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Ask HN: What to do about Pokemonium?

3 points by aleprok ↗ HN
Hey lovely HN audience.

I am one of the original developers of PokeNet. It was Pokemon multiplayer game written with Java. We released our source code under GPL and we never made any money out of the game. As we broke Nintendo trademark and copyright we got cease and desist about 2 years ago. Afterwards we stopped development of the game, but the source code spread like a fly around the Pokemon MMORPG community, especially at ragezone.

Well some time ago someone forked our source code and materials. Modified the game somewhat and created Pokemonium. They have currently about 40k accounts in the game about half of what we had when we got our C&D. They are making money from ads which we never did and they have just modified our game, actually made it even buggier than it was.

They are not distributing the source code so they are breaking our GNU Public License. They are also breaking Nintendos trademarks and copyrights. We have contacted the lawyers who sent us the cease and desist from millernash, but they don't seem to care much at all about Pokemonium. We have also contacted noalegal the legal team of nintendo.

So what can I do about them when Nintendo seems not to give a shit and they are not following our source code license?

http://pokemonium.com/

8 comments

[ 27.4 ms ] story [ 413 ms ] thread
project23
You lawyer up or move on. It sounds to me a part of you wants to get even because Nintendo sent you a C&D and you want justice that Nintendo should do the same for these other guys. Putting aside the merits of right and wrong, its childish if this is actually the case.

You have a right to defend your open source project and if you really want to get these guys to follow the rules, enforce it. But don't expect Nintendo to do anything. If they do, its great. You did your part in reporting this (albeit you probably wouldn't if it wasn't your project specific maybe; I'm totally guessing on this part).

But if it bothers you that much, have an attorney send them a letter.

aleprok
Well mostly we are annoyed that they do not follow GPL and because of that we have kind of tried to get Nintendo to shut them down. I do not have the money for lawyer and anyway the guy in control of Pokemonium lives in US and I live in Finland.

The stupid thing is I kinda find it nice that they forked our code, but I dislike them for not following GPL.

renownedmedia
From the homepage, "Pokemonium is an open source Pokemon MMORPG that is based off of the Pokenet server files. Coded in java this project is being developed by -DefaulT and the community of RaGEZONE. More to come later, for now enjoy this vast pokemon world online!"

At least you're getting attributed :p

caw
Also, if they distribute the source on request, doesn't that fulfill the requirement? Maybe you just have to email them for the source.
devs1010
If they are hosting the game online its not cut and dry that they have a legal requirement to distribute the source code under GNU Public License. I would read up on this more to get a better understanding as there is a lot written about this. See this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/539291/rebranding-a-gpld-... among many other threads. There is dispute about the term "distribute" as if its on online app they are technically not distributing the code to anyone but it remains on their servers.
aleprok
Well thing is. The PokeNet client source code is under GPLv3 and the server source code under AGPLv3.

They are distributing the client binary to everyone who want's to play the game and GPL requires to distribute the source code.

Then again AGPL requires them to distribute the server source code, even though they do not distribute the binary to the players.