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RE: The PUBG Lawsuit Will Fail And That's Good For Us
Also you only have to change 10% of something to win any of these "copy" cases. So by that account Fortnite wins easily.
Also you only have to change 10% of something to win any of these "copy" cases. So by that account Fortnite wins easily.
Actually, it's more complicated than that.
There is something to be said for originality versus a derivative work. If you create something, even independently, that manages to match another person's work you can get in pretty significant trouble because you need a good explanation of how you matched.
However, if you copied anything at any point from someone you could be in legal trouble. For instance, if I borrow a paragraph of text from a novel, I can probably make a fair use case for it (I've actually had to do this once, albeit with video game background music, due to how wonderfully lovely YouTube is). If you take a game and just change the art assets, that will get you very heavily sued. It's just ideas that don't get protected: Fortnite can have gameplay that's functionally identical and still be in the legal clear, it just can't touch the code or art (the protected elements) of PUBG at all.
When I have done IP work while publishing Dilbert the Board game all the lawyers I worked with. Told us you have to change 10 percent to make it your own.
This applies to design work.
So if I wanted to copy Mario Kart all i have to do is change the levels / characters / items.
So what fortnite did was 100 percent legal.
Plagiarism of a paragraph is different.
Like if I am playing a fantasy RPG and I want to add a beholder (that WOTC owns and protects) I just call it a one eye demon and I can print it.
I'm really not sure what the rule is for character designs. I know that there are cases where people can take things pretty much wholesale (for instance, Tolkien's fantasy races quickly becoming standard and not really protected), and be fine, and others where you might have to do things differently.
Mind you, by changing the levels, characters, and items in Mario Kart, even if you've just changed the appearance, you've gotten rid of everything protected. Unless you're stealing code, your game can be identical and still work (heck, if you could license the code and redo the art you'd be fine).