Scratch

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100730/17081510430.shtml#c857

No more can be said about this. Namco has no more right over Pac-Man except to say that they made the original idea. There's no way for Namco to take back their game, even if they have control over every government in the world. No way.

And also. I lost 5 dollars at the movies playing one of Namco's arcade games. I put the money in, but it won't start. 

I think it is interesting how this coincided with Namco's advertisement of the anniversary of PacMan. They scored plenty of free press off of this maneuver.

But perhaps even more interesting is how they claim in their letter that people could play the Scratch version for free, implying that they are loosing money. Guess who else lost money? Toru Iwatani, the inventor of PacMan.
Namco has made no-telling how much money off PacMan over the decades yet their compensation to Toru .?.?... they promoted him from game designer to a supervisor position. Wow. Turns out the true criminals are the games' copyright owners. Poor Toru, literally!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article550758.ece

Last edited by Locomule (2010-08-20 10:44:59)

pika100chu wrote:

Survivorduck wrote:

That's just ridiculous. 

Namco, you just lost one customer.

two, actually.

Three actually.

Harakou wrote:

Ouch. Yes they did get a lot of free press, and they say any press is good press. (or something like that; I can't remember.) But I wonder how true that is here. I mean, this certainly doesn't make me want to pay Namco to play Pac-Man, quite the opposite in fact. I suspect that this will turn out to be a bad move by Namco, but unfortunately nothing substantial enough to really affect such a large company will happen.

Oh and by the way Locomule, your link gave me a 404 error. I'm not sure if it's the formatting on my iPod or just your post.

Thanks to Harakou and everyone else for commenting. Negative press is a weird concept but made careers for both Madonna and Marilyn Manson (I'm also a mucician btw lol)

The link I posted goes to an archived newspaper article from The Times/The Sunday Times and ends with "article550758.ece"
I have no idea what .ece is but I checked it and it is working via Firefox.

Here is a copy of the article from that page...
__________________________________________________________________

From The Times
August 3, 2005
Happy birthday, Mr Pac-Man
It was inspired by pizza and spawned an industry that generates $30 billion a year — but 25 years on, the world’s most recognizable computer icon has not made its creator a rich man.

by Leo Lewis

We are in a cheerless office-block on the edge of a bleak, rain-swept industrial estate in the grayest corner of Yokohama, waiting to speak to a visionary whose lurid colours changed the world. We are expecting someone extraordinary to break through the dreariness. With a single stroke of genius, our man created the most recognizable icon of the computer age, shifted the global landscape of entertainment, and spawned an industry that is now worth more than $30 billion (£17 billion) a year.

We wander down a smelly, nondescript corridor, and almost miss a slightly overweight middle-aged man wearing cheap sandals and a faint grin. “Hi, pleased to meet you,” he says, darting out from behind a coffee machine and extending a hand, “I’m Iwatani. I invented Pac-Man.”

He ushers us into the sort of decrepit meeting room that even a small, failing business would be ashamed of, and points to a tacky, stuffed-toy version of the notorious yellow glutton. This is the hero of the world’s most successful video game, and his father. “Happy 25th birthday, Mr Pac-Man!” says Iwatani. Toru Iwatani, now 50, is the stuff of video game legend. An internet search on his name unlocks thousands of retro-obsessed sites venerating Pac-Man and debating its significance — all oozing that brand of know-it-all nostalgia that vintage technology provokes. When the 1980 Pac-Man craze was at its most intense, with machines lurking in every nook from Hong Kong noodle shops to P&O cross-Channel ferries, Iwatani’s name conjured a sense of global mystery and intrigue.

Who on earth was this inventive Japanese devil, and how had he got us all hooked on these twittering, beeping machines?

Iwatani sits down and tells the whole story, starting exactly 26½ years ago when a 24-year-old Namco programmer strolled into a now demolished restaurant in central Tokyo, called Shakeys. It was here that he ordered the marguerita pizza that, with one slice removed, provided the visual inspiration for Pac-Man’s famous profile.

In fact, Iwatani acknowledges that, while a eureka moment for the annals, that event represents the official birth of Pac-Man: “The whole thing actually started with me walking around games arcades watching how many boys were playing and the fact that all the machines were about killing aliens, tanks or people. Girls were simply not interested, and I suddenly had a motivation for my work: I wanted game centers to shed this rather dark, sinister image, and it seemed to me that the way to raise the atmosphere of a place is to entice girls to come in.

