4 ms·

The game-maker's attitude really frustrates me. I understand that creating something in an existing universe that you enjoy is very gratifying and gives you in

• stcredzero 16y ago
  Forging on ahead and leveraging the publicity of the cease and desist incident worked very well for the Words with Friends guys.
• Peaker 16y ago
  Derivative works are one of the most beneficial forms of work society can enjoy. Unfortunately, we ban them.
  • mcantor 16y ago
    Where do you personally draw the line between derivative works and stealing?
    • Peaker 16y ago
      When modern copyrights were first created in the US, they were viewed as a necessary evil. Society trades some of its liberty (publishers' copying for 14-28 years, mainly) hoping this will increase incentive and thus authorship of new works. Back then, they were viewed as a "necessary evil". Since then, a few things happened: * The public domain is no longer expanded, copyright terms have become effectively infinite * The view of copyrights as a trade was replaced by a view of "protecting authors" * This view of "protecting authors" almost implies the view that infringement is "stealing". * Everyone can now copy easily, not just publishers, so that the restrictions that applied to a tiny minority now restrict everyone's freedom much more harshly I agree with the view that it may be a necessary evil (even though even at the time of copyright's inception there was some empiric evidence that copyright was in fact unnecessary to form business models around authorship). I personally believe: * 5 years are a more reasonable copyright term in the modern age * Copyrights should only apply to for-profit institutions (e.g: publishers), similarly to how they were practically applied in earlier days. Individuals should not be restricted by copyrights, and we shouldn't have a police-state surveillance to enforce copyrights or any other law against people in the privacy of their homes. * Copyrights should not apply to "functional" works (e.g: Software). I see short copyright terms restricting our enjoyment of the arts and entertainment as reasonable, but copyrights artificially restricting our use of existing resources as very harmful. * Software tends to form a "net-effect" following which makes it difficult to compete, even when you have better software (e.g: Windows isn't technically superior to Linux, but the huge net effect around it is simply too overwhelming to compete with). This means that opensource software cannot gain traction when competing with closed-source software, and that's harmful for society. Software should be open for everyone to modify and distribute by law. * There are plenty of more efficient business models that will allow creation of useful software in the absence of copyrights (Contract work, pay-per-feature, support, etc) * Any loss in incentive to create new works will be more than offset by the increase in efficiency (anyone can improve and extend any existing work, rather than having to duplicate it, in order to implement any idea). * Derivative works are likely to form a huge stream of new works that we're currently losing out on, which is also likely to offset any loss of work due to lesser incentives. In summary: I don't view copyright infringement as theft at all.
• zarify 16y ago
  You make it sound like they're making their own game and ripping off the Blizzard characters/mythos/etc, rather than using Blizzard's own content creation tools which they release in order to promote modding... What are they going to do, give you modding tools and then tell you you're only allowed to use them completely out of context of the game they came with?
  • mcantor 16y ago
    That's a good point. Blizzard is kind of feeding with one hand and slapping with the other in that respect.