And if it is, How Legal is it?
It began with three sentences.
They were the words of veteran community member and former Sonic Cult co-administrator InsaneSonikkuFan, who stopped by the Sonic Retro thread on Sonic Megamix last week to give his props on Sonic Megamix, recently revived in the public eye after a period of secret developments.
“So, this hack fucking blew me away,” he said. “The level design, the music, the sheer features, everything. I put this on one of the arcade cabinets I run and it was one of the most popular things I’ve put in there.”
It is what that last sentence says–and what it doesn’t say–that is getting so much attention. It certainly sounds cool on the surface–what is tantamount to a fan developed ROM hack can be ported to arcade use, granting another rare opportunity to play Sonic in such a setting. Indeed, the use of arcade ROMs via MAME is common in some circles of gaming, mostly for purposes of preservation.
But on the surface, this doesn’t appear to be ported for preservation–it could, instead, be for profit.
“I hope that’s a free arcade cabinet,” warned Retro forumer jman2050 shortly after ISF’s statement.
Though no further clarification has been given since the original statement, the pay-for-play use of an arcade Megamix, if true, crosses some dangerous boundaries in copyright law. Though Team Megamix edited original source game to make a homage all their own, the core of that code still principally belongs to Sega.
Team Megamix lead programmer Stealth theorized the legal ramifications this all could have Tuesday:
The game on the cabinet is the attraction. You don’t maintain multiple arcade cabinets and concern yourself with popularity unless you’re turning a profit.
You run the machine for longer than it’s being played, so when it’s being played, you must charge more per play than the cost of running the machine during that time to not run at a loss, meaning also that increased popularity is increased likelihood to generate profit. A machine that doesn’t attract customers doesn’t generate paid plays to pay for the electricity, and is therefore a liability – it does nothing but cost you money. Therefore, the value is in the software running on the machine. People would be paying to play Megamix.
Any money lost running any one machine is the responsibility of the maintainer to recover, not the authors of software running on that or any other machine, meaning that, in this case, any income greater than the cost of running the one machine during the time it is actually being played is a “profit”, regardless of whether or not the maintainer chooses to spend it recovering losses from time spent running that or any other machine while it is going unplayed, which is his own decision.
Ownership of the modification is held by Team Megamix, and has not been transferred as a whole or in part to anyone, meaning that while we’ve given free license to operate (given that you already have license to operate the original Sonic the Hedgehog software), we haven’t so much granted full license to redistribute, nor have we at all granted license to rent or sell sub-license. Moreover, license has not been openly granted by Sega to profit from use of the original title “Sonic the Hedgehog”, on which it is based, or any other Sega-owned properties that were used.
The simplest terms into which to put the problem are these – If anyone deserves to receive compensation for the availability of the modification to the original software, it would the people who expended time and effort to create the content and adapt it to that software, not someone who put a computer in a wooden box and sat back to await an impending shower of quarters.
Any such payment to anyone not licensed to rent or sell sub-license for the software constitutes an involuntary loss of potential profit for the owner of the property, which is pretty much the basis of copyright law, which automatically protects all works from the moment of their creation or publication up to 70 years after the death of the last surviving author. You might as well try to argue the legality of just up and doing the same thing with MAME and a couple of arcade ROMs that you haven’t purchaced physical copies of (with inherent license to rent), or haven’t purchased or otherwise been granted any other form of license from their company of origin. The work that we performed to modify and augment the original software to create Megamix is no less our own than the work put into commercially-released games are property of their respective companies (purchased from the actual authors under “work made for hire”, which is essentially just an immediate, voluntary transfer of ownership).
Because it remains unclear as to whether ISF is charging people to play the game, there remains a split consensus as to whether the cabinet is nothing more than enthusiast hobbying or something with more serious ramifications. Retro forum administrator and Megamix dev Tweaker declined to speak on this specific matter, and then temporarily ceased discussion on the Megamix thread while matters are sorted out. There is no word on whether further investigation will be conducted on this particular matter by Team Megamix. For the moment, all that is clear is that a veteran Sonic community member managed to port Sonic Megamix to an arcade cabinet, and that the end result is being played with some frequency. The critically important details–mainly whether that cabinet is being made available to the general public, and whether the public is paying money for the privilege to enjoy the fan made ROM hack–remain largely a mystery.
TSSZ News will keep you informed should the matter evolve.
Loading ...
Seems pretty pointless to put this on an arcade cabinet to be honest, but whatever, as long as no one important cares then neither will I.
First off, the game is probably running in a dedicated Genesis emulator with an arcade frontend, not MAME. Secondly, Team Megamix has *no* legal claim to Sonic Megamix, since it is an unauthorized derivative work. So even if ISF was charging for plays, Team Megamix couldn’t do jack shit about it.
Well done. You’ve just reported on a bunch of people incredibly over-reacting to a single statement. As a matter of fact, I have yet to see someone show a front-end for a PC-based arcade cabinet that allows you to set a required amount of money needed before the game will launch.
SDev: It’s absolutely not Team Megamix’s copyright claim that bears concern here–it’s Sega’s.
Blast Processing: In a worst-case scenario, the legal ramifications of a pay-to-play setup for what is essentially a ROM hack are too big to ignore. I would like to believe the article brings to light what is clear, what isn’t, and the possibilities of what could be.
-T
I charged my friend a quarter to play Sonic 1 Megamix on my PC. Take action before Sega goes bankrupt and Team Megamix dies!
Is Sonic Megamix running in your rectum?
If so, how is it legal?
Way to reopen a closed discussion about a more-or-less nonexistent issue, quote me out of context, and paint the situation as being exactly the way people were treating it, which led to the closing of the thread.
That huge block of text you quoted was in direct response to the post immediately above it, in which someone displayed their ignorance by asking what the (potential) problem was, and himself relating it to the idea of copyright. Based on the exact content of his post, I broke it down for him.
Following that was a storm of posts from members with no stake in the matter whatsoever with the sole intent of adding their own personal dramatic spin on the situation by accusing Team Megamix of “making mountains out of molehills”, several while themselves tossing sarcasm and spite for no reason other than to stroke their own egos, as with some of your readers.
The irony is that there were only three (or four, depending on your criteria) posts about the subject from Team Megamix members, those being the one-liner from jman, the one you quoted from me, myself making clear the purpose of my original post and responding to a couple of more sensible members on matters of pure technicality, and Tweaker, at the end of a post related to quality-of-posts moderation, declaring that he didn’t want to comment. No other current member became involved, and I personally and purposefully avoided any other responses.
I commented on this exact thing just late yesterday afternoon to Tweaker, and bet him that before I checked again today, there would be at least 5 more unnecessary posts on the issue without Team Megamix involvement. Three was all it took to convince him that temporarily closing the thread was a better idea than letting this play out over the next two weeks and fifteen pages, die, and be revived again by members that only view the board about once every month yet feel the need to sound off on issues that they’ve otherwise taken no part in and which have already been resolved.
I doubt I’ll have anything further to say on the issue, because I know exactly the type of responses that will follow this.
Who gives a shit? If it’s illegal and he gets caught, he isn’t going to get busted, nobody’s going to care, especially SEGA. SEGA hasn’t cared about the 50+ hacks on Sonic Retro, so why care now, regardless of minor monetary gain?