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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.
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.
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!
IP is only 3 centuries old in the anglosaxon world, 2 for the rest of Europe and 1 for the rest of the world, and in that time it has become a cesspit of creation murdering nonsense that has been slowly making sure creativity in this world is killed because your ideas might make vague use of common tropes someone else with the money wants to sue you about, making sure most of the artistic creation of the last 10 millenia could get sued the fuck off if it was made today. The ideals of feeding the public domain while removing the need for the patronage system were very worthy, but they just created an even more oppressive system of patronage because from a social class standpoint, artists have to be either wildly successfully distributed or will not be able to distribute full time anyway, making things moot. Clinging on the idea of IP as implemented is thinking you can make the Titanic float by repainting the grand staircase.
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.
Linux.
Firefox.
MySQL.
Apache.
Gnome.
KDE.
And if you're going to redefine your original statement so that GPL counts as payment, I give you:
Chromium (browser and OS)
Open BSD
Free BSD
Hey Pirates, you think you aren't stealing?
Do we HAVE to go over this again?
I'm getting fed up with these two concepts. There is only one kind of Plagarism...
...misspelled.
cheating. If you didn't do the work on your paper, then you're cheating.
plagiarism /pledrzm, -dirz-/
-noun
1. the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
English? YOU FAIL IT!
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.
I've spent hundreds of hours developing articles for Everything2. I shudder to think at the hours which have gone into Wikipedia. Human Emotion? YOU FAIL IT!
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.
The courts let you do that. They also provide a mechanism for recovering the costs of frivolous lawsuits. Understanding Jurisprudence? YOU FAIL IT!
IP is not a failed idea. Our system is what's broken (or more likely, those who are in charge of the system).
you are the government
you are jurisprudence
you are the volition
you are jurisdiction
and I make a difference too
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First of all, no I don't know those money booths where you can get cash for free.
Second, that's a completely flawed analogy. The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create music/video/software. If people are doing those things without the copyright incentive, that means that we don't need copyright after all.