China's Joyland Park Rips Off StarCraft and WoW

[fryb]

I went here over the summer funnily enough...

Now, I've never actually played any of the games that are meant to be being ripped off here, but, it's clear it wasn't their original idea. But, to be honest, EVERYTHING in China is a rip off. You'll find things that are much, much worse than this that Western companies don't do anything about, so I doubt this will have much of an effect. The children's area of the park is actually a complete rip off of Suess Landing at Universal Islands of Adventure in Florida which I'm sure a lot more people will be familiar with. In fact, the park as a whole is a rip-off of there, with the entrance, logo and layout all suspiciously the exact same.

The park was disgusting, mind. Theme Parks are my other main interest, and this was one of the worst places I've been to. I'll just attach some other photos if anyone's interested in more of a guest's perspective...

The main attraction...

And then in the gift shop...

 

[mew4ever23]

Shit, this place is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. Blizz, if you're going to go after a private server owner, you might as well go after the theme park blatantly ripping off your franchises.

 

[boag]

hahahaha, ok this funny on multiple levels, because the Warhammer thing could always be used against blizzard in court.

 

[MrGalactus]

Oh big deal. How is this hurting Blizzard? It's just characters and stuff. They at least put some effort into it.

 

[Solo-Wing]

Oh China, is there ANYTHING you won't illegally rip off?


Apparently not.

Totally.
That had Mario level designs, Klonoa sounds, Ponyo Music, and the character looks like something from Spyro.

also people lets not forget THIS.

 

[Therumancer]

I do recall hearing about this a couple months back. Such a blatant rip-off... and yet I doubt Blizzard will be able to do anything about it, Chinese copyright law being what it is (practically non-existent).

The last time I remember this coming up was them ripping off Gundam.

-snip-

Honestly, with the economy in the shape it is, I half expect that if the world ends (or ends as we know it) next year as some nutjobs predict, it might very well be the result of a war over this, as the lines are very quickly being drawn between East Vs. West. A lot of those with anti-US sentiments will talk about the US's debt, but at the same time they tend to overlook what's owed to us, including by some of those creditors, and the same applies to a lot of countries as well. Things like the US's reduction in borrowing power might have those with anti-US sentiments cheering for a number of reasons, but in the end that's simply moving things closer to a head, because it's making it more crucial that the US get things sorted with China, and while Blizzard's IPs are a drop in the bucket you can pretty much point to Joyland as an example of EXACTLY what I'm talking about accross a spectrum of thousands upon thousands of differant products and properties, both physical and purely intellectual.

Very well put. While I don't think I could have made such a detailed or verbose post on it, this was partly what I knew, partly what I suspected, and partly things I had no idea about (like that they really made that much money from it, for example).

I was going to bet that, if anything, they would go to war to call in their debt... but it seems more the opposite at this point, with the rest of the world calling them on their illegal actions.

That said, if there is a World War III and it involves nuclear weapons, we are quite unfortunately screwed. If it doesn't end up using them, then perhaps I can find a nice cabin in the mountains with some emergency tools and learn to live off the land...

...or maybe this will all just continue as it has been going for some time and nothing significant will change.

Well, while a lot of people on the leftward end of the spectrum don't get it, the old maxim "Free Trade means he with the biggest guns trades freely" applies here. One of the reasons WHY the US spends so much on the military in order to remain the dominant world
power is that if nobody can collect what you owe, it doesn't matter. The US's problem though is that we are increasingly less willing to actually act like the dominant world power and act totally diplomatically or give ground on our own interests when we should.

These loans China is giving the US were kind of a diplomatic solution to a lot of things. To some extent they were tribute, simply expressed in diplomatic terms. They were also payoffs, again diplomatically expressed, for the US not to press it's interests more heavily in their part of the world. China having doubtlessly noticed our huge military occupation of Japan which provides us with a foothold to do unpleasant things to them if we ever exploited it (we won't) when China itself has traditionally had no abillity to project it's own power. Basically the idea being they give us money, we pussyfoot around their patent violations and such and allow them to build up their economy, it becomes win/win since we both wind up getting huge piles of cash.

The thing with China though is that it's exceedingly racist, overpopulated, and wants to rule the world. Conquering and colonizing other nations is increasingly attrsctive as it becomes more powerful, and despite having no apparent threats under the current status quo it's insisted on building up it's military over the last couple of decades to gain the abillity to project it's power. Traditionally people think China isn't a threat because it could never get it's armies to Europe or the US as it doesn't have the naval power to do so, but it IS developing that naval power as an offensive tool.

