Atari Sub-Contractor Violates GPL, Used ScummVM for Wii Games

[JeffJ]

In several recent releases, it seems that Atari published games for the Wii based on ScummVM, which was released under the GPL.

Atari contracted Majesco, who contracted a company named Mistic Software with offices in the Ukraine.

When the fact that the GPL was being violated was brought to Atari's attention, they were kind at first until it was discovered that Nintendo doesn't allow open source software to be used with the Wii SDK, so updated documentation mentioning the GPL wasn't an available solution.

So, what happens to the games? To quote:

"There is a period of time in which all current copies have to be sold. Any copies beyond this period or any reprints get fined with quite high fine for each new/remaining copy. The remaining stock has to be destroyed [sic]."

Atari and Majesco seem to have been very cooperative about this whole thing, but had their hands tied by the agreement with Nintendo.


More PlayStation 3 News...

[labonte]

Atari has apprarently settled with the SummVM Team instead of going the route of a lengthly court case. Settled over what? Well, if you missed our previous article you'll see that a company involved with some of Atari's games being published for the Nintendo Wii were using the SummVM open source engine without permission and now Atari is paying up for their mistake.

"The rough details of the final settlement were: [ScummVM developers Max "Fingolfin" Horn and Gregory "cyx" Montoir] can post an agreed 'press release.' They are not allowed to talk more about it.There is a period of time in which all current copies have to be sold. Any copies beyond this period or any reprints get fined with quite high fine for each new/remaining copy. The remaining stock has to be destoryed [sic]. There will be no single usage of ScummVM for any of upcoming games without our knowledge. Atari makes a significant donation to Free Software Foundation. Atari covers all expenses on gpl-violations.org lawyers."

[JeffJ]

To clarify as well, there are 2 sides to this. 1) Nintendo states in its EULA that there will be no usage of open sourced code allowed on the wii console or to be used in conjunction with the SDK, there fore they could not site the GPL license in there game releases for fear Nintendo would start asking questions.

and 2) the failure to site said GPL license in the release documentation of said software that was coded with GPL licensed code is a breach of the GPL license and puts the developer at risk of heavy fines for each copy that was produced. Now when people pointed this out to Atari they were good about it at first said oh yes sorry our bad we will get this into our software documentation... and then they never did... why. because Nintendo would have there ass on a platter for it.

For Atari, there options to mop up this mess is limited now.... sucks to be them... especially since they are broke as hell right now as a corporation.