There has been alot of hoopla about posting tracks and other such products on the 'net for Papyrus and other sims recently, and if you are reading this, guess you are interested in hearing what it's all about. Basically, this...Sierra/Papyrus have asked some people to remove some 'copyrighted' products for their sims, and some people (who obviously do not know their sim history or anything about the legalities of copyrights) have questioned why this action has been taken.

For those who don't know their sim history, even The Pits has had problems with copyrights back in our early days. Before anyone else had ever manipulated a track, we had started our Daytona Project to add the Daytona Motor Speedway to NASCAR 1. We were called by International Speedway Corperation (owners of Daytona) with an order to 'cease and desist' all attempts to put Daytona within reach of sim racers. Why? Well read further, O enlightened ones...

Like we said before...this is NOTHING new, the policies of Sierra/Papyrus and the owners of specific copyrights has always been the same...to protect the property that they own. They are bound to that by Federal law, which basically says this... if someone does NOT take action to protect their copyrights, then their copyrights are null and void, and anyone can use them for their own purposes. So the companies MUST protect their copyrights, or risk losing them. So how does this effect the sim racer?

What IS constituted as a copyright? Logos, likenesses, names, programs, drawings, letters, instructions...basically anything that is created by someone has a form of copyright on it. Companies will file for copyrights with the US Copyright office, but there is a law about 'intellectual property' as well...in other words, if someone were to copy this page, and sell it in a book about sim racing, we would have full authority to prosecute them for violations of our intellectual property, even though this page is not on file with the US Copyrights Office. A full 'legal' copyright is what companies seek to fully validate their ownership of something, in the case of written text and many other things, it's not necessarily required to prosecute a violater. However, without a full copyright of this page on file with the US Copyright Office, it would be more difficult for us to prove that this page was originally ours, and that is why companies will go ahead and copyright their products.

So, is Rusty Wallaces's car paint scheme copyrighted? Yep. Is the Daytona logo a copyright? Sure. How about each file that resides within each racing sim you can buy? You bet. So how can we provide all these cool things to the sim racer without getting in trouble? Very simple explaination, really...or I should say, two explainations.

First off, is the explaination of this. The sim community as a whole is VERY lucky that so far, companies have not been as 'trigger-happy' as International Speedway Corp is about Daytona. If they were, we would see NOTHING but 'fake' paintschemes on cars, on tracks, on trucks, on buildings, on EVERYTHING that us 'aftermarket providers' try to do that add realism to the sims. I've heard rumors that it could get worse in the future...so WATCH OUT! The people who are complaining that they can't download a copyrighted track for free are completely ignorant of how lucky they really are. It is very possible in the future that you could see NO logos or realistic paintjobs of any kind on the internet...without a lawyer following shortly thereafter. So you people that are complaining about spending a little money...We've got no sympathy for you...WAKE UP! Go out and spend a little cash...after all, you are supporting the companies that are BRINGING you this enjoyment of racing...but some people seem to forget that little fact in their greediness to get something for free.

Here's the second part of the equation. Even though the specific files of racing sims are copyrighted, if they are changed in a patch (as with our TPTCC and N@50 patches), then the copyright falls to the person or people who made the modifications. In other words, someone could not download our TPTCC patch and sell it on CD, as we could prosecute them even though the patch is created for another copyrighted product. Sierra/Papyrus would not care, as the violation of 'intellectual property' was with OUR modified files, not theirs. Now, we've seen some very uninformed people state that all you have to do with a file that comes with the game is modify it a tiny bit (such as put a dot on a car or something like that) and it's now THEIR intellectual property. WRONG! The whole of the file is still the original, and therefore still the property of the original author.

So are .dat files from Papyrus tracks and such copyrighted? Not if all the files contained within are modified...as in the case of David Noonan's Brands Hatch for GPL, and some of our TPTCC tracks where the entire roadcourse has been reversed. In those cases, ALL the files were modified. It's not a specific file (as in the case of the .dat files) that is illegal, it's whether or not the files within were manipulated. And since in the case of 99% of the tracks that can be found for these sims are not completely modified, they cannot be posted as a whole...because if someone downloaded them, they would not have to pay for the sim with which they originated (such as when people post a 'version' of Daytona, which is really only Talladega modified to look like Daytona). The original Talladega was to be purchased with the sim, so the entire track cannot be posted. Please note that it would be legal to create a patch to MODIFY a user's Talladega to look like another track, but as you have seen from the paragraphs above, ISC is not going to stand for it if someone calls it 'Daytona' and puts Daytona International Speedway logos on it.

So how is it that sim racers can't have a version of Daytona, even though Papyrus didn't provide us one in the sim? Because of the fact that for Papyrus to provide a Daytona, they would have to pay ISC for the use of the copyrighted logos, name, and likeness of the track, and at the time, they were not able to obtain the liscense to do so. Face it, unless you create one yourself, you cannot legally obtain a version of Daytona for the NASCAR Racing sims.

While we're on the issue of copyrights and piracy, let's take a look at one other form of piracy found on the internet...that of the piracy of other individual's work. While it can be said that someone creating a 'likeness' of Rusty Wallace's paintscheme for use in NASCAR racing (or Jackie Stewart's car for GPL, or Brian Simo's Trans Am Mustang for SCGT) is violating a copyright themselves by providing a copyrighted paintscheme, they are doing it for the benefit of all those racers out there who like to see the most realistic racing sim that they can get. The authors who do all this work do it free of charge, they spend hours of their time to put out the best work that they can so when YOU jump into your racing sim, you feel like you are bashing fenders with the best of them. But even then, some people have no brains to see what is being provided to them, but would rather take those projects and distribute them as their own work. We at The Pits have provided a service to those authors who work hard for the sim world, we have ALWAYS stated the name of the authors by the projects that they created, and if need be, we will go to bat for them if someone takes their work. All they have to do is email us, and we'll put a stop to it. So if you want to post stuff on your site, how DO you do it without getting the author and us annoyed at you? By merely asking! 90% of the sim editors out there do not mind if you ASK them if you can post their projects, and give them credit where credit is due. After all, THEY were the ones who spent several hours getting that paintjob just right, or the utility that works so great...and since they are not asking anything for it, all they would like is a little note to let people know who DID do all the hard work for the realism of the sim racing world.

And just be glad that SO FAR, companies are still letting us post realistic cars and logos and such on the internet...the future may not be so bright. Even though at the moment they may still enjoy the free advertisement that they are getting, legal lawyer jargon could take that away at any moment. So don't be so foolish to shoot yourself in the foot, and take a little time to thank all the authors out there who have provided such a great, realistic racing world for all of us who may never get the chance to swap paint with Jeff Gordon, or breeze past Michael Schumacher in the last chiquane...