EA takes ‘open source version’ SimCity 2000 offline due to copyright infringement

Electronic Arts has taken an OpenSC2K, an open source version of SimCity 2000, offline from GitHub due to a copyright violation. According to the publisher, the used assets are not free to use, because the game is still legally available.

GitHub’s OpenSC2K page now states that the repository is currently unavailable due to a takedown procedure. The takedown request addressed to GitHub has also been published. It states that OpenSC2K uses assets from SimCity 2000 and that this game infringes EA’s intellectual property. EA refers to the fact that the game can still be purchased through Origin and the publisher points out that no open source license of SimCity 2000 has been issued.

Developer Nicholas Ochoa may have referred to OpenSC2K as an open source version, but partly because he used original designs from the SimCity 2000 for his version, he realized the chances were real that one day a takedown request would follow. He hoped that he could get away with this, on the one hand because the game is already 24 years old, on the other hand because EA has offered the game SimCity 2000 for free on several occasions.

According to TorrentFreak, Ochoa is now trying to put a version of SimCity 2000 online that would not infringe EA’s intellectual property. He wants to remove the assets that have been used in violation of copyright and also give instructions on how to extract them directly from the original games files. Ochoa reports that not only the infringing assets but also its entire code have now been taken offline, without any prior warning.

Screenshot from the original SimCity 2000.