IP law violation is not theft. That tired metaphor needs to go. There is nothing new under the sun. Every idea one has is either copied verbatim or with variation or synthesized from multiple sources. Ideas are not protected, only particular expressions of ideas.
IP is a deeply flawed concept, and the current legal status shows that. Wholesale copying of ideas is not only tolerated but a routine aspect of all industries that rely on IP (covered by terms such as homage, inspiration, spiritual successor, et al). Only verbatim copying of letters and bits are considered violations of copyright law. Why are particular arrangements of building blocks privileged above the ideas behind them in copyright law? Because society cannot afford to subsidize the monopolization of ideas, except in the highly restricted cases of patents. Because copying with variation and synthesis of multiple sources generate progress that keeps society moving.
I must respectfully disagree.
IP protects the work that goes into creating a new "expression" of ideas as much as the core of the idea.
You're right; you can't call "super-powered heroes and villains" an IP-protectable object. You can't even call "flying brick" a protectable archetype.
But you absolutely can call "Superman" and all his associated weight and history of background and backstory protectable. It
is theft to steal a comic book, whether you steal the physical pages or you copy the digital file without paying for it.
That internet piracy is not nearly so harmful as the RIAA and others would like you to think doesn't change the fundamental truth that it IS theft to partake of another's work without their permission.
"There is nothing new under the sun" is false as long as "new expressions" of ideas are real things. Else, no novel would be worth writing any longer. No new videogame worth producing.
IP is
property. I won't say the existing laws work perfectly - they are deeply flawed - but efforts to "liberate" IP by changing the laws to permit anybody who wants to to copy and use (especially use-for-profit) whatever they like just because they don't think it's being made "officially available" enough...that's the same as deciding that a cobbler's shoes are not "officially available" because he decided to stockpile for the winter rush and won't lower prices just because he has a surplus this summer. "Well, since he won't sell them, clearly I can just walk in and take them. Maybe for what the government decides is a 'fair' rate."
When people say "NCSoft is sitting on the IP of City of Heroes," they
really mean NCSoft is sitting on the easiest means to get a game that has exactly the features of CoH/V back. If they were talking about re-creating or making new work to build a new game, they would be less eager for the CoH/V IP. It
is work to create new IP. City of Titans has a whole lot of people working very hard to produce new setting and character material so that our game will be its own animal. Just slapping old CoH IP onto a new coding structure
would be easier. But it still would be work to rebuild all the models.
Thing is, the fact that it would be easier is
why the IP has value as property. It's established. The creative work of designing it is done. And it was done by people who sold that effort to Crytpic, who sold that effort to NCSoft. NCSoft has
paid for it. To say they don't deserve to own it is no different than saying that the wealthy man who bought a unique work of art from an artist doesn't deserve that art work. The artist got paid for his work, but he was paid by that wealthy man. That wealthy man is down the money he spent on it; he has a right to the property he has purchased. The fact that he's wealthy and could afford the cost doesn't diminish his claim to the art. Without people like him, artists would not be able to create their art as freely, because they would be doing it solely as a hobby.
There's a LOT of hard work going into City of Titans. We're volunteers, and we do it as a labor of love, but the fact that we have to have paying jobs rather than being paid to create CoT means that it is a slower process, and that we give up a lot more of our personal time than we otherwise would. There are good and solid reasons for this, but game companies usually have big backers precisely to mitigate that reality. Those backers
deserve their control of the work product, because without them, it would either not have come to be, or would have cost the creators far more to create. More, perhaps, than the creators would be willing to expend. (Obviously not, so far, the case with CoT; we're pretty driven. But even we recognize that eventually, our creative work will be a product, and if we don't own it, we won't be able to sustain the services that go with it, and this industry-changing experiment will fail.)
Money and property are not evil, and IP is just another form of property. We may need better laws to simulate its specific expression as property than we actually have, but the core concept of "intellectual property" is sound. And the need to protect