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Copyright and the Games Industry
A recent post at the Press Start To Drink blog examined the relationship the games industry has with copyright laws. More so than in some other creative industries, the reactions of game companies to derivative works are widely varied and often unpredictable, ranging anywhere from active support to situations like the Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes debacle. Quoting:
"... even within the gaming industry, there is a tension between IP holders and fan producers/poachers. Some companies, such as Epic and Square Enix, remain incredibly protective of their Intellectual Property, threatening those that use their creations, even for non-profit, cultural reasons, with legal suits. Other companies, like Valve, seem to, if not embrace, at least tolerate, and perhaps even tacitly encourage this kind of fan engagement with their work. Lessig suggests, 'The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.' Indeed, the more developers and publishers that take up Valve's position, the more creativity and innovation will emerge out of video game fan communities, already known for their intense fandom and desire to add to, alter, and re-imagine their favorite gaming universes."
Intellectual property is a bankrupt and indefensible notion. Scratch a weasel word, find a thief.
Someone post the torrent already, preferably with both projects in the same .torrent
For, uh, my student paper on IP laws. I need this as a first hand source. Thanks!
moox. for a new generation.
I'm getting fed up with these two concepts. There is only one kind of Plagarism... cheating. If you didn't do the work on your paper, then you're cheating. If you didn't provide sources, you better have research. If you don't have research, your paper is baseless and should be given a failing grade.
Copyright is the idea that you control the copies of your creation. Obviously, nobody wants to spend thousands of hours creating something then letting someone else (a corporation) sell it without royalties. Or letting people download it for free off the internet. (Hey Pirates, you think you aren't stealing? Well why don't you download a random assortment of bits. Oh that's right, because you want somebody else's *work*).
However, Copyright has turned into this idea where as soon as you make a "Dark cloaked figure who kills people for a living" you can go bully anyone else for doing something like it. No, it lets you own your words. Not something like your words, your words only.
Trademarks protect against people making Harry Potter books or Mickey Mouse movies. There is no need and purpose for copyright to cover that issue.
IP is not a failed idea. Our system is what's broken (or more likely, those who are in charge of the system).
In Japan, you have a ton of people making derivative works (doujin) and selling them at low volume at various events, the biggest of which being Comiket, which half a million people attend. A lot of times, these derivative works are with the approval of the original creators, who set out guidelines as to what they consider proper and improper derivative works. The biggest content creator I can think of is Nihon Falcom (Japanese video game maker), who recently offered fairly liberal access to their entire library of music.
Would Valve be any more approving of, say, people selling Half-Life comic books as SE is of their properties? Especially with more risque contents?
While Valve in particular may be relatively forgiving, it seems less of a single sliding scale between PC/free and console/not free and more of a dichotomy of PC devs smiling upon derivatives as long as they're games that reuse assets, and console devs smiling upon derivatives as long as they're not games and don't reuse assets.
The author really should have done more research for this article. Epic games is, typically, not one of the overly protective companies desperately trying to nail down every fan with an idea in the name of Intellectual Property enforcement. The event cited (C&D over a gift doll) was actually done in error and was not sent by Epic themselves but rather their trigger-happy crack legal team. Mark Rein (PR dude) later explained the incident as an accident and publicly apologized for it.
Typically, Epic has been more in stride with Valve in that they actively encourage people to mess with their games in not-for profit ways. They have also released free SDK's and source code for their engines. They've held contests (with cash prizes, noless) in order to cultivate talent and often recruit employees from the community. They've even taken a mod to retail status (Tactical Ops) just like Valve did with Counter Strike. They've also helped to pioneer the feature of community made mods and maps being offered on consoles.
On the whole, Epic is one of the least "evil" gaming companies on the planet right now. And while they're not immune to making mistakes, I personally don't believe they deserve to be unfairly placed on the wrong side of this particular fence.
I was reading about a series of Japanese games called the Touhou project a few weeks back. What was interesting is that while the single author of the franchise enforces his copyright to the games themselves, he doesn't on the characters and settings that games revolves around.
This has allowed many groups to create works (primary comics, but also remixed music and other things) based off his work. He doesn't mind people even selling these things. All they're required to do, is to make sure that they state they're not an original work.
This has made him and his franchise surprising successful, but it seems he is now worried that it'll grow beyond his control. After a project announced that they would produce an short animated film with some well known voice actors, he ranted in his blog that about it. Some people would argue that Touhou is currently better known for the community's work rather then the creator's original work, and unless he starts really enforcing his copyright, this may not change. On the other hand, if he did that, it would also kill off most his community.
Stuck behind a rock and a hard place.
Some companies support "modders" making derivative works, some block or threaten legal action, but some start one way and switch. I don't suppose the Devs want to do it, but Legal probably get twitchy these days.
