LegendOfLegaia.net

I dont know if yall have though of this but have we ever tried to continue it ourself by making are own version of the game for the web ive made acouple of games myself with the RPG maker it works rather well if you know what your doing. just throwing this out there

i say go for it

I say don't get yourself arrested/fined. Sony still owns the copyright to Legaia, and it'll be like that until someone gets rights to it. The trademark, however, is free to purchase. That only means you can use the name "Legaia" though. Unless you purchase the copyright from Sony, you won't be able to make a Legaia 3 or remake with anything referencing the previous two games (except game play). It'd be like how Legaia 2 was a sequel to Legaia 3. Didn't match.

Correct me if I'm wrong, K7, but I was of the belief that copyright generally did not extend to derivative works, especially if they're not-for-profit.

Nope, it's still illegal and a big time developer/publisher would most definitely shut it down. A group of people tried to do the same thing with Chrono Trigger without permission from Square Enix and tehy were issued a cease and desist letter as soon as they found out. Here's a link to the official website briefly explaining it:

http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/

It was non-profit too so no such luck going that route either.

@Nightshade, as Hiro said. I mean, it makes sense too. I would hate to have released an awesome game and then someone go and develop a remake of it that's better looking and then give it to everyone for free or sale it without my permission - even if I wasn't actually making a profit from the game anymore.

And also copyright tends to stick forever. So it's something you'd have to get legitimate permission for, and in this case the copyright is owned by Sony (as you can find on the governments copyright website) so they're the ones you'd have to go through... You may still have to go through the original producer too, but I'm not sure.

would basing one game off another count?

Has this actually been proven in court, or are big name companies just strong-arming because they know that few people, especially indie developers, have the legal wherewithal to mount a defense in court?

As far as I've read, the courts haven't actually ruled on whether Crimson Echoes (or something similar) would actually have violated copyright, only that Squeenix had a legal claim and the developers didn't have the resources to challenge and voluntarily complied.

This doesn't help us, since I doubt anyone here has the ability to match Sony's lawyers, but still, until the courts have decided...

Well, if you REALLY want to get into it, you can spend some time here:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

If you can understand it, that'll tell you everything you need to know about copyright. Just don't speed through it on your reading. Bills and laws are the types of things you need to analyze carefully or else you might misunderstand them.