the_dog_god wrote:
gidget wrote:
Staff members work for Neopets, therefore Neopets has the copyright to any and all of their Neopets related work. So, that would not be the reason.
But if the staff member was terminated before they made the idea of Neoschools legally belong to Neopets Inc, rather than the staff member who originally thought of the idea, then you have problems with ownership of the rights to Neoschools I believe.
No you wouldn't. Anything created in connection with anything Neopets owns is automatically their intellectual property. That's why you can't sell your own neopet artwork. Even though you drew it, even if the neopet doesn't look anything like the ones on the site, it still belongs to Neopets.com. So if a staff member said "Hey! Let's create a school system where Neopets(tm) could train and gain Intelligence, we could have aishas(tm) and blumaroos(tm) as teachers, and there could be a gym class where pets could learn new Battledome(tm) abilities, and they could take field trips to Faerieland(tm) or Maraqua(tm)!", and then that staff member was terminated/quit/whatever, all those ideas would still belong to the company, not the individual.
In any case, TNT has told us that they scrapped Neoschools because the project ended up being way too large and complicated to finish satisfactorily. And they didn't want to develop and release something no one would have been happy with.