

Last edited by ssss (2011-06-11 09:55:16)