A company called iPhSoft sells ScummVM-based versions of some games for iOS. The Broken Sword DVD edition was among the first commercial products to bundle ScummVM. ScummVM is used legally and with the team's blessing in a number of commercially available games, however. The settlement involved Mistic Software "paying all legal fees and making a donation to the Free Software Foundation as a sign of good will, without acknowledging copyright infringement." All remaining unsold copies of the games were to be destroyed at a specified (but unannounced) date. The dispute was resolved in May 2009, and an announcement followed in June. (Sandulenko has a more detailed account of the incident on his blog.) The ScummVM team found out and, with help from, they contacted the Atari legal team. The games even featured a graphics glitch that's associated with ScummVM 0.9.0.
The developers at Mistic Soft used ScummVM to make their job easier, but they failed to comply with the terms of ScummVM's General Public License (GPL). Atari had contracted Majesco Entertainment to port the games ( Pajama Sam, SPY Fox, Freddi Fish) and Majesco had in turn subcontracted the work to Mistic Software, which had assigned it to subsidiary Mistic Soft in Ukraine. Back in 2002, another person sold pirated copies of LucasArts games bundled with ScummVM on Usenet.īut a far more insidious misuse of ScummVM occurred in 2008, when three Nintendo Wii games were released featuring ScummVM used without permission or proper acknowledgement.
After being threatened with legal action, the site owner mischievously redirected all visitors to the ScummVM website until his host shut him down. ScummVM's name and logo was used to give an appearance (albeit false) of legitimacy to a SCUMM games DVD sold by .uk.
ScummVM has been distributed illegally many times over the years, but this is usually just a case of opportunistic individuals trying to make a quick buck from pirated material.
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