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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.
Sony should just pull a Youtube and say they are a carrier for this content, and will pull down content based on DMCA claims.
The other thing is, how many real commercial games are simply copies of other games with slightly different graphics anyway?
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
Also, I don't see how that game creation could violate copyrights, they're such cartoonish that could well fall under the fair use gambit, under parodies or limited usage.
until one post the entire star wars saga, of course, as a single level
They could just say 'anything you do here is your own responsibility' and leave it at that.
Sony could say that if they weren't hosting the user-made content themselves, and distributing it to other players. If players keep it on their own consoles, it's nobody else's business.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
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.
As far as I know, nobody's ever had built-in distribution for end users' content before like LBP does. It's much simpler for Sony to do so if they are assigned the copyright; then they know they have the right to distribute it wherever they want to.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
But I think thats the entire point. It is a game, and if you can make/play a recreation of another game in it, that might (in the eyes of executives or whathaveyou) to lessen your desire to actually buy that game. Instant lawsuit.
That argument falls on one point, the games industry have been using each others idea's for decades. That's where we get 'genre's' from.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This is a great example of what can be done with the level editor, but is anyone going to actually confuse it with the real thing? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg0ZBHdz7wM This game has barely been released and we are getting stuff of pretty high quality. I can't wait to see what happens in the next few months.