just got a thread closed cause they say ScummVm is piracy?!?

[Rasi]

In fact, if you crawl thru LA's forums, you will find posts, that tell the users to try out scummvm to play game XY...

[Tim20]

I believe Lucasarts referred to the Scumm engine as SPUTM, and since its Scumm(VM) I assume there is no legal recourse since ScummVM is not trademarked by lucas, however im uncertain on that since Lucasarts thought they could sue digg, that was a very long shot, ScummVM/Scumm is closer..
we pray

Well, SCUMM itself is an acronym and I don't remember reading anywhere that SCUMM was a trademark of LucasArts (surely if it was, it would for example state "The SCUMM(tm) Bar" in the game)

Ah. Well fair enough then. Still, strange how they never trademarked SCUMM. I mean, it was a utility they created for these games and something they used. It's a good job they didn't then, i mean, if they sued digg for being similar to The Dig, then they would most certainly have tried to sue ScummVM for having the word 'Scumm' in the title.

Anyway, cheers guys.

[Ceri Cat]

Technically you can't trademark an acronym. It's only been the last couple of years that's been overturned somewhat by corporations like Sun Microsystems.

In fact here's a reasonably well written explanation of how Sun amongst others have got around it. Lucasarts were slow on the uptake and it's hard to expunge 15 years worth of written evidence to the contrary.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/11.html#a996

[LogicDeLuxe]

I'd hesitate to call SCUMM VM an emulator as its nature is not emulation but rather replacement of the original engine to allow the software to work in new environments.

It's more than that. While the primary purpose certainly is being a game interpreter, it also emulates some hardware like the OPL chip, and it also has some more useful features the original interpreters hadn't.