I can't imagine BYOND being held responsible for the content that people post. They might be asked to help identify offending content and remove it, but I don't think they'd be expected to screen all content before it's allowed on the site. This can't be the first time someone posted copyrighted content on a site without permission and the owner asked for it to be removed.

I'm sure the IP holders are more likely to act if money is being made off the fan games, but there's no reason to limit yourself to reporting only games that have donations or subscriptions.

This is pretty amusing. :P

Whether or not BYOND is covered under the safe-harbour provisions of the DMCA (I assume US law applies - website's hosted in the US, isn't it?) is an interesting question, actually. Don't you need to lack a manual review process to qualify, or am I misremembering? (The idea being that a manual review process means that unlicensed stuff can be manually removed).

Tom should probably put up one of those "This is how you contact us if you want to do the DMCA thing" pages somewhere, actually, now that I think about it.

Im sorry, all i have to say is.
LOL.

Enzuigiri wrote:

This topic made me lmao literally. So let's cut the bull crap for a second shall we? It's obvious this post is directed at Falacy and the fact his game is more popular than yours even though its a DBZ game. Even though its true you can't make money off of anime games this is something you should contact Tom about this.

And really Silk? Enough of this facade and your fangame hate.

SilkWizard wrote:

I didnt' find out that people were actually selling subscriptions to fan games until a week or two ago. This is not a joke. Your existence on BYOND endangers my own endeavors (if BYOND gets a site-wide C&D, I'm super screwed in the short term as well). This problem needs to be addressed.

What you really mean is
~I've been trying to wipe out fangames and there players(especially falacy's) and I have found an opportunity to do so.

If someone is selling a fangame they're massively in the wrong. I don't see any problem with reporting them to appropriate authorities (Tom first, then maybe the content owner), and I could hardly be accused of being a Silkwizard fanboy.

Despite what you think, SilkWizard doesn't hate Fan Games. When are you people going to learn that? The point is that if you have a fan game, you can't sell it, have a subscription for it, and you most certainly shouldn't be taking "donations" in an attempt to side-step that.

People who think Silk is targeting Falacy and Fan games because he hates them is a moot point even if he was. The fact that illegal activity is occurring from these areas, is enough for ANYONE to report them.

Though on that subject, if I were to use BYOND as a game engine, I probably would be just as concerned as Silk. Fan games are one thing, but to charge for them is such an escalating issue. If I was in Silk's shoes, I would have just called the number without hesitation (but I see his concern to not do so...I just don't think Byond will be held liable...but I'm not proficient in legal knowledge in this area). Don't blame Silk, blame the people who are charging for content they don't own.

Galactic Soldier wrote:

I knew plenty of anime games that operate under the table so they don't get caught. I don't think this pertains to Falacy, but for the most part he gets his subscriptions due to his fan games.

I've seen one in my time do this as well. I find it offending and have been urged to talk to my friend's dad that I grew up with in high school (been in the FBI for almost 20 years) about the legalities for awhile now, since they tend to deal with copyright violations. But this is a rising topic, so I might go ahead and ask him anyway (though he's almost always working so I can't always get ahold of him). I may even see if I can report this issue to investigate to him if I can (though I think they only operate on the owner's request, not sure).

I think in general that fan games should completely vanish from BYOND, all they do is cause trouble. Games like Finale by Dragonn, Bleach by Vcentg, and some other games have been known to sell in-game benefits. So if your game gets shut down because I reported you, you can openly blame me for thinking you are in the wrong as much as Silk does.

There's a difference between fan games and p2p fan games. Sometimes having a fan game is offensive itself to the owner of the IP, but not always. When actions like Silk's occur and he gets people shut down for doing this illegal activity, I think that's a big enough message to those who think they can "dirty deal", and more people like Silk get tempted to shut them down to prevent it. But from what has been seen on BYOND, it's almost like BYOND's community isn't mature enough to even handle a fan game. So I'm kind of on the fence on the subject "all fan games should be purged", but definitely paid ones need to be dealt with. I'm unsure of Falacy's situation, as I'm not legally trained/knowledgeable in this particular area.

I've heard some rumors about Dragonn selling his source, and was even posted on the BYOND forum at some times; I don't know where the threads that have this are now. VcentG sells several benefits such as shikai changes for $5.

Selling "SOURCE" vs. "Resources" is a total different situation. You own the source if you make it, fan game or not. You just don't own the fan game resources and cannot distribute them. This area I do know about, as I been in a couple open source "fan games" that used their own content (like NEStalgia), but they only allowed people to implement their "fan game content". Don't start mixing the two subjects up.

Mikau wrote:

Despite what you think, SilkWizard doesn't hate Fan Games. When are you people going to learn that? The point is that if you have a fan game, you can't sell it, have a subscription for it, and you most certainly shouldn't be taking "donations" in an attempt to side-step that.

SilkWizard has stated that it's lucky that fan-games can even exist here though. This is probably one of the biggest sources of confusion for many.

EmpirezTeam wrote:

My comment was for Falacy and his supporter Enzuigiri. Falacy thinks the only thing NEStalgia beats DBHU at is HUDs.

Well let's not try to taunt them to believe that's the issue, as it's obviously not. Even though their political views on this subject are completely out of whack.

Here's a good prediction:

BYOND has taken decent measures to prevent public advertisement of such games with the recent site updates. It is a good prediction that, unless any anime-game owner does something blatantly stupid like advertise in the fashion Silk did, then the most that would happen to BYOND is more than likely the requirement to delete any anime reference of any kind (regarding specific brands).