Information about the closing of VMK, and what that means for the copyright and VMKU

Hi


After going to Disney World twice and Disneyland once since VMK's closing, I have been gathering information after talking to some executives in different branches of Disney. I have a friend who is high up in the Art department at Disney, so I was able to go to some of the executives and inquire about VMK's closure and the Sulake corporation.
For those of you who don't know, Sulake were the developers for VMK. They wrote the source code using C, C++, Shockwave, and Flash (Which are programming languages for those who don't know) and they are the owners of the actual code, and not the intellectual property. (Intellectual prop. meaning the idea/brand name, which is in this case the Disney parks and in a larger view, the Walt Disney Company.) What all that means is that Sulake (Which has made games such as Habo Hotel) owns the code for VMK, which in some ways is more valuable than the intellectual property and therefore, Sulake (not Disney) could sue Falling Star for copyright infringement.

Now I know a lot of people blamed Disney and "Yavin" for the closing of VMK, but really it was Sulake. In January of '08 (3 months before VMK closing) some of Disney's consultants and developers went on the Disney Magic on a cruise to take designs for a future implementation of the Disney cruise ships into VMK. It wasn't until February that Sulake had told Disney that they were interested in closing down the game, for reasons unknown to me.
So theoretically, VMKU could get a O.K. from Disney, but there is a 99.99% chance of them getting sued by Sulake none the less. Now if they decide to make their OWN game, without using Photoshop/paint (Really, I have seen some HORRIBLY doctored images using paint... just stop....) Now about the new mini game that was posted and is on Youtube, Its Hyperspace mountain, which we all used to play in Tomorrow land in VMK! Now by using that and promoting it as your own, even without releasing either Sulake will force it being removed, or you will be sued for $100,000+ on my estimates, because of how large Sulake is.
Sorry to be the rainer of bad news, but it some ways its good, at least people will now why VMK closed.

Apeman is a computer programmer who writes code in C, C#, C++, Basic, Dream Maker, Python, Java and was a VMK player since May 26th 2005, and was one of the original 50 beta testers for VMK.