Will they be able to absorb it and use the symbol of it in ways the original creator would object to in order to further the success of the platform?

What if they can they rework the original creator’s design in a way that fully realizes the platform’s capabilities because of unpublished information they hold?

Tread carefully, industry….tread carefully

Spore has wonderful content creation tools that can produce a fantastic array of imaginative and intricate creatures, buildings and vehicles. Second Life tools are clunky and wonky by comparison, with some creation entirely impossible to accomplish without third-party applications (which are hellaciously expensive and/or require intensive study to master, usually both).

But EA asserts ownership over anything I create in Spore. By default, they upload everything I make and distribute it freely to other players, gratis. Linden Labs allows me to not only retain my IP interest in my creations, but also to sell products to other residents in a medium exchangable for real-world money. Their cut? I pay base tier on the space my shop occupies. That’s it.

So I spend painstaking hours polishing and tweaking Second Life objects, trying to get each detail perfect, but scant minutes tossing together Second Life creations. My personal investment is higher in Second Life because my creations are mine, and each represents potential income. And since Spore is just for fun, the Spore community won’t ever get my best effort as a creator (not to imply this is any great loss for them).

When you enable UGC, you see a flourishing of content. But when you concede player ownership and allow them to monetize their efforts, you see a flourishing of GOOD content (plus a great wave of mediocre content with really excellent marketing, but that’s the biz).

Creating a new program that mimics playing pacman *is* creating a new program. Similarly, if I paint my own version of the Mona Lisa, I can say I painted that copy of Mona Lisa.

You know you just shot yourself in the foot with the second sentence there, right?

Mike Weldon would only have “reproduced” a pacman clone if he had done:

copy pacman.exe pacman-clone.exe

He’d have only “modded” a pacman clone if he had patched the binary of an existing pacman implementation.

Creating a new program that mimics playing pacman *is* creating a new program. Similarly, if I paint my own version of the Mona Lisa, I can say I painted that copy of Mona Lisa.

I do agree we should not let judges decide – judges are people too! If we cannot decide, why do we think judges will be able to magically see the right solution? Similarly, I really am not at all convinced Sony has any actual need for such a strong claim. Half of it is grabbing for imaginary needs, such as the ability to reuse your generated content for their own profit. This is a pointless claim. 90% of users content is crap so you don’t want it anyways. The other 10% is of “free” value, ie, the sort of thing that is valuable but can’t be monetized without ruining its value. The extraordinarily rare case where someone actually does generate something of value? Make a deal with the person then. It’s not like you won’t already have a huge advantage in any negotiation when you, the multinational Sony, enter discussions with the individual who did the work. Even if they want to go their own way, the marketing coup of a real-world success engendered from your in-game game likely will more than cover the potential losses. Contrast that with trying to forcibly take it from the creator – a huge public backlash irrespective of the legality of your EULA and the potential for some judge to choose in favour of the author despite the EULA! The other reason to seize all content is for marketing – you want to be able to point to users content as examples of how cool your creation system is. Two easy solutions to this. One is to explicitly allow the use of people’s work for marketing the platform. The other is to instead run periodic contests. Users submitting to the contest will waive appropriate rights (possibly even all in this case!) You get two bonuses here – not only do you get the rights explicitly freely given to you, but you also get a built in selection process to determine which things are worth looking at in the first place! Yet another reason to seize content is for control: to allow the deletion and editing thereof. I’m not sure this requires any right transfer, it just requires a disclaimer that you reserve the right to corrupt your database at any time. Another reason is because your internal tools allow people to copy from each other’s content. The problem here is that you might be seen as an enabler, in a grokster fashion, of the duplication. Similarly, when someone does submit to the contest, or agrees to developing some solution externally, there is the question of the source of all the bricks they used – how can you ensure all the sources granted proper permission? By demanding complete ownership of everyone’s content, you can ensure all mish-mashes created are also yours so have simple ownership rules. This, however, is an illusion – if I illegally submit a building block into the system which contains ideas that I do not own, I would not have transfered the rights to Sony (since I didn’t have them to transfer) Thus, any aggregate *still* needs to be vetted against some player having injected an illegal texturemap.

This is all just a long winded fashion for me to reassert that I really feel these grab-all EULAs are misguided and unnecessary.

Letting a judge decide sounds like an uncreative solution for everyone involved. We can do better then that.

“First game I ever made was a Pac-Man clone.”

I do not see anything getting made in that statement. The first game you reproduced\modded was Pac-Man.

First game I ever made was a Pac-Man clone.

Take WoW as a example if they enabled user generated content for that game given the large numbers of players WoW has you would be looking at sevral hundred thousand people generating content. Most of it would be low quality but the massive volume would very quickly exhaust almost all paths for original content that Blizard might try and release in the future. Even if Blizard isolated its devlopment team from user generated content odds are given the massive amounts of user content being designed that large aspects of any content Blizard designed would be the same as user generated content.

The problem becomes if Blizard doesnt own the user created content then there at risk of being sued by the creator of that content. Sony aserting ownership of user created content is there answer to the issue. While this answer works for them it probally doesnt work for the people generating the content because while sony has gotten rid of the legal issues on its side the people on otherside still face to threat of being sued by sony if they use the ideas they created for any game under this eula for another game.

I think there needs to be a way for both players and companys to generate content at the same time without fearing being sued. People generating user created content for a game need to understand they can not sue because later company generated content looks like what they created. Companys need to understand that users will probaly take the content they made for your game and redo it in other games as both user generated content and if given the shot then company generated content for another company.

User generated content is going to be important in the future but not tell both creators and companys agree to not sue each other over it.

>when does supplying building blocks turn into moral rights as a creator?

YOu had me right up to the last point. Can you elaborate further?

Moral rights: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html

In short, it’s the legal principle (used worldwide, though the link provided focuses on US law) that underlies several aspects of IP protection, particularly around visual arts. To rephrase my question:

If you provide a bunch of building blocks, which might range from small pieces up to large building blocks, and IP is vested in you, and it gets remixed, at what point do you lose moral rights (IP ownership)? On the sliding scale of “barely tweaked” to “radical remix reinvention”, where does it stop being “yours”, if ever?

If someone makes a giant collage of Mickey Mouse out of PacMan stickers, what do the IP owners of Pac-Man get to claim? (I am sure Disney has a claim). What if it is a collage of an original creation?

YOu had me right up to the last point. Can you elaborate further?

>XBLA remixes

Pacman CE is f***ing brilliant. Go spend a little time with it if you haven’t yet.

For me, the key issues of ownership are tools (as you’ve identified) and time (at work, they pay for my time, so they own my IP, not true of Sony). I think the time area is where the MMORPG companies (and possibly the mod tool owners) will run into (legal) trouble.

Well, there is another difference in that, at work, you’re explicitly building things for your employer. It seems synonymous with ghostwriting: the point of the exercise is to have your IP folded under someone else’s umbrella.

That’s not the same social contract extant here, and that doesn’t seem to be properly spelled out.