China is unlikely to go to war to call in it's debts, that wouldn't work for a lot of reasons especially given what we could say back. It's more likely to launch invasions and use those debts as an excuse to justify doing so. Throughout history (Rome and the classic "Barbarians At The Gates") people have thought that business and trade would render war impossible due to the system of debts and flow of money but it never does, since in the end debts are only as good as your abillity to collect them. Even if it gets a leg up on the US, the US is still a huge military power and chances are nobody could make us do anything without leveling 99% of the planet in the process if we ever chose to really fight (and this is without WMDs, but I won't get into that). In the end anyone with half a brain realizes they would never get their money anyway... and of course those debts are questionable since China's penelties for infringements of IP and copyrights are also a big deal.

That said, nuclear weapons are increasingly irrelevent which is part of why China is building up it's military. You might remember a few years ago (well more than that now) how Russia was freaking out over how the US built up anti-missle defense systems, and we were demonstrating som eof them in The Middle East. An area of research banned by treaty with the USSR in order to maintain peace through MAD. Part of the whole situation with Georgia a few years ago was that the US had defensive missle interception bases in Poland to hedge the USSR in, since it would be difficult for them to fire ICBMs over the country either into the EU or accross the EU into the US. Russia was threatening to nuke Poland for hosting it and everything else. This came up because while the EU was basically quaking while it sent diplomats and watched Russia turn off the gas, the US (which itself had it's military tied up) noticed that Russia WAS on the border of the EU and probably made a point that short of bringing it's forces accross the sea which would have given time for the US to act, it wasn't going to get much by implying bombardment due to the fact that our bases could stop it. Russia largely gave up Georgia (all hype aside) because it's strategic value was limited under those circumstances since it couldn't leverage europe with missles on their borders.

China on the other hand has had working anti-satellite systems since like 2006 (look up China, Satellite, and Lasers). Not ground based energy blasters or anything, but laser systems that can blind satellites in orbit. These systems make it very difficult for the US to gather intelligence or itself engage in extreme range bombardment. The end result is that any major war between super powers is liable to be increasingly conventional, with WMD having to be fired from very close range.

Right now even if the entire world was to gang up on the US and flush it's WMD tubes (very unlkely) estimates are we'd have roughly a 5% chance of surviving in anything like an intact shape considering the enviromental fallout. The rest of the world has a 0% chance. This is because it's increasingly less about who has the most missles, but how well you can shoot them down. Right now we can shoot them down with ground batteries, planes, boats, submarines, and other methods. Most of the "World War III" scenarios of the past are irrelevent because interception technology has gotten that much better for the US (where most things are set). Hence the "retro apocolypse" bit, and how games like the recent edition of "Gamma World" have swithed from Nukes to messing with the Higgs Boson particle. I mean sure, if your not in the US or China your pretty much fragged right now (though as time goes on and other countries catch up this will be less of the case), even China is probably fragged because they don't quite have enough defense to stop everything, though with time they will. Right now the US still has the abillity to sail subs up to their coastline and flush the tubes, in a few years though the Chinese navy might be able to stop that though.

The point of another (lengthy) rant is simply to point out where we are militarily. Things are changing. Really the US should have acted long ago, but in general we're too nice and too focused on maintaining the peace. We have this nasty tendency to not want to do anything until the last possible minute and hope for a bloody miracle when we do act. Should a war happen I think it's going to be a lot more conventional, with battles being fought to get into range to use WMD. Likewise I think that because we don't use them, people underestimate the power of non-WMD weapons, we have missles and such designed to penetrate inte sewers/subsctructure of cities before exploding to cause them to collapse in on themselves and so on. If you saw the beginning of "Iron Man" you might remember the missle he was showing off at the beginning and what it did to a mountain, the thing is we've been able to do things like that for a long time, in fact ther was some talk about leveling the mountains in Afghanistan outright with massive deployments of firepower when the war first started, but it was nixxed because in the US we care (probably too much) about collateral damage as opposed to protecting ourselves or you know... winning the wars we get into, there is becoming a fine line between what we can do, and what we will do. I simply remember that movie and how years before it was made there was a lot of hyping of the US military (probably understating things actually) and points about being able to do that for real BEFORE Hollywood got wind of it were brought up. Right now we still have a huge edge if we were to use it, which is also why the curret pecking order remains still and why China hasn't done much besides posture. Give it a few years though. A war next year might not end humans, but it would end the world as we know it, though I imagine where life in the US would suck it would be better than most places when the smoke cleared.

