 | UGC for gamers at InformationWeekSeptember 12th, 2008 |
User-Generated Content Gets Easier For Gamers is an article at InformationWeek that I was interviewed for.
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From the article:
Not all companies are so magnanimous however. EA, for example, in the Spore End User License (EULA), claims ownership rights over “…the Spore creatures that you create…”
Koster believes the game industry needs to become more accommodating to player content contributions. “Trying to claim ownership over the things [players have] created is just overreaching,” he said. “A blog platform does not claim ownership of everything written on it.”
So, it’s Koster vs. EA. Hehe. No, I know it’s not. There’s a place for what EA is doing, and it’ll help lead to what Raph’s doing. Wet the appetites, so to speak.
Is there really any difference, Raph, between EA claiming rights to something made using their builder tools, and a person’s rights to what they will create using their own tools, and put on Metaplace or SL? Granted, Metaplace is giving out some tools, but it’s not like you’ll enable people to create full 3D art. But I wonder if that won’t come, at some point, either through Metaplace (directly) or some generous group believing in the ideal.
Is there really any difference, Raph, between EA claiming rights to something made using their builder tools, and a person’s rights to what they will create using their own tools, and put on Metaplace or SL?
There is potentially a difference. Many creation tools could be defined as “rearranging” tools, and therefore stuff created with them could be considered derivative work.
On the other hand, let’s say that I create a cartoon character like the guy in the upper corner of the Metaplace website (it’s called a sqronk) and then someone who is a sqronk fan replicates it in Spore. EA claims ownership over that critter, even though the sqronk fan didn’t have the rights to it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3jAOuop_NI
In any case, we don’t claim ownership over anything you do with MP, so…
Interesting. So, is there a problem unless Chooseareality uses that specific creature, made with Spore’s creature making tool, anywhere else? Including Metaplace? I’m not talking about the image, but the actual 3D output.
I’m not sure about the legalities here. Would it be illegal for someone to make a game, doing their own art work, but making it look exactly like WoW?
Technically, … hurm. I am not a lawyer. The sqronk is not trademarked, but it is copyrighted by default, and EA therefore cannot exert IP rights — Chooseareality is actually fraudulently entering a contract with EA, and exposing EA to liability, because they are not a distributor of someone else’s IP, though since it was a recreation the case could be made it was fanart and non-commercial… though EA of course does profit by it as it spreads it out to other players.
If you prefer, it is as if Chooseareality just ripped an album track and put it on BitTorrent, and now both of them could be gone after by the owner of the song. EA can respond to a takedown notice under DMCA, if we filed one, but doesn’t look at what is there because to do so would be to admit an editorial role and therefore liability. However, if they are making their business around the notion that lots of folks will be copying, then they could be liable under the same reasons that YouTube is being sued by Viacom.
Doing your own artwork but cloning someone else’s can be a violation of trademark. A lot depends on what rights the original content creator reserves or not…
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