Hello all. I've long been a member the community built around the BYOND
("Build Your Own Net Dream", http://www.byond.com) software, which is most
famous for its large and thriving sub-community built around anime
fan-games. There has been years worth of controversy over the status of
fan-games and their developers by the web site's staff and BYOND developers:
do we try to drive the anime developers & fans away because they very rarely
get permission from the copyright owners to use the IP related to Naruto,
Dragonball, etc; or do we take a laissez-faire approach and let developers
deal with IP issues themselves? Lately the community leaders have taken the
second approach, but in the past few weeks a few forum moderators and
longtime community members have been speaking out, saying that they want to
diminish the connection between BYOND and copyright abuse.What I'd like to hear from any of you who are in the know, is what would constitute fair use of copyright when it comes to fan games. If the game makers are using in fan-games which are made freely available on the Internet graphical sprites, names, etc which are likenesses of materials that are copyrighted and/or trademarked by others, but not using any actual TV footage or sprites from published games, then is that usage likely to be fair? Thanks, Ryan
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