 

[Therumancer]

Oh big deal. How is this hurting Blizzard? It's just characters and stuff. They at least put some effort into it.

Because those characters are owned by Blizzard, and the guys using them are stealing the results of their creative process.

On a more practical level however it's about goverments though.

See when a company produces a product and sells it within their market the goverment collects a share. They get taxes from the workers hired to produce the product, off the property the workers work in, and off the sales to the consumers.

Blizzard is an American company. Let's say the value of the property being stolen is 100 million (a nice round number) just on sales tax in a state with 6% your dealing with 6 million dollars being lost to the hosting state. That might not sound like a lot even with that number, but when you compound it by thousands upon thousands of violations similar to this on an international level since China sells knock offs around the world, the amount of money rapidly becomes staggering. You consider it that way and the fact that this is how China has built the economy that allows it to lend money to begin with, and it puts things into an entirely new perspective.

See, the thing is that China doesn't want to allow an outside company that owns these properties to come into their nation and wind up taking most of the money where they only get a percentage. China's business practices are pretty messed up, and you might remember a big thing a while ago about Blizzard running WoW in China and the manipulations involved to do so and how little money they can actually take out of China (so to speak). By knocking this off China gets to keep all the money in China without having to wind up paying anything into other economies (with say an American company bringing the money into the US and it's economy through it's work here even when it's not being taxed). China is basically pocketing everything with things like this when they really did none of the work or innovated any of
it themselves.

It would be differant if China invented it's own brands, characters, products etc... and sold them and made tons of money, but it doesn't do this, China actually innovates very little, and instead steals ideas and creativity from the rest of the world. Part of the problem of course being the nature of their own society (where on one hand you have huge, modern cities, and on the other you have people living with their farm animals which is how SARS got started) is paranoid and self-stagnated for purposes of control with the goverment trying to keep a tight reign on everything.

It's important to note that China also isn't beyond just producing knock offs and imitations, but to actually counterfeiting goods. They will do things like have garmet factories produce Jeans and then put brand names like "Levis" on them and sell them as the genuine article around the world. This is especially easy for them when you have companies who actually contracted manufacturing there and the goverment was able to get their mitts on the specs to pass over to their own businesspeople. We've even seen things like entire "Apple" company stores being faked in other countries largely due to China, without the buyers realizing (for the most part) that they were not dealing with Apple.

As I've said in other posts, Joytown in of itself is no big thing, but it's a sign of the overall problem. The noteworthy thing about this is not the huge amount of money it's costing creators and their host countries (stolen money which China ironically lends back... which is something I've ranted about in other posts), but how blatently public it is. Basically this is China sitting there thumbing it's nose at the rest of the world showing it won't follow the rules. Chances are those stuffed mouses that say "Mickey" on them were not in any way produced or contracted by Disney, the very fact someone can snap pictures of that (a property owned by one of the biggest, nastiest, creative corperations there is overall) is a sign of how bad the problem is and why something really should be done here.

 

[Alar]

I do recall hearing about this a couple months back. Such a blatant rip-off... and yet I doubt Blizzard will be able to do anything about it, Chinese copyright law being what it is (practically non-existent).

The last time I remember this coming up was them ripping off Gundam.

-snip-

-gigantisnip-

Again, interesting and informative...

However, I do have to say this: holy shit man, are you a writer or something? So much text to get through! And yes, I did read it all.

 

[biocrock]

Meh, in the big scope of everything, everyone ripped off Africa. What would the european traders and scientists have had if the arabic numerals had been copyrighted.

