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LittleBigPlanet Creations Raising Copyright Questions
Joystiq's Law of the Game column uses the recently released LittleBigPlanet to address the question of intellectual property rights for user-created content within and for games. At this point, Sony's ToS claims a great deal of control over users' work, unlike Second Life's, which is much more permissive. GiantBomb has a related story pointing out creations within LittleBigPlanet that are copies of other games, and how they could lead to legal troubles for Sony if they aren't quick about taking them down.
They could just say 'anything you do here is your own responsibility' and leave it at that.
If they were stupid enough to allow claims of copyright or copyright infringement in their game it'll die like a jolly fast dying thing, of death.
I mean seriously.. its a game...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there. The only thing really new in this whole thing is that Sony is claiming ownership of their users' creations - something that even Microsoft wouldn't attempt. If Sony hadn't claimed ownership, there would be no issue.
I mean, really, PCs have had user-created content for ages. And by ages, I mean "since the start of the PC," since I recall using a level editor to create new content for a simple sidescroller 20 years ago on the PC. Level editors? Not new.
PC game publishers have never had an issue with user-created content. If the user creates it and it infringes, that's their problem, not the publisher or developer or anyone involved in the original game.
The only new thing that Sony brings to the table with LittleBigPlanet is their restrictive license where they claim ownership of your creations. Otherwise LittleBigPlanet is just a generic sidescroller with lousy jumping controls and the world's creepiest avatars.
Sidescrollers with level editors have been done before. It's just that no one before Sony was stupid enough to claim ownership of content that users created, so this issue has never existed before.
Sony's dumb license, Sony's dumb problem. End of story.
So by Sony's logic, if I fire up Microsoft Word and write a document, then Microsoft owns the copyright to my creation?
I fail to see the difference between this game and a word processor.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Actually, that's standard verbage and would be far more acceptable than claiming ownership.
EA's EULA simply says that you are giving them permission to use your work. Sony's is actually claiming your work is theirs.
The difference is, with EA you still own your work and theoretically could do whatever else you wanted with it.
The modding toolkits that come with PC games usually contain clauses that say the PC game developer or publisher owns the rights to all content created with the mod toolkits. UnrealED is a great example of this.