Castle Eltz copyright violation

[Nail]

I get Harmful site blocked on that addy, proceed with caution

[Avoc]

eltzenterprises.x10.mx <- just the URL should make the warning signs go up all around.

[FireFly]

To be honest: The last thing I expected was for them to hire a law office. The images on my website only contained low resolution ingame screenshots showing parts of a castle that resembled the real castle of Eltz. If you do a google search for “Castle Eltz” you will find hundreds of High Quality images of the Castle. So why pick on me?

Well, They own a castle that they commercially exploit and they also own a couple of holiday houses that they rent to tourists visiting their castle, they own a website for this castle, they have tons of money on their bankaccount and they never ever heard of wolfenstein.

Like I mentioned before: they probably did a google search for their castle and the first thing that pops up is the splatterladder site, the second is the wolfedit.com site and the third is their own site. I think this alone pissed them of already. After visiting my site they found images resembling their castle… I don’t think they got upset by the images, but they got upset after finding out that the images are part of a gamelevel for a game called Wolfenstein. They found out that in this game axis battle the allies - or the other way around - and Axis, well… let’s just expose the big secret, shall we? : Axis are just plain old nazis… and we don’t want nazis running and bunnyhopping around our beloved castle eltz. It might hurt our sales…Can I blame them for that? If you would own a castle , church or whatever kind of building and you never ever-in-your-intire-life heard of wolfenstein would you like to be associated with nazis?

No ofcourse not, silly you!

However what does this mean for a mapper / leveldesigner ? Does this mean that he can never ever reproduce a building - that exists in real life- in his map? Does this mean that a mapper or a artist cannot use the Eifel tower, the statue of liberty or any other structure in his map, simply because the owners of the building doesn’t like the idea of having Nazis running around in their structure? Isn’t that called censorship? or is that called copyright violation nowadays…

[QUOTE=nUllSkillZ;240473]A draft of a letter (email):

Bitte um Prüfung der Untersagung der Veröffentlichung der Map "Castle Eltz"

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

mein Name ist xxxxxx und ich spiele seit Veröffentlichung das kostenlos im Internet erhältliche Spiel "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" ("W:ET").

Vor kurzem wurde eine ebenfalls kostenlos erhältliche Spielwelt ("Map") mit Namen "Castle Eltz" veröffentlicht.
Mit Bedauern habe ich gelesen, das Sie eine Veröffentlichung von Bildern der Map und auch die Veröffentlichung der Map untersagt haben. 

Die Map ist technisch, künstlerisch und spielerisch sehr gelungen und professionell gestaltet.
Der Autor war sicherlich von der Schönheit und Einzigartigkeit der Burg Eltz inspiriert.
Eine der besten Maps für das Spiel.

Da weder das Spiel noch die Map zum Verkauf angeboten werden, gibt es keinen kommerziellen Hintergrund.

Das Spiel "W:ET" wird täglich weltweit von mehreren tausend Spielern gespielt.
Die Map stellt somit eine zusätzliche, kostenlose, weltweite Werbung für die Burg dar.
Eventuell könnte man in einer mitveröffentlichten Datei/auf der Webseite des Autors auf die echte Burg Eltz und die Webseite der Burg hinweisen.
Eventuell gibt es ja auch die Möglichkeit, die Map mit anderem Namen und dem Hinweis in einer mitveröffentlichten Datei/auf der Webseite des Autors "inspiriert von Burg Eltz" zu veröffentlichen.

Über eine Antwort von Ihnen freue ich mich.

Vielen Dank im Voraus.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

[edit]
It’s never too late to ask.

I’m too lazy to translate at the moment.
[/edit][/QUOTE]

I do apreciate your effort, but you’re waisting your time. You’re more than welcome to send that to the owners, but don’t expect them to respond back : They’re pissed off and so am I… Even If they would give me the permission to continue the map I would refuse. I will rename and rework the map, removing any trace of the real castle eltz…

Despite everyone’s good intentions, it doesn’t matter if they have the rights to it or not, or if their claims are BS or not. They own a damn castle so they have plenty of money to throw away if they want to take him to court. He just needs to redesign his castle so that it is no longer recognizable as the real Castle Eltz. Maybe something like this.

I’m afraid that castle is also copyright protected: If you do a search in the http://tess2.uspto.gov/ database it even says you can’t use the castle images in games

[QUOTE=Nail;241381]they can only copyright the name, images of the castle cannot be copyright, it’s in plain view[/QUOTE] According to the letter I received on my home adress from their laywers you are correct: I could simply rename the map into “castle Altz” or “Castle whatever” , But I rather delete any reference from their castle from my map before I release it…

By the way, now that we’re talking about censorship: a few days ago someone - I think it was shagileo, posted this funny puzzle on this topic, why was this post removed?

[shagileo]

By the way, now that we’re talking about censorship: a few days ago someone - I think it was shagileo, posted this funny puzzle on this topic, why was this post removed?

Wasn’t me

I saw the post as well, but it was from a user I didn’t know and he was newly registered.
If somehow that username had any resemblance to my name, then it was very likely a bot messing around again.

[Zer0Cool]

According to the letter I received on my home adress from their laywers you are correct: I could simply rename the map into “castle Altz” or “Castle whatever” , But I rather delete any reference from their castle from my map before I release it…

Nope! ^^
Castle Whatever is already mine So dont do the mistake twice, else i will hunt you down with my lawyers, ftw!
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16749&highlight=castle

[shagileo]

How big are the odds

[Chris2]

Hope you can find the time to place some kind of reference to this whole ordeal in any future reworkings of the map in form of some subtle dig at castle eltz.

[Avoc]

Hope you can find the time to place some kind of reference to this whole ordeal in any future reworkings of the map in form of some subtle dig at castle eltz.

I’ve actually thought about doing this ;D

[Diego]

I’m afraid that castle is also copyright protected: If you do a search in the http://tess2.uspto.gov/ database it even says you can’t use the castle images in games

I was being sarcastic. I picked that one on purpose because I knew that it was even more heavily copyrighted than Eltz. I wonder how much it cost Disney to model their castle after it.