 

[tharglet]

Images, and what I think they are. I've not played Starcraft, so some might not be accurate. Feel free to quote which ones that are incorrect/not filled in and your suggestion and I'll edit the post.
1: A protoss
2: A Vyrkul?
3: A centaur, but not sure if it's one from WoW
4: Random dragon, blizz-style
5: Heroes V
6: Human WoW-style. Don't recognise them as a lore char
7: Couple of belfs, looks based on the first image on this page
8: Ogre
9: Dragon again
10: Troll (quite clearly WoW-style, plus "WOW" on sign)
11: Looks based on one of the Burning Legion demons, possibly done off Kil'jaeden
12: A naga
13: A Draenei
14: Strangely-coloured Illidan
15: Random water ride. Not much to see here.
16: Dwarf. Doesn't particularly look like a ripoff from this angle
17: Starcrafty architecture
18: Sign for one of the Starcraft rides. Name doesn't seem like a ripoff of anything to me
19: More starcraft-stylised architecture
20: Uh... people. I guess this proves people visit this place?
21: Guess it's staff. Don't recognise the costumes as anything
22: I guess this is gonna be the 3D film we saw the people queueing up for
23: Not sure if this is a ripoff of something, but reminds me of Bioshock
24: Looks like troll huts to the left, orcish hut to the right and StarcraftLand in the background
25: Random overview shot
26: Decorated toilet sign. Not sure where the wings are from. Looks like they were going for succubus wings or something.
27: 19, at a diff angle
28: Unmistakable logo in the centre
29: Looks like a Nexus building, from Starcraft wiki
30: Looks like a Zerg on the left
31: Just looks starcraft-themed, can't see anything like it
32: Ripoff segway
33: I guess it doesn't just scrape the sky, but scrap it too
34: Two Lich Kings. What more do you want?
35: ... wet Lich kings apparently
36: Something Orcish, that apparently people who can read English will enjoy more
37: A gnome, based on first image on this page. Also looks like there might be a wyvern behind him, in the style of a horde flight point
38: WoW elf, very similar to the Sylvanas redesign.
39: A blood elf, pretending to be a bard.
40: Reference to Silvermoon City on the english bit (Full of mysteries and unknown ancient legends in woods, Silvermoon City is still changing under endless exploration)

 

[PseudoDuck]

Not a big Starcraft fan so a lot of the first pictures were lost on me and I was just thinking "Okay, it's a bit near the line but it's hardly a big rip-off"...

...then I see a few buildings that have a hint of Orc-ish style about them, but still not too bad. Then I see a re-coloured version of Illidan (with twin blades, blindfold, wings and horns), then a Naga followed by an obvious Draenei and a Blood Elf. But to cap it all off...TWO giant statues of the Lich King (on the water ride) followed by a direct copy of the Gnome from the Deeprun Tram loading screen.

It is actually hilarious how much has been copied directly rather than vaguely "influenced" by Blizzard.

 

[BonsaiK]

Can't see Blizzard has any case to sue them, after all the game clearly says "you must construct additional pylons".

 

[standokan]

But them having a shit copyright law, does that mean that we can also rip THEM off?

Not that I know of anything that we can rip off though >,> .

 

[Toasty Virus]

This is why socialism applied is bad. It doesn't encourage original thinking at all, and ends up with cheap knockoffs of whatever may be popular.

So can you please direct me to the original theme park that Blizzard built in secret? Or do I have to resort to going to some cheap knockoff in China to fulfill my geek dreams of seeing a WoW/Starcraft theme park?

You're getting a bit aggressive over nothing there.

Nobody said they ripped of a blizzard theme park. What they DID do is steal character designs and even EXACT artwork from Blizzard.

 

[Zeetchmen]

Considering who shoddily things are made in China, I wouldn't want to ride roller coasters or anything midly dangerous there.

 

[Bloodysoldier]

This is why socialism applied is bad. It doesn't encourage original thinking at all, and ends up with cheap knockoffs of whatever may be popular.

So can you please direct me to the original theme park that Blizzard built in secret? Or do I have to resort to going to some cheap knockoff in China to fulfill my geek dreams of seeing a WoW/Starcraft theme park?

So can you please stop posting the same thing. You are going on the realms a spam. Stop copypasta and learn to use your skull.

 

[ResonanceSD]

China stole some Intellectual Property. Oh. The shock. Evident all over my face.

 

[Freakzooi]

To the Chinese 'copyright' equals 'the right to copy'

The theme park doesn't look that bad though, I must admit

 

[ShakenBake]

This is why socialism applied is bad. It doesn't encourage original thinking at all, and ends up with cheap knockoffs of whatever may be popular.

So can you please direct me to the original theme park that Blizzard built in secret? Or do I have to resort to going to some cheap knockoff in China to fulfill my geek dreams of seeing a WoW/Starcraft theme park?

So can you please stop posting the same thing. You are going on the realms a spam. Stop copypasta and learn to use your skull.

So I take it you don't know where it is either?