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UGC and IP in a cloning worldNovember 4th, 2008 |
Slashdot is discussing an article at Joystiq about UGC and IP rights which comes from a GamePolitics news item of a few days ago about the update to the PSN TOU around UGC — specifically because of LittleBigPlanet.
The bottom line, amidst all that linkage? Sony is taking a fairly traditional approach to IP rights, from a networked game sense:
Sony can use user content without restriction to advertise. They can also ‘commercially exploit’ your creations without permission, and if they do benefit ‘commercially’ (read: monetarily) from your creations, they owe you nothing. You’re also agreeing to abandon your moral rights to the work. Most importantly, you’re not allowed to commercially benefit from your creation without their permission.
– Mark Methentis, Joystiq
Now, LittleBigPlanet feels more like a toy in a lot of ways — you work with the pieces they give you. Then again, it took mere moments in UO for someone to grab a bunch of fish and spell out a dirty word on the bridge in the middle of Britain. (What’s more, seeing that occasioned a moment of glee from the team, though perhaps not from management).
As more UGC-centric design flows in, the demands from users for retaining ownership or even monetizing their expression is going to rise. And it’s going to come into conflict with the notion of “derivative work” — everything in LittleBigPlanet is clearly of LittleBigPlanet. It is also going to run into strange problems with cultural appropriation — the Tetris clone in LBP is a strange agglomeration of cool and illegal on so many fronts that it boggles the mind.
In music we have the notion of a “cover version.” The original songwriter still gets credit and even cash, if the cover makes money — and sometimes the cover is very faithful, downright imitative. In games, we have infringement and we have homages and we have “a game in the same genre” and occasionally we get “remixes” like the modernized versions of Atari classics that have been popping up on XBox Live Arcade (the Missile Command sucks — sorry, widescreen makes the game worse, not better! — but the Warlords is pretty good!).
Games are formal systems. This means like much like mathematical proofs build on each other, new games tend to wholesale take the grammatical structure of an older game and change a few atoms. Sometimes these are purely topology of the challenge landscape — my preferred example is dated, but if you look at the old Dreamcast game Donald Duck: Going Quackers, it is a direct, top-to-bottom rip of the original Crash Bandicoot in every respect save for the art and the levels. Same controls, same everything.
In fact, as I have argued before, much of the issue with genre advancement in games is that whole genres are built out of increasingly baroque elaborations of simple games, with the result that genres gradually become less accessible to the uninitiated.
This leaves games in an awkward position as far as progression of the medium goes. Learning cover songs is how a musician learns. The entire field of classical music performance is predicated on interpretation! And indeed, many young game programmers and designers learn by remaking classics. In Metaplace, we have seen remakes (with variations) of Tetris, Pac-Man, Tron’s lightcycles, Robotron, Kaboom, Space Invaders, and more. Now, with games like these, there are so few atomic elements to the game that it hardly takes a big change to create something that feels substantially different from the original. (As an example — the Pac-Man-like game is multiplayer; the lightcycles game has no start or end, but runs full-time and users join and depart at will, etc).
If UGC really does succeed in democratizing game creation to the extent that many of us hope, we’re going to have to reach an accomodation with this question. When people learn and create Tetris within LittleBigPlanet, should Sony claim ownership? No, it presumably belongs to that holding company that controls the Tetris rights. But should they claim ownership? Shut down someone who is learning their craft? Is there an educational exception?
Way back in the early 90s there was a Tetris clone known as “Wesleyan Tetris” that you can’t get anymore. Randall Cook, a student at Wesleyan I presume, made a Tetris clone that made snarky comments at you as you played. It raspberried. It played cheers and weird sounds (roosters crowing, etc) as you did things. It told you “good move!” when you made a good move. It added invisible blocks. Rows that shifted sideways unpredictably, ruining your strategy. It was the best damn version of Tetris ever.
More recently, we saw this happen with Geometry Wars and Grid Wars, which was arguably better balanced than the original.
How do we find a way to get “the best damn version of <insert game here> ever” while still retaining IP rights for original creators? If someone makes a better Tetris, at what point do we really say it is OK to monetize it? If they do it in LittleBigPlanet, who should own what? If someone remakes an X-Wing as a Spore creature, should EA claim ownership?
And trickiest, to my mind: In a world where UGC is dominant — bear with me a moment, because that’s not the world we have now — when does supplying building blocks turn into moral rights as a creator?
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