An interesting hypothetical

[TribeHasSpoken]

I just thought of something we may have to face when Shadows is released. What would we do in the event that someone on the internet, perhaps claiming to be us or to represent us, starts selling the game for money?

[Yonkey]

We ask Vivendi to sue them for fraud.

[Petra Rocks]

Wouldn't it be copyright infringement?  Or maybe both.    Anyway, I don't think that would be all that hard to deal with.  You could even just indicate where you could get it for free on their site.

The fun would really get started when/if this site goes down and abandonware sites take it up.  Or even if they do before.   

[Yonkey]

Probably both.  If our game was commercial, it would totally be considered software piracy as well.

Anyway, what's with the wacky question, Michael?  Is there some POS company that I don't know about?

[TribeHasSpoken]

I got the idea for the question when I saw a thread on the SCUMMVM forums. As you may or may not know, SCUMMVM is a freeware program that can be used to run your old Lucasarts adventures (and a few others) on Windows XP, Linux, Mac, whatever you want really . Anyway, someone on the forum had found a site where someone was attempting to sell DVDs that contain the SCUMMVM program plus pirated versions of every game that the program can run. To make matters worse, they were using the SCUMMVM name, logo, site graphics, etc. It immediately got me thinking about it happening to us one day.

http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=2019

[Yonkey]

Well, needless to say, software piracy is illegal.  In our case, our game is non-commercial so if they try selling it without legal permission, all it takes is one email and VU will prosecute them for copyright infringement and financial damages.