#Egames 3d maze man trial#
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Attorneys who are intellectual property (IP) experts. WeвЂ™ve obviously asked many attorneys their opinions before we decided to litigate.

#Egames 3d maze man trial#

ItвЂ™s a very grayscale issue and a real trial by jury would be needed to determine the outcome. The question of infringement isnвЂ™t black or white. In my opinion, obviously no, or we would have settled immediately instead of fighting for over 6 months. WhoвЂ™s going to do something about it?Дid you infringe any of HasbroвЂ™s copyrights? Maybe Hasbro shouldnвЂ™t have been allowed to file a lawsuit without Namco, but they did. Unfortunately the case didnвЂ™t proceed far enough to determine the ownership issue.Д«ecause it would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue these kinds of ownership issues, taking a gamble that Namco wouldnвЂ™t join in after all. But then again, Hasbro has a lot of money to beat up on us small guys, so realistically, whether they had a right to sue or not, there wasnвЂ™t much we could do. It was our legal opinion that Hasbro was on very shaky grounds with respect to some ownership issues. I donвЂ™t know if Namco declined on purpose or if Hasbro just assumed weвЂ™d give up before it became an issue. Some have the legal opinion that Hasbro had no right to sue without involving Namco in the lawsuit. Why isnвЂ™t Namco suing you? DonвЂ™t you need all owners of a property in a certain geographical area to join in on the lawsuit? How can Hasbro sue without Namco? Well, technically Namco owns Pacman, but they licensed it to Atari.

So Webfoot was into retro before Hasbro? How can they sue you?Д«ecause they bought Atari, even though it was after the fact. The point is, copyright law encourages the improvement of a creative work, and I personally feel flattered that some of our game ideas are showing up in HasbroвЂ™s products, coincidence or not.

#Egames 3d maze man free#

I think companies should be free to innovate and improve, as long as they donвЂ™t copy. So are you saying you feel like you should sue Hasbro? Webfoot was making retro games for 7 years before Hasbro sued us. So Hasbro decided to get into the game quite late with their purchase of Atari, five years after Webfoot had already been making retro games. We believe Hasbro got into the retro business because they saw companies like eGames and Webfoot had been successfully surviving in retro for many years. Tom Dussenbery made it sound like we saw HasbroвЂ™s new Tetris and Pacman games and decided to copy them. HasbroвЂ™s 3D retro games came after WebfootвЂ™s allegedly 'infringing' games had been selling for a couple years! I bet many people donвЂ™t realize that. WebfootвЂ™s games are new innovative 3D games with some similar gameplay rules to the classic games. The fact is, our games were made before Hasbro was in the video game business. Well, people assume WebfootвЂ™s games were near clones of the Hasbro games. We believe our real problem was that we were successful competitors to HasbroвЂ™s games, so they sued us instead of the true infringers. Out of all the thousands of retro games released over the past 20 years, we thought ours were some of the most different and original games! We just couldnвЂ™t understand why Hasbro wasnвЂ™t concerned about the thousands of exact clones, but were upset over our new 3D games. How did you feel when you first heard about the lawsuit? I think the developers have been unfairly portrayed in this lawsuit. I understand the types of questions people might have, and IвЂ™m very anxious to tell our side of this story. IвЂ™m going to ask some tough questions, because I think thatвЂ™s what our readers are interested in hearing answered. Diana Gruber sat down with Dana Dominiak of Webfoot Games, one of the companies that settled, to find out what really happened, and how the suit affects developers. Recently, most of the defendents involved decided to settle. Most readers are familiar with the Hasbro copyright infringement suit against several game developers.