[ericra]

Neat project. I love it.

I read the "legality" section of your README, and I hope that someone can provide some advice. It would be nice to know where the lines are so you didn't have to constantly be concerned about 2K/Firaxis legal department coming for you.

Just commenting here for visibility in hopes someone more qualified can provide some help.

[wtallis]

Freeciv has been around much longer without being targeted by any legal threats that I'm aware of. There have also been commercial competitors like Activision's Civilization: Call to Power and its sequel that only had to drop "Civilization" from its naming for lack of a trademark license.

I'm not sure any of those aimed to be as direct a clone of a specific mainline Civ's rules and mechanics, but rules and mechanics are the aspects of the game that are most clearly free to copy.

[thurn]

Spry Fox v. LolApps (2012) was a case about a similar visual and thematic remake of a game (Triple Town vs Yeti Town). The Yeti Town developer decided to settle when it became clear that they would likely lose, and the remake is no longer available.

Realistically, of course, it probably doesn't matter since I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.

[john-radio]

> I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.

Bigger corporations than Firaxis have made that same assumption and lost. There was a great story recently about an Adelaide woman who represented herself in a suit against Google for years and finally won: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-...

[HillRat]

The Spry Fox fact pattern is distinguishable, I think, given that the defendant had access to privileged IP and had been negotiating to port the app before creating the knockoff after negotiations fell apart.

[wmil]

I think it's one of those cases where the lines are unclear because this kind of IP issue has never been fully litigated. IP owners like to take an expansive view of IP rights, but they are likely to loose on some issues in court.

Firaxis could certainly send a cease & desist.

[japhib]

Here’s a really good breakdown from the dev of a Tetris clone: https://blog.osk.sh/post.php?p=643dbb578e1ba3.57021842

TLDR is that it’s really easy to get a larger hosting platform such as Steam, the App Store, etc to take down a game just by issuing a DMCA. But suing to take down something on a self hosted website is much, much harder

[BigJono]

If they needed to find safer legal ground they could reimplement the community balance patch, which overhauls basically every game system, and is a much better game tbh.