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.

Comments

Re:Sony

[Chaos Incarnate]

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.