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As if Star Citizen didn't have enough problems, now its developers are being sued by Crytek:
Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.
In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.
Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 15 2017, @04:13PM (7 children)
> "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.
That would certainly be a good reason to change engines - but is completely irrelevant to a contract obligation, unless that contract also required Crytek to have that focus.
Similarly, I rather suspect that Y being a fork of X isn't going to buy you any legal leeway on using Y instead of the X you agreed to. The whole point of a fork is that Y is no longer X. They may have closely related code bases but "product X" is not only a specific lineage, but also the organization that controls it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:47PM (4 children)
Oh call the waaahhhmbulance for Crytek. Rather than seeking litigation to squeeze out every last cent, go out and get someone else (or many someone elses) to use your engine, or offer improve your engine in the areas it is deficient so as to make them switch back again. This insta-litigation thing companies get into when they can't pull profits anymore isn't going to help anyone.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday December 15 2017, @05:50PM
Nah. Crytek saw the Star Citizen devs wasting their huge pile of money and decided they wanted a piece of that action.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday December 15 2017, @07:28PM
It all hinges on the contractual terms of the license - which we currently only have via Crytek's claims - but if CIG has committed at least some some of the breaches that Crytek is claiming they have, and trying to work it out internally has presumably failed to come to terms, then Crytek only really have one course of action left for relief, and that's the courts. You can hardly blame them for taking this route if that is indeed the case. Either way, the only winners here are going to be the lawyers, and I don't think that's going to go over to well with those that still support the project if they think their pledges are being spent on that rather than the moneypit of SC/SQ42. Potentially CIG are going to have to bring in external counsel as well - while CIG's in-house lawer and co-founder, Orten Freyermuth, is qualified to represent them in this, he's also intimately involved in the case and only an idiot represents himself in court, lawyers included.
I think we can expect a lot of ugly articles and comments on this, so the smart thing to do stock up on popcorn and get ready for the show.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday December 15 2017, @08:28PM
If they had just licensed an engine and then changed their mind, I'd be with you.
However, it sounds like Crytek invested a fair amount in helping them make proof-of-concept demos, etc. while they were seeking crowdfunding, with the payoff to be promotion and collaborative development of the CryEngine in their game. Once the developers accepted an investment from Crytek on those terms, they became bound by honor (and law) to uphold their end of the bargain.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday December 18 2017, @10:46AM
This is a contract dispute, no? I'd hardly dispatch the waaahhhmbulance for wanting to hold them to their word. A contract is not merely a suggestion.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @06:27PM (1 child)
Actually it can still be copyright infringement. That's why there are licenses like BSD and GPL (and the different versions of GPL).
Modifying someone else's code doesn't make the resulting stuff automagically yours by copyright law.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 15 2017, @08:42PM
Assuming the Lumberyard engine is fully legal, and that the developers abandoned the original CryEngine for Lumberyard, I don't see how that angle holds any water.
You're free to write a piece of software built upon a GPLed codebase, and then later replace that codebase with some other roughly drop-in replacement that you can redistribute under some other license. So long as you *completely* remove any (outsider's) GPL-derived code they no longer have any hold on you.
Having used GPL code in the past doesn't "infect" your code with the license - your code is still *your* code, and you can do whatever you want with it. At worst, *if* you distributed the combined work(and thus activated the relevant GPL clauses), you'd then have to share that *specific* version of your code under the GPL. But that's only relevant to other people - as the copyright holder you can do whatever you want with code you wrote yourself.