MEGAUPLOAD HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN BY THE FEDS

I PUT IT IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE IT MORE NOTICEABLE
Guess that wasn't reaallly necessary.

Anyway...Here's the government's case against Megaupload.

SOURCE: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

...But the government asserts that Megaupload merely wanted the veneer of legitimacy, while its employees knew full well that the site's main use was to distribute infringing content. Indeed, the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other. Because of this, the government says that the site does not qualify for a “safe harbor” of the kind that protected YouTube from Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit.

For instance, the “abuse tool” allegedly does not remove the actual file being complained about by a rightsholder. Instead, it only removes a specific Web address linked to that file—but there might be hundreds of such addresses for popular content.

In addition, the government contends that everything about the site has been doctored to make it look more legitimate than it is. The “Top 100” download list does not “actually portray the most popular downloads,” say prosecutors, and they claim that Megaupload purposely offers no site-wide search engine as a way of concealing what people are storing and sharing through the site.

Megaupload employees apparently knew how the site was being used. When making payments through its “uploader rewards” program, employees sometimes looked through the material in those accounts first. "10+ Full popular DVD rips (split files), a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez)," said one of these notes. (The DMCA does not provide a "safe harbor" to sites who have actual knowledge of infringing material and do nothing about it.)

In a 2008 chat, one employee noted that "we have a funny business... modern days pirates :)," to which the reply was, "we're not pirates, we're just providing shipping servies to pirates :)."

Employees send each other e-mails saying things like, “can u pls get me some links to the series called ‘Seinfeld’ from MU ," since some employees did have access to a private internal search engine.

Employees even allegedly uploaded content themselves, such as a BBC Earth episode uploaded in 2008.

Other messages appear to indicate that employees knew how important copyrighted content was to their business. Content owners had a specific number of takedown requests they could make each day; in 2009, for instance, Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase, one employee suggested that "we can afford to be cooperative at current growth levels"— implying that if growth had not been so robust, takedowns should be limited. Kim Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.

Employees also had access to analytics. One report showed that a specific linking site had “produce 164,214 visits to Megaupload for a download of the copyrighted CD/DVD burning software package Nero Suite 10. The software package had the suggested retail price of $99.” The government's conclusion: Megaupload knew what was happening and did little to stop it.

author=Sailerius

author=SegNin
Nobody is going to care about using sprites (falls under Fair Use).

This is false. Fair use is for purposes like education and parody, and only allows you to use a small portion of the original work. If you wanted to use ripped sprites and claim 'fair use,' you wouldn't be able to use enough of the sprite for it to be a usable game asset. That's the whole point.

You are using a small portion of the original work--a game is far more than just its sprites.

It is educational--you're learning how to make an RPG which entails graphics design, writing, and for the newer RM's possibly even scripting, etc. People have actually submitted RM games as class projects.

And some fan-games are parodies.

Finally, you're not profiting from the games monetarily, and there's no intent to deprive any of the copyright holders of any potential profits. So, the worst that could happen is that they'll ask you to remove your game from circulation (like they did to Calunio with Marvel Brothel)

Think about this: Newsgrounds and other such sites has a ton of flash videos and games that make heavy use of game sprites. And there've been plenty of rom hacks and fan-games made...and nobody has ever gotten into trouble over any of them--with the lone exception of the Chrono Ressurection team who got C&D when they revealed their plans to create a remake of Chrono Trigger in 3-D. Of course, what no one knew was that Square planned to later release their own remake of Chrono Trigger in 3D on the NDS. And before you bring up the Crimson Echoes C&D, that one was FAKED.

Point is, no one cares about your crappy (or even not crappy) amateur freeware game--unless you make a game where their intellectual property is prostituting itself. And the game starts to get noticed by everyone. Then there might be issues.