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Message: 4712

Author: Daniel

Date: 22/03/2005

Subject: Re: JSW's current copyright

 

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, andrewbroad wrote:

Party Willy is my latest /JSW/ game (released in April 2004).
My latest /game/ is Manic Miner: Neighbours - Allana Truman
(released in November 2004).

Yes, Andrew, of course :-) . I did mean your JSW games and I thought
it was clear from the title of the message, since in my question I
was only dealing with JSW copyright, not that of MM. I think that
everybody even slightly interested in the subject of JSW/MM games
today must have come across your website, which is the focal point of
JSW/MM development, and must know of the existence of "Manic Miner:
Neighbours - Allana Truman", as well as of your other excellent
games. Personally, I highly appreciate "MM: Neighbours - Allana
Truman", and your other MM /AND/ JSW games, for their
meticulous, "devious" design, and the extreme challenges they pose
before the player, which make one spend hours and hours in front of
the screen, even with the help of the inifinite lives pokes and
constantly saving snapshots on the emulator :-) .

Also, when I referred to the text files accompanying your games, and
contrasted the information mentioned in them with Matthew Smith's
recent interview, I did not do it with the intention to imply your
files were inaccurate, but just to quote them as a source of JSW
wisdom, which they truly are :-) .

But between releasing Party Willy and releasing MM:N-AT, I learned
that Jester Interactive owned only a licence to make commercial
MM/JSW games, and that the Software Projects copyright was owned by
Tommy Barton (cf. Messages 4259 and 4277 of this Group).

Thanks for the reference. I haven't had time to browse through the
old messages yet - I will do it one day, but there are so many of
them.

This has always been a confusing issue for us, but in practice
nobody should be bothered about us offering unofficial sequels as
free downloads, and I haven't heard of any threats of litigation
regarding the distribution of *Spectrum* MM/JSW games in the nine
years since I discovered the Spectrum-emulation scene.

That's good news! As Jaramago says in the text file accompanying
his "Jet Set Ylliw" demo (how is it progressing, by the way?), let's
make JSW the most remade game in history! :-)

A further complication is the copyright of the /character/ of Miner
Willy, as distinct from the copyright of the games. Perhaps it's
Advanced Mobile Solutions who own the former, and Tommy Barton who
owns the latter?

Just to complicate the matters further: is Jet Set Willy the same
character as Miner Willy, for the purposes of the copyright? The
definition of the character would have to embrace both designs /
concepts, I imagine. From that perspective (purely theoretically),
would other characters, like that of Phillip Bee's Jet Set Willy Ivy
or the hero of Lee Tatlock's "Willy versus the Vampire Lord" still be
THE SAME character?

Daniel

 

 

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