“The whole purpose of Pac-Man was to target women and couples, and get a different type of player involved.”

Iwatani and his team of six developers were given a remarkably free rein in coming up with Namco’s greatest hit. He puts this down to the fact that the industry was then in a primitive state, and that his bosses, who were generally ignorant of the market, had little choice but to trust the instincts of a 24-year old geek.

“So there I was, wondering what sort of things women would look for in a video game. I sat in cafés and listened to what they were talking about: mostly it was fashion and boyfriends. Neither of those was really the stuff of a good video game. Then they started talking about food — about cakes and sweets and fruit — and it hit me: that food and eating would be the thing to concentrate on to get the girls interested.”

Over the next 18 months, Iwatani and his team set about creating the game that would change the games world. After many experiments, he came up with Pac-Man chomping his way through food placed around a maze, and being chased by ghosts. The four ghosts — Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, as they were known outside Japan — were based on Obake no Q-Taro, a famous cartoon ghost, which Iwatani sketches for us on a scrap of paper.

On the technical front, what Iwatani did was revolutionary. The ghosts did not move at random, but in four distinct behavioural patterns. The “power-pills”, which gave Pac-Man the ability to eat the ghosts, provided an instant switch in the nature of the action and therefore the tone of the game.

But the genius of Pac-Man — and the reason that in the 25 years since its release it has been played more than ten billion times — was its sense of life. Before it, video games were exciting but essentially mechanical. You controlled a space ship, car or tank and the enemy did the same. Pac-Man’s munching action and the ghosts’ goggle eyes gave the world of video games colour, humour and, above all, character.

It may have been aimed at girls, but boys converted to it immediately: Pac-Man’s most interesting revelation was gamers’ affinity to living things. And that spark of inspiration has taken the industry from a 2-D yellow disc through Mario, and on to a 3-D Lara Croft.

“From very early childhood I have always loved practical jokes and playing tricks on people,” says Iwatani. “I love doing things that provoke a reaction. It gave me so much joy to know that over the entire world, people were affected by my game. Even if it was only one page of their lives.”

Iwatani describes his worries on the evening before Pac-Man hit the streets. “There were some really big hits out there — Defender, Centipede, Asteroids. We sent the Pac-Man machines out to the games arcades in secret. There was no fanfare, no advertising, we just wanted to see how the public would react.

“I was really nervous, because I was not at all sure that the game would be accepted . But it was startling how quickly it became popular — all the more so because men were suddenly interested in a game with no violence.”

Everyone from teenagers to heart surgeons joined in “Pac-Mania”. Iwatani leafs through a history of Pac-Man goods — lunchboxes, car bumper stickers and other trinkets. “I think that the moment I knew things had got out of hand was when the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of Pac-Man got a 56 per cent share in primetime US TV. Artists and writers change lives. I just made a video game.”

Strangely, that is exactly how Namco saw his achievement: as just a game. Pac-Man, quite apart from the lucrative sequels Ms Pac-Man and Pac-Land, made the company more than $100 million. Iwatani was merely promoted to supervisor level, and still lives in a house too small to accommodate a Pac-Man arcade cabinet. “You work for a company all your life in Japan,” he says, “I received no particular bonus. People think I made a fortune and that I’m a rich man. I’m not.”

There is something rather distressing about Iwatani’s workaday scene. It is tempting to imagine what he would be like now if he had worked for an American company.

Iwatani’s answer is to point to a career spent doing exactly what he wanted. After Pac-Man, he went on to become Namco’s foremost producer of arcade games — classics such as Ridge Racer, Time Crisis and Point Blank.

And yet, Iwatani is in some ways a video game Luddite. He has become a great believer in a golden age of video games, when the ideas were instantly accessible, the controls easy to grasp, and the gameplay simple and charming. “The development of the hardware, and the greater ability to express every idea that flies into a programmer’s head, mean that game creators have made the new games congested with every technique in their power. The basic games behind all this are so blurred that people can’t catch up. We should go back to basics — like Pac-Man — and play in an easier, more relaxed way.”

hdarken wrote:

pika100chu wrote:

Survivorduck wrote:

That's just ridiculous. 

