Blizzard, Microsoft Codify Licenses for Machinima

Wired has up a piece looking at two recent licenses released by Microsoft and Blizzard clarifying their policies towards player use of their games to create Machinima. It's an interesting discussion, because while Blizzard's license grants rights for the first time since World of Warcraft was released (essentially deliberately opening holes in their EULA), Microsoft's new policy takes rights away from enthusiastic Halo players at a time when everyone has just been given the capability to create their own in-game videos. Despite some trepidations, both licenses seem to be well received: "Even digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation signed off on the rules ... Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney who examined both sets of rules, said the main difference between them lies in a user's base set of rights ... 'It's great news that both of these companies are taking machinima seriously enough that they have been willing to come out and authorize some kinds of machinima ... That's a huge improvement over where we were before, which was (that) no one wanted to give machinima guys any kind of guidance at all.'"

Comments

Re:Well received?

[EvanED]

Doesn't everybody just click "I accept"?

I bet the people who did, say, RvB didn't just click "I accept." I bet they read it. Heck, they might have had a lawyer read it for them.

Imagine a real hollywood set

[freshmayka]

Machinima is storytelling. Now what if you could not only break into, but copy and distribute all the props and actors from a Hollywood back lot?

So Steven Spielberg spends a couple dozen million dollars on models and props and sets and backdrops and... makes a movie and cashes in on it.

Bungie designs a three-dimensional virtual world with models and props and sets and backdrops and... turns it into a gameworld and cashes in on it.

If in EITHER of these cases, Random Joe comes in and uses any of these creative resources (the models, sets, props, actors) and makes an entertainment product and sells it... What do you call that?

If it WAS a studio back-lot, it's probably grand theft for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in props.

In a digital world, you're just manipulating and redistributing a data-stream. Sounds fair enough right? Well so long as nobody turns a profit from it...

The artist could argue that all art steals from previous ideas and creations. However you can't actually make a replica of Michael Angelo's "David" and name it Joe Average's "Bob" and sell it or otherwise claim it as your creation... Make a video of the statue, or a photo, paint over it, add a soundtrack, and call it "Mixed-Media" and THEN you can put your name on it.

Re:Imagine a real hollywood set

[DavidTC]

Um, no, actually, if you snuck onto a movie lot and filmed a movie, you might be in trouble for trespassing, but it's no sort of copyright violation I can think of, and you could even sell said movie. It's not even theft to use props and whatnot, as long as you weren't actually attempting to make off with them, any more than it's theft to sit on a bench in someone's front yard. (And if it was theft, it still wouldn't be illegal to sell the movie.)

In fact, there are actually 'illegally filmed' movies out there, including some big ones, where they thought they had permission to film somewhere and didn't ask the right people. They sometimes get charged with various things, like obstructing traffic, but none of them are 'copyright violation', because you can't copyright reality and it is explicitly legal to take pictures of whatever the hell you want in public.

The only exception is sometimes you can't use photographs of people for profit without consent. Only people, not their stuff. And, of course, taking a photograph of a copyrighted image counts as copying it, so need to be careful there.

Your example is even stupider than normal examples comparing copyrights to property rights. You've managed to come up with something that isn't illegal at all.

Reading is hard. Jump to conclusions, instead!

[Malkin]

You didn't actually read Blizzard's Fair Use Guide before posting that, did you?

No, they don't expect the 16-year-old kid to go out and get a license before he makes his movie. They only want you to get a "content use license" if your film ends up being used for a commercial purpose, or screened in public at a festival. That's not at all unreasonable, since you're making ample use of their artwork in your movie.

Barrier to Entry

[hidannik]

While it's nice to know what's kosher and what isn't, the Microsoft license forbids two common practices - one that is common for writers just getting their feet wet, and another that keeps the costs low enough for hobbyists and amateurs to dabble.

The first practice I'm referring to is fan fiction; a writer makes "baby steps" by writing sequels or prequels or side-stories or alternate endings, etc. that use the existing fictional world as a base.

The second is the use of sound and music from the original work. The machinima author, to comply with this license, has to produce new sound effects for everything in the film, new ambient noise, and new music. And has to synchronize those sounds with the action while also adjusting sound placement in the environment, something that games do for you automatically, just as they do the animation of characters and 3D rendering and physics.

I'm not saying that Microsoft is wrong to put these restrictions in the default machinima license for its properties; for the sound case in particular there are license considerations that make it understandable. But it will have a chilling effect.

Consider all the machinima out there that would never have happened had this license been in place six years ago. There would have been no Red vs. Blue (violates both rules), no Fire Team Charlie (violates sound rule), and so on.

I like to make machinima "arrangements" of games with good stories; I am in the process of making one of Shadow of the Colossus. After that's finished, I'd wanted to make one of either BioShock or Halo. This license certainly kills that idea (violates sound rule). Or if I do make it, I'll be the only one that can watch it.

Not only that, this means all walkthrough and speedrun videos will have to lack game sound, and it also leads to the slightly ludicrous situation that Halo 3 players can record gameplay and share it, but cannot save it in video form for posterity.

Hans