The main one that irks me is Relic. Dawn of War was a great game with a good modding community. Dawn of War 2 came along and (in part because of the GfWL networking) really locked down on modding such that most of the community gave up. There were some incredible mods and textures for DoW1, and any "pure graphics" changes were user-side only and didn't break games. Mods were properly handled and a handshake before the game failed if you weren't running the same Mods. Then DoW2 was released, it was "more complex" (like that ever stopped the community!) and modding didn't get anywhere near the same support (plus even textures needed to be put in as mods the last I saw). You can't even easily add custom badges and banners, FFS!
I can see the point of copyright and intellectual property to some degree - working hard on something and then having someone else duplicate or modify it or appear to be an official part of it without your permission and without credit or recompense, potentially making a bad impression on those who don't know it isn't official, is wrong and serves no good purpose. The problem is that corporations take it too far.
A mod, modificacion of a game, often have to distribute files of the original game modified. On some games this is allowed, so is not gray area, is white area, but on others theres not text that allow you to do that.
Is sad, but mods that use a popular IP are... popular. Not all mods are based on movies, books, etc.. but there are big group of then. These mods are almost all gray area, very few have the authorization of the owner of the ip.
Modding use to be something that add value to a game and the studio that created that game. People are more inclined to buy a game where there are a strong mod community and cool mods.
But Microsoft changed this with the concept of DLC's. Now companies salivate with the idea to create these mods thenselves,... small amateurist modificatios that can be created in a hour of work, and sell for $10 or $4. As a result, modding is something that remove value from a game. DLC's is modding done by the original authors. It was created on the consoles, because consoles can't have modding, but now is leaking and poisoning the PC world. Games like Total War have started to encript the datafiles, to stop modding from flourish.
Modders thenselves have changed. The original profile for a modder where Hackers, in the old sense of creative people that like to hack fun stuff. Thats what created these hacked wolfesten.exe's. Nowdays the modder scene is a hybrid of indie and amateur developpers. Amateur people that have a voice, and claim for quality in the SDK. Mods tend to be total conversions (everywhere but a few games, like the TES serie), made by people that invest time and maybe money, and some expect that to help then take a position in the game industry and get experience in game developping.
So modding is more or less dyiing. And the companys will change his opinion and modders, and there will be some badwill.. and probably we will return again to the hackers, times, where to change the weapon speed on a MW2 server, you first need to hack the exe. So we hare returning to these wolfestein.exe times.
-Woof woof woof!
I can understand square/enix, the developers of this "fan-sequel" tried to get fame for doing another chrono trigger. Chrono Trigger is a brand, it was probably the most famous rpg on the snes. Square build up this brand, why should they let somebody else make use of it? The creators of the chrono sequel could have also made their own rpg, but probably noone would care, so they make a rpg in the chrono trigger scenario, so they get world famous for doing the chronotrigger sequel. You know if you want to make a game related to a film, like batman, you also need to pay the licence holders of batman money, for creating a game with the tag "batman". And above else this game could also be a bad game and would damage the brand then, which would lead to less income for square, which square needs to be able to exist.
Nah, the whole C&D thing was pretty much a fabrication on the part of the creators who had either lost interest in the project or were unable to finish it, because they wanted to be remembered in a positive way.
Think about it, if they actually cared they could have easily continued working on it - there's hardly a lack of strong anonymizing systems available online today, Tor and Freenet being the best known examples. They could also have simple hosted the ROM on a server in Russia or China where issuing a takedown notice, let alone obtaining the required paperwork for a lawsuit, would have been nigh-impossible. Plenty of people who commit much more blatant violations get away with it that way.
No, this was just a lame cover-up. I'm not saying they didn't recieve a C&D (many sites do, and the standard response is simply to switch hosting), I'm just saying that wasn't their real reason for cancelling the project.
...just the last outgrowth of greedy, late capitalism gone wild in despair.
An attempt to extend land grab nowadays, when practically all land is grabbed.
Just Say No to IP.
(Note: I haven't any issues with copyright, with trademark -- and to some extent with patents -- if applied with measure).
It's not so a complex matter. I don't know why, but Japanese publishers hates opening up their resources. Programmers prefer closed, hard-coded software structure design with less capability of modding. Take a look at Doom. Highly moddable. Any .wad accepted. Engine licensed open-source. Take a look at any Japanese PC game(Bio Hazard, Lost Planet, whatever). Any moddable feature? Where's the Mod Dev Kit? Where's the seperate vanilla mod folder or file? Any GPL, Apache, BSD licensed component? None, because they hates opening things up. Even if you establish an open project, some people dislike opening everything up in Japan.
