4 ms·

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies. A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work. What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether. All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server? I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

venomsnake 11y ago
> I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself. Yes. But I paid $40 USD and I am entitled to the profits of the art I create with it is sensible stuff. MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create. But Bethesda can claim that video of my speed play trough of Doom II infringes their copyright (the case was with Nintendo and some of their games I think). Blizzard can claim that modifying a bits in my RAM memory infringes their copyright and so on.
- balfirevic 11y ago
  > MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create Hypothetically, could Microsoft legally do that if it wanted to? I'm guessing something like that could be part of EULA.
  - creshal 11y ago
    The home/academic licenses for MS Office have not-for-profit terms, IIRC.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  In different words, you recorded and broadcast your performance of the production company's game. Which, for other forms (Music, stage plays/musicals, etc.) usually requires royalties paid to the creator of the thing being performed if you perform it for profit. I think it wouldn't be difficult to argue that the different mediums -- character on a screen vs. character on a stage -- don't really change that aspect significantly. The legal evolution around the birth and maturation of machinima is kinda interesting to dig into.

venomsnake 11y ago

> I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself. Yes. But I paid $40 USD and I am entitled to the profits of the art I create with it is sensible stuff. MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create. But Bethesda can claim that video of my speed play trough of Doom II infringes their copyright (the case was with Nintendo and some of their games I think). Blizzard can claim that modifying a bits in my RAM memory infringes their copyright and so on.

balfirevic 11y ago
> MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create Hypothetically, could Microsoft legally do that if it wanted to? I'm guessing something like that could be part of EULA.
- creshal 11y ago
  The home/academic licenses for MS Office have not-for-profit terms, IIRC.
mattlutze 11y ago
In different words, you recorded and broadcast your performance of the production company's game. Which, for other forms (Music, stage plays/musicals, etc.) usually requires royalties paid to the creator of the thing being performed if you perform it for profit. I think it wouldn't be difficult to argue that the different mediums -- character on a screen vs. character on a stage -- don't really change that aspect significantly. The legal evolution around the birth and maturation of machinima is kinda interesting to dig into.