On IP, Legality, And Virtual Worlds
Thanks to LawMeme for their complex article discussing how to regulate player content in virtual worlds, with particular relevance to the recent announcement that MMO Second Life "now recognizes the ownership of in-world content made by subscribers." The author starts with a question posed by a third party at the time of the announcement: "You're creating this world in which people come to play and be creative, and yet you've given this world a system that has been extensively criticized as limiting creativity. Haven't you just given them a new set of hurdles to creativity?" He then outlines his worries: "If your game platform - your game's rules and infrastructure - is non-coercive, then your game is going to have a serious problem resisting the intrusion of decidedly unfree real-life values as soon as your players start to care greatly about it. Only if your game is so trivial and so boring that no one attaches any significance to what happens there will the sense of play survive unaided."
FIRST POST. Ok, had to get that out of the way, but its funny that THERE.com has been doing it right along. We develope the content, pay an ingame amount of money to sell our objects. And our name is taged to the object saying we designed it.
i got to say i would love to generate my own outfits for my character etc. however i would see a large portion of the people out there creating content to make their character appear nude. i play FFXI and i think they did a great job on the game. no player created content though, and i would say for the right reasons