Re: [kidsgames] Just Subscribed.

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

"Ruegsegger, Ted" wrote:

> > Meanwhile, Oliver is now a "Harry Potter" fan - and like most
> > fans of that wonderful series of books he *desperately* wants
> > to grab a broomstick and play Quiddich.  He built a Quiddich
> > arena and all the various balls (Quaffle, Bludgers, Golden-Snitch)
> > - and now he and I are getting into the coding.  This is a
> > networked game - but it'll never see the light of day outside
> > our home because I don't want to get sued by the author or her
> > publishers.
> 
> Let's not be hasty! Surely you can work something out with them! This sounds
> so fantastic, it'd be worth buying a new computer, or even several! Please
> keep us posted!

Well, the state of the code right now is that all the 3D rendering works,
you can fly around on your broomstick in this large stadium - and any other
computers that know your network address can join in.  My son's PC and mine
are connected via 10baseT network cable - and he can fly his broomstick and
see me flying around on mine - and vice versa.

The Harry Potter books are rather vague about some of the rules of the game.
ANd there are certainly some practical problems with the things we DO know.
For example. the best racing broomstick is supposed to fly at up to 150mph,
when you set up one of my virtual broomsticks to fly at 150mph and to make
turns that would produce a 3g force on the player, you need a pretty massive
arena - bigger than a football stadium that's for sure.

The player who is the 'seeker' has to find and catch this flying 'ball' called
"The Golden Snitch" that is supposed to be "the size of a walnut" with little
silver wings.  Well, just try finding something a golfball from the air in a
volume of space the size of a football stadium while zooming along at 150mph
and dodging these bowling balls that are flying around trying to hit you!

> Hmm...even if they won't budge, I wonder how enforceable a proprietary claim
> on the rules of the game itself would be. I mean, unless you include Harry
> and other copyrighted characters, all you're doing is implementing a
> simulation of a concept, which can't be copyrighted the same as a character.

Yep. We certainly wouldn't need to include the actual characters - it's a
purely graphical thing - so you never know the names of the players.
Although it would be nice to use the team names and colours from the book,
that's not necessary either.

> NB: I'm not a lawyer, nor even close.

No IANAL either - but I know enough to be scared of them.  :-(

The reason I'm concerned is that there is to be a Spielberg movie of
Harry Potter - and one of the toy companies has already signed up
to make the action figures.  That means that for sure there will be
Quiddich games written for Playstation and/or Nintendo 64 - and THOSE
companies will be paying big licensing fees.  They won't be at all
happy about some yahoo coming along and giving a game away for free
without paying any fees.

So, I need to tread very carefully.

What I thought would be the best way forward was to contact some of
the Harry Potter fan clubs on the web and (since they are the people
most likely to want this game) to have them petition the author to
grant permission for a free implementation.  Perhaps we'd offer to
collect a 'shareware' fee and give that to charity or something.

Anyway, most of the fan clubs didn't even reply to my request -
one did and offered to ask it's members to write to the author.
I sent them some screen-shots and explained the state of the
software to date (ie not finished - but playable).

That was months ago - and I didn't hear anything after that. 

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)


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