# Not a racism, I'm just happened to born in Japan.
*ahem* I'm not a lawyer, especially not a japanese lawyer, but as I'm aware, the reason they can make fangames is because japanese copyright law DOESN'T care if the product is free. Zun prolly would care if someone made their own touhou 13.0 and SOLD it, but if its free then it's protected
Kind of odd that this comes up a day after Ninendo lost the preliminary hearing in a rather important case against Divineo in France.
To summarize Nintendo sued Divineo over the production of flash cards for the Nintendo DS. The judge ruled that consoles should operate more like "windows" and that anyone should be able to develop for them without the companies approval.
http://www.assentek.com/communique-presse-nintendo-vs-assentek-linker
In the first round I guess the "homebrew" community will get what it wants...of course if it hold up after appeal it will have the side effect of destroying the console industry (with no need for licensing or control over their platforms there is no revenue stream) but hey at least they would be open right?
You are very misguided. Other responders have enumerated the ways. I will only add this one:
Copyright is the idea that you control the copies of your creation
Ostensibly, yes. However in actuality a digital copy is an entirely passive entity. It cannot be controlled by its author. So in an effort to seem to maintain control, copyright law aspires to give you control over something that can be controlled...specifically...other people.
Everyone in the world, in fact, if the law is to serve its purpose.
And as history has shown time and time again, the moment people feel a chain on them, they yank on it.
Laws that punish those who harm others are one thing. Laws which go against the grain of human nature are quite another. And one is much more likely to succeed than the other.
One thing I never got: Why hasn't Brian Clevinger been sued off of his ass yet?
Rob
The war between open and closed source has coalesced in the gaming community. Take Infinity Ward vs Steam for example. Both have great games; however one allows for open source utilization and private dedicated hosting, while the other has recently chosen to horde their source code and even the rights to multiplayer dedicated hosting. You would not think that these two giants would be conspiring, especially with both of their track records in the gaming community, but I have drawn some dangerous conclusions for the entire gaming community in my mind about such things: We must examine the recent developments to come to this insane conclusion of mine: Both corporate giants Infinity Ward and Steam have sold out to each other: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/11/06/non-steam-digital-deliverers-uninterested-selling-mw2 You can’t play Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 without steam on the PC version, and at the same time Infinity Ward has decided to not allow the PC version to have private dedicated servers! This is a dangerous leap towards PC gaming prioritization, all in the name of “keeping the PC on a level playing field with consoles”. How many more people will buy into the amazing DRM abilities of Steam and then lock every open source aspect of their game? Will Valve follow suit? I fear that there is an inevitable slow prioritization happening in the PC gaming world. For once the PC world becomes as DRM restricted as efficiently as the console world, both console and PC gamers will be screwed in quality, hosting, and pricing. I do not believe that anything good can come from this new trend seen emerge with the Steam/Infinity Ward convergence with the CoD:MW2 release. Unless PC gamers are able to restrict themselves from supporting these colossal game giants to protest their move to not allow things like their disabled dedicated server capabilities, we will be allowing these companies to succumb to the inevitable greed that will prosper in this world of PC gaming prioritization. The scary part is Infinity Ward is apart of Activision, and Activision is apart of Blizzard. You can see how the conspiracies can fly off the handle from here.
Many (most?) Touhou fangames are sold. Occasionally pricier than ZUN's set rates of \1200 day of and \1500 at retail--Scarlet Symphony was \1800.
Most of the doujin games based off touhou are NOT free, they're sold. Check out himeya shop online, they have a pretty good listing of them and are one of the few companies that buy them up and resell them to US customers.
If I spend many hours thinking of very novel and original way of doing something useful, should I not be able to live off the resulting earnings for a while before the person who did not invest any time in the idea can just copy it and undercut me?
Your use of "novel" and "live off the earnings for a while" makes it sound like you're talking about patents, but the article is about copyrights. Copyrights and patents differ in their scope and their rationale, and the casual use of the term "IP" to refer to both confuses the issue by ignoring these differences. For one thing, patents are more defensible in this respect than copyrights because they last 20 years, not life plus 70. If you mean patent, say "patent"; if you mean copyright, say "copyright".
the whole GPL and open source concept relies on copyright law. Without the law of copyright and IP then some private company could just take any open source product they liked and then sell it or a derivative product for a profit.
Without copyright, it would be lawful to disassemble an app, comment it thoroughly, and spread it throughout the Usenets. Crackers would be encouraged to make software free.
I expect the Doom III engine will follow suit once its no longer in use and assuming any legal issues can be resolved
Id Software is a U.S.-based company. It can't release Doom 3 under any GPL-compatible license until October 2019, when U.S. Patent 6384822 on depth-fail shadowing expires.
At least they bother to embrace their fanbase. Do companies think before they go shooting their own fans?