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Marvel Clamps Down On Game Skins
mrleemrlee writes "Marvel Entertainment has sent a cease-and-desist letter to The Skindex, which houses skins for customizing computer games such as The Sims and Freedom Force. The Webmaster has responded by pulling the website's content and publishing a copy of the letter. This is interesting in that such skinning has been going on for a decade, at least since Doom. Only now has Marvel decided to protect its IP; what might it have in store? Do other sites have anything to worry about?" Are user-created game skins of their characters good publicity for companies like Marvel, or an unacceptable copyright violation?
This could backfire on Marvel. It is like prosecuting fans who write fanfic for copyright violation. While they are creating derivative works without authorization, and copyright law bans this, they are usually doing no harm, and smacking them down will create a lot of enemies for the copyright holder. Enemies aren't customers.
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I clicked throught the different sections of the website, and it looks like ALL the skins are taken off. I could understand Marvel if the entire site was of Marvel skins and nothing else. If he made any money off of advertising, he is soley making it from Marvels stuff.
I thought skins were like fan art, in that they fell under 'fair use', as long as no attempt was made to make profit from them. At least, those made completely by the fans themselves -- screencaps from movies or games, or scans from the comics might be different.
Very depressing to see that current 'copyright' law is only being used to prevent the fans from trying to live their fantasies.
Actually, I think my comment above isn't quite on target. I didn't realize that Marvel wasn't actually the game maker, but rather was a third party whose characters were being used by skinners to create cool characters for various games made by other companies. So Marvel doesn't really have a financial upside to this practice (at least in a short-sighted view).
Still too bad.
That's the bad thing about it. Marvel is losing no money from this. No one is going to avoid the Spiderman movie because they have a spiderman skin in The Sims.
It is there right, granted. I an not saying they do not have the right to do this. I just wish they wouldn't.
http://use.perl.org
Unfortunately, due to the way Trademarks work, if you don't protect your Trademark, it will enter the public domain.
They could always license the trademark to the skins site for a token fee (say, $1) under certain restrictions (such as licensing downloaders only to use the skins for personal use, for the site not to sell access to the skins, etc.).