Yeah but its an LFnetwork site not an LEC one, its just officially sanctioned by LEC. If you mean mentioning ScummVM in the Mojo help forums - yes that happens all the time.

Hm. Someone must have fired all the old lawyers at LEC and gotten ones that aren't complete fucks. It would explain why ScummVM isn't being harassed anymore, and also I recall LEC having major issues with modifications/uses of their works before.

"but it's funny that they seem to have no problem mentioning ScummVM in their forums to get their own games to work..."

By "their forums" do you mean the LucasForums help and SCUMM hacking forums? Both LucasForums and LucasFiles were started and are run by fans, including me 😀 LucasArts has nothing to do with them except they allow their employees to post on lucasforums and allow mods and fangames on lucasfiles.

ehh, if it's officially sanctioned then it has EVERYTHING to do with LucasArts. See Press Release Above. There is no gray area. There is no Spoon. (Dog Soldiers 😉 )

Er I guess. Really it's all a little scary because after all it is the lawyers of George Lucas... yeah. But, since around when LucasArts switched presidents a couple years ago (from Jack Sorensen to Simon Jeffery), and apparently also heads of the legal department, their stance on fan stuff has lightened up a lot. They are still having some sort of massive identity crisis because the lawyers are scared -- they dont have a proper policy for dealing with whatsisface's his unreal tournament millennium falcon add on and worry that the existence of joe and his home made wookie porn hentai game somehow equates to the loss of their intellectual property rights, but for the most part they're trying to lighten up on the people who pay their bills.

Their employees occasionally post on forums (using their real names/nicks now too, and without fear of being fired), they do interviews with pages called "The Clearly Unofficial Monkey Island Website" etc etc. ScummVM is still a pretty nasty thorn but I hope they work through it... or just leave it alone. Seems like they were leaving it alone for about a month, then one lawyer or another finally got back down to the bottom of the pile on his desk and brought it up... but it seems it's been pushed aside again.

Regardless, LucasArts adknowledges LucasFiles as existing, but they really don't want anything to do with it.

Originally it was going to say at the top "LF Network and LucasArts presents LucasFiles" but they said to take their name off of it.

In the legal disclaimer that slashdotters were bitching about - LFNetwork is granted ownership of the files that are submitted to the site. For some reason all of the slashdotters, and probably the "enlightened computer users" at large assumed that this was some ploy of LucasArts to steal up all the lovely ideas of their fans? Hi. LFNetwork is not LucasArts. I think that if it comes down to it, we don't want the exclusive rights to your idea for a fangame plot.

So yeah, no, Lucas doesn't want your ideas at all. Actually, that "LFNetwork owns it" was them getting themselves as far away from them as they possibly could. The intent was "LFNetwork owns it. LucasArts doesn't! Get away from us!" Odds are if one of you goes and sues LucasArts because your jedi outcast mod's storyline ends up in Episode 3... Lucas would tell you to sue us and leave him the hell alone.

Obviously LucasArts sees this as a tool for them to use to promote their games. ... ... And? Like FilePlanet or Fileshack or whatever else any download site on earth isn't?? LucasFiles has no crappy waits, no premium services, and allows Star Wars and other Lucas modders and fan game makers to host their stuff without worrying about a C&D. Also we're working to put up tons of old shit that people like me would be excited about - crap like old videos (like the formerly almost impossible to find full-screen Grim Fandango trailer) and pseudo-obscure demos (like the Passport to Adventure demo disk etc).

Ragging on LucasFiles will get you nowhere. It's less than a week old. Give it time and it will own your soul... er, I mean will provide you with a vast expansive wealth of Lucas related downloads. Yes.

Oh, I wasn't really ragging on your site. It's just that it seemed to be an effort on LA to act like they are doing something to appease the masses of angry (previous) customers that they had.

"The fan community is incredibly important to LucasArts and this site will provide them with a variety of ways to continue to celebrate their passion for the company and its games."

Just seems like a tidbit to throw out so they can say. "See! We support the fans! Go to Lucasfiles! NOW LEAVE US ALONE AND PLAY OUR NEW CRAPPY GAMES!". 😉

Well, I'm sure there's a little bit of that going on, but that's basically your job if you are in marketing/PR, right? Well, no there's a lot more to it than that, but it seems like that's all they do sometimes.

LFNetwork was started by six people, three from Star Wars sites like JediKnight.net, and 3 from "old school" LEC adventure sites like Mixnojo (actually the three of us are just from Mixnmojo 😀. As much as LucasFiles will be used as a promotional tool by LucasArts it will be far more than that. We're going to use the "permission" thing in any possible way we can without getting the cold glare of legal fixed directly on us... if only for the sake of getting more readers, driving up banner impressions, and fattening our wallets. Oops did I say that out loud?

😁
Well, when your wallet looks like George Costanza's, consider throwing us a few bucks. 😉

Anyway, LucasFiles seems to be a pretty groovy place. I'm glad it's there. 😀

Oh, BTW, since you're a Mix'n'Mojo-er (uh), what happened like two or three years ago when the whole network went crashing down?

Well, glad you asked. Gather 'round and I will tell you a tale.

It was only a year ago really, or a year and a half. Seems like two or three.

We were sharing the cost of our server with another site, because there was no way in hell we could afford our own (especially with the .com crash wintery economic climate yadda yadda). As it was we were already paying $150ish a month to keep the site online, which was more than we could afford as poor students running a hobby site.

Well, it got worse, and impossible to stay open, when the site we were sharing the server space with decided that they were goinhg to back out. So, on top of our banner ad provider suddenly paying us $0 a month, the other 50% of our bill went away. Death.

We nearly found a couple new places to host the site, but none of them worked out. Finally, Aristotle from the LucasGames network came up and said "hey we have this idea for a network - you guys and LucasGames, we can team up and make a huge network of LucasArts sites - we can centralize the currently spread out fan community, team up on some joint sites, and finally be big enough to attract advertisers who are stable enough to pay bills."

So thats that. We got a new server, haggled our way into non-ripoff contracts with UGO and Doubleclick (Aristotle's a practicing lawyer by day, bless him), and are now alive most of the time. Since then we've opened LucasForums and LucasFiles.

As far as LucasArts's relationship with fansites goes, they were talking to us and other fansites before we formed some massive fan conglomerate, by the way. Hehe. When we were still by ourselves in early 2001 struggling to keep from shutting down we randomly sent them an interview request with Simon Jeffery, the president of the company, and they said yes for some damn reason. After that we got an invite to interview people at E3 etc etc. LucasFiles and LucasDownloads are both domain names that the Mixnmojo people have owned for a couple years now, but we never had the bandwidth or money to actually open a site until now. Fortunately at this point LucasArts knows enough about us to trust putting some of their files there, and plugging it in a press release.

Neat... and not at the same time.
Why wouldn't there be some big, spectacular explosion at the end? Hmph.