Namco, you just lost one customer.

two, actually.

Three actually.

Even though it's stupid they removed it, it is their stuff. I agree it is amazingly stupid when there are roms and better remakes out there. But I'm still their customer. I love Ms. Pac-man and Galaga.

The following is an overview of Fair Use and in no way is intended to completely define it. Indeed, many factors come into play and ultimately only a judicial decision matters in the end. However, the following may provide  good insight into why many people, possibly including the Scratch Team, believe that Namco was wrong.
_____________________________________________________________
The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
___________________________________________________________________

The issue seems to come down to a single question...
Which is more important, the educational value of Scratch users being able to learn by copying PacMan OR the potential money thet Namco stands to lose from people playing the Scratch version of PacMan instead of buying Namco's PacMan.

I think it should be pretty obvious by now what a lot of us think.

Of course, there are more sides to this, such as the abundance of other projects based on copyrighted games and programs that can surely be found amongst the tons of Scratch projects available.

One of the main issues also is that in order to claim fair use, you must give credit to the copyright owner, Namco. I would think that considering the nature of Scratch, a best solution would be a generalized statement on project pages, linked from Scratch's front page, or something similar. Expecting  every kid who creates a project based on an old game or pice of software to include a fair use statement is simply impractical and unrealistic.

Lastly, I am no lawyer and besides, I always try to remember that I could be wrong about anything. I am not even remotely tied to Scratch in any official way, I am just another Scratcher. Please don't think that I represent the Scratch Team, other than hopefully in spirit.

I believe that this is ultimately about something far bigger than the issue of the blocked Scratch project. This is about the challenge of remodeling copyright laws in such a way that protect companies while allotting for the modern free exchange  of ideas and data over the internet. When PacMan was created, the internet did not exist. This extends far beyond Namco, or even gaming into other realms such as music, movies, etc.

Expecting outdated laws to still fully apply in the wake drastically different technology available to people around the world is simply ridiculous. The laws do not need to be thrown out, but amended and improved. Likewise, businesses need to change their profit strategies not only for their own good but also for the benefit of their customers. No easy task, hence all the foot dragging and pointing of fingers.

Once upon a time, they could rest assured that they had a monopoly on the physical distribution of their products but clearly, that day has sailed. More than likely, nothing will change any time soon. Namco is only interested in money so if this works out against them, they will change their strategy. I think they could stand to increase both their reputation and profits by reversing their stance and supporting both Scratch and its philosophy of free education for the masses. Instead of simply wringing more loose change from what is essentially a dead horse, they could use this opportunity to shine a new light onto the milestone genius of PacMan and honor its rightful place in history.

For one of my patently silly exaggerated examples, in order to fly, you must have a license. But if we woke up tomorrow and discovered that people grew wings overnight, would you seriously expect them not to fly? You could not ticket them fast enough to stop the sky from filling.

That is where we are at this moment, and one of the reasons that I do not think we should back down from this assault. You Scratchers are the ones who will decide how this all plays out in the future. Arm yourself with knowledge, remember to be empathetic of each other, and follow your hearts. You never know how much something you create, such as a simple little game, might impact the lives and futures of people all over the world!

laser100 wrote:

It's supposed to be allowed for educational use though...

Can you please point out to me how recreating a coyrighted game is at all "educational"?

cheddargirl wrote:

scratch_yoshi wrote:

laser100 wrote:

It's supposed to be allowed for educational use though...

Can you please point out to me how recreating a coyrighted game is at all "educational"?

By trying to recreate a Pac-Man game, the user learns about the scripts involved used to make that game and better understand the programming behind Pac-Man (and thus further helps better understand programming concepts in general). By sharing it online, other users can examine the scripts and also learn how the programming works, and, if they want to, improve on those scripts to see if they can make the program run more efficiently. 

Thanks! 

this has to be the stupidest thing ever    What? Do they think they'll lose money or something? Namco sux.

somehow I never heard of this till now 

Last edited by militarydudes (2010-09-04 00:30:48)

@Locomule: xD
@Military: This is the first time uve ever heard of this?     
@Freckles: Agreed 101%

GarSkutherGirl wrote:

XplodingEggs wrote:

hdarken wrote:

Three actually.

Four, actually.

Five, actually.

Six, actually.

Last edited by majormax (2010-09-05 11:00:27)