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WHilst sitting here I came up with an idea, somehow inspired by the zelda: shadow pyramid thread. Anyway.. here goes:

Am I right in saying that copyright means you cant profit from any games you make featuring the copyrighted material. So if you make a game and give it away, however sell a 3d model, imperative to the running of the game for the price of that game, you wouldnt be breaking the law. I know someone will correct me about the laws etc but its a nice thought.

Technically you still would be (ie you are using something someone else has designed/made etc). However, if you aren't going to sell your product, then the chances are the company from which you are using the graphics/music etc wouldn't notice, and thus wouldn't do anything (because they wont know about it).

However, if they did find out then they would probably start contacting their lawyers...

Yeah copyright law isn't about money, a lot of companies won't let you even give things away for free. However, some others see it as free advertising and will let you get away with it. That is a privalidge tho, you really need to step carefully, they could change their mind at any time

If its small, its always best to ask first - they may be happy to not charge (or possibly charge a very small amount).

Hehe ur all talking as if i plan to use it I hate using copyrighted materials or even names etc since it makes me feel it isnt all my work. Thats why i wasnt happy with the retro comp at 1st, but in the end my game turned out so much different to the original i didnt mind. Did ne1 ever get to the final monsters on my EggDude game? Thats where i put all the work in i had firing monsters AND invisble ones. I think i made the skeletons too hard like the judges said which was a shame.

Basically the Copyright laws stop people from copying stories/media/code(compiled or not)/images which belong to someone else... effectively someone is protecting the idea from others, however you can get around this pretty easily.

the main idea with computer games and copyright infringement when your making a fan game is actually that they don't want you to tell your own story of the game, as
a) this can ruin storylines they've already come up with
b) it would be benched as another game in the series by people who see it and if it is bad then this would affect the orignal company NOT the developers.

for example if i made a Doom Clone based in the same universe but it was just really really bad, like say the zombies hugged you and such... and the graphics were 2pixels laced together with a few texel
then although i'd be panned for it, this would also reflect badly upon ID for allowing me to take thier story and murder it.
remember alot of these games and such are created by artists who REALLY dislike anyone else telling thier stories for them, because its thier vision not someone elses.

however more oftenly nowadays it isn't the development companies that kick up a fuss about it, but the publishers ... and to be honest i'm yet to figure out why - because if you give away a game then they loose no money, and they aren't the ones who look bad if it goes belly up, infact the only problem they could have is that the general idea of the media used is their legal property.
It is an understandable affair if its say like a Super Mario Clone which is supermario and all of the sprites are ripped from the orignal game and such ... however when you have a game like Bid For Power, it make little to no sense why Funimation had a problem with them creating thier own representations of the characters from Dragonball Z.
I mean no one was charging anything, so no lost revenue. The game was just a bit of fun and actually more sure to the series than almost any of the current Dragonball games i've ever seen - fan or retail ... however they slapped a cease&desist order on the guys which kinda broke thier spirit about the game and did slump the development by almost 8months.

unfortunately copyright laws prevent you from using the stories and characters within those stories without permission from the owner of the copyright - for example Core own the copyrights to Tomb Raider and Lara Croft, so if you want to make a game with her name then i'd have to ask them ... however if i just wanted to use the model of her i made, then i don't have to. She could look identical, however it isn't the look they've copywritten but the name.
so it is always good to know what is copywritten and what isn't...

personally i think someone needs to just stand up and say "f**k ya'll i'm gonna finish making my fan game which is all my work and i'm not charging for, this is being done in my spare time and if you want me to stop then you can take me to court."
because that would actually be far more damaging on them than yourself, as copyright laws only allow then to sue you for upto 10x one years wages ... and oftenly you're allowed to spread this payment out over several years or take 6months in jail.
and although that may damage your reputation and criminal record and such, it would force the gaming world to stand up and finally say...

"hey what the hell did he actually do wrong? he didn't pirate the software, he wasn't earning off your idea, he just made something for everyone to enjoy."
to be honest i doubt they'd even want to push to take it to court, because it would be extremely damaging.

funimation have stopped quite ALOT of freelance projects based on the series they own (which to be honest thankfully for those in the UK they have zero juridiction, but due to word of mouth about what they do so many db/z/gt or gundamn projects were scrapped)
however this has damaged thier reputation so much over the past few years, including a lawsuit they filed against Cartoon-NetworkUK which has lead to them loosing out on alot of work.

i mean as has been said as long as your not big enough to be noticed your pretty much left alone because they don't go looking - unfortunately if you want to make something worthwhile then it will be big enough to notice.

Did you know that every time 'Happy Birthday' is sung in a commercial presentation, royalty has to be paid to the original designers of the song tune? Funny what those copyrights an' trademarks can do, isn't it .

The way I heard it, it's illegal, no matter how much money you make, don't make or lose from it. I think you are allowed to make it, but there can only be one copy for personal use. So you can't show it to friends and such, only you.

