Interesting article. Some of it is good, and others... well, I got a problem of my characters being extensions of me, in that the female ones were... not. I just made them for the story I came up with for them, the powers they'd use, that sort of thing. The one I would say I identified with most was a big ass hulking brute that beat the crap outta everything he was mad at... aka a 'hulk', but not the same, no sir.
The rest, well... Just playin' concept art. But art, indeed so.
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RE: IP and you. I had this all laid out, in the... gosh, this feels weird to say... old forums.
Basic boildown: CoH's character creator, and the ID for Biographical information, the AE mission builder, were all tools and materials you buy at a hardware, craft, or art store. What you made with the tools/materials was YOURS. You get to keep it, and use it, and even protect it.
The technicalities of HOW this worked in CoH versus a hardware store is this: The game held pieces like the mentioned-in-the-article Lego pieces. What you constructed, while still an assembly of pieces, you made. The list of parts is the protected for you IP. NCSoft does not own the list you put together, you do. Still do. Which is why the Sentinal extractor was important. Your character's make up is stored there. It is yours. Not NCSoft's.
If you made an AE mission, ALL OF IT is yours. The words, the character lists, whether you made them or just used generics, the way it was put together, all that creation is yours. You own it. NCSoft does not.
The way you created your base, where you put things, the layout, all that? That's yours too. You made that.
What you do NOT own is this: The artwork to skin the parts. The mesh that makes the parts. And the client to make these parts come together. NCSoft owns all artwork, all pieces, used to make the things you made, and make it work.
The problem, then is this: It's a symbiotic relationship, in that, NCSoft wanted us to create things in their little universe, and we needed to make them for our own needs. If one goes, the other can't survive.
Oh, we can have a copy of the makeup of our character, and all it achieved... but... kinda useless to look at an .XML file and say "Yeah. Totally see how that worked." Just not quite the same.
Anyway, that's the IP argument. The artwork isn't stolen. It's just not usable in it's currently owned-by-us state without a client that runs it.