Interesting points about copyright Raven. But, did I hear you say that Doom had a story?!?.. That's news to me

You can show things to friends. It's the copying you can't do. Although you can make a copy for archival purposes.

And yeah, Doom has a story? D'oh!

Actually it does, just not much of one lol. I think the point was more: SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT RUN SHOOT SHOOT RUN SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT NEXT-LEVEL, and less STORY. Ya, that's definately it.

I loved doom... the original.. man that game was fun^_^ No story required..

doom 1&2 are the ones without much foa storyline... Doom3 is HEAVILY story based (which is unusual for an id title lol) - i mean you should think more Resident Evil with it, only without any of the reading. i think it makes it more fun, especially when you get to trap those four scientists inthat room with the HellHound hehe... Mwhahahahaaa

though i don't think the janitor liked me after that, i mean how you get intestines unstuck from the roof i dunno

easy way outa that, put the janitor in the room with the scientists , but copyright is more than just money or characters, concepts are covered too, our firm makes arcade toys amongst other things and we have to use EXACTLY the right shades of blue on a sonic the hedgehog ride or EXACT copies of the main characters for rides etc, even though we have a licence they could sue us if we deviated one jot from the approved formulae, even "twee" stuff like Enid Blyton they are realy strict, we had to develop paint matches for pantone (printers ink colours) since they where the exact colours specified (since the original characters started out in print), not a close match, but EXACT pantone matches, they didn`t exist in paint before (and there are tens of thousands of official paint colours .. not one was close enough), when we make a new themed toy it has to be OK`d by the manufacturers, you cant just say "lets make a noddy carousel", you have to show them the drawings and models before it gets allowed, then they check the first models and suggest changes, THEN you may get the ok to make the ride, and we are licenced to do this stuff, I don`t know what would happen to somebody who wasn`t "approved" but they protect the "look and feel" something feirce, but from their point of veiw it`s fair enough, like for Sonic they probably spent two to three hundred million on promotions and stuff to ensure it has a wholesome image to the customers (and more importantly their parents), you bet they will jump all over anyone who does a "Debby "does" Sonic" cartoon or releases a game where Sonic kills cute fluffy bunnys in full gore mode, bad press like that could wipe out years of promotional buildup, then again a fan may make a game/cartoon/image library that is good enough to derail the "official" plotline and reduce sales on merchandise they spent hundreds of thousands tooling up for and developing, and the Image they are selling this stuff on is built from THEIR money and hurts their profits if the image they build is damaged or changed in some way they don`t want, these people don`t just set out to entertain, they are there to make money, if they are set to release "Sonic cybernetica" (a robotic Sonic) to go with a major plotline alteration they have spent the last year building up to, and some fan makes a "Classic sonic forever" game that becomes very popular all over the net (cos people have no idea as to why their are more more robots appearing on sonics "team" when it is part of the buildup), and the game becomes mentioned in the press, then they could be looking at losing money bigtime since the fan may have inadvertently set up a popular "anti robotic" feeling and punctured the buildup by the copyright holders, if they spotted this sort of thing soon enough then they may well send a legal type letter asking the author to cease and stoppit, because the author (fan or not) is riding on the image made by THEM, not HIM, and unless he cares to repay the millions they spent on product placement they are not gonna be too happy, if you get what I mean, gosh this was a long post, gonna go and dunk my finger ends in vaseline now

Mentor.

i know mentor, but the point is that i think ALOT of these people now are going overboard.
i'm an artist, my ideas are copywritten by myself for whomever i'm working for at the time and oftenly are attributed to something bigger... however if someone wanted to make a game based on my copywritten characters, i wouldn't mind as long as they actually gave credit to where the ideas came from and they didn't make any money from it.

i mean really it has got to the point at which Core could sue you for making a Lara Croft model for Quake3 or Unreal Tournament 2003 and putting it on Polycount... almost every model up there is an illegal representation of someone else's copywritten idea.

what gets me is while that is accepted, if you then proceed to make a version of Tomb Raider without asking permission - then Core WILL shut it down ... and oftenly do even when you have permission.
at what point should it be considered unreasonable behaviour on the part of the original developers or publishers to do this?
if they're levels and media was being back engineered then fair enough - but even when they're not they still have a problem.

personally i wouldn't mind setting up Fan/Amature Developer Amnisty program, so that people can develop fan games provided they don't use original/backengineered material and they don't retail the game. Get something passed so that legally anyone protected by the amnisty cannot be touched legally by a developer/publisher or any other people unless they break the amnisty rules.
would be nice to actually encourage fan games, not sure about you - but i'm absolutely sick and tired of reading fanfiction about games, when you know it should be a story for a game with these characters.

and if the game are good then that would just show the industry that the fact that many have stopped trying to impress and just go for tried and tested forumla should start getting creative again and producing games we want to actually continue playing rather than placé update/extention games.

FanGames instead of FanFiction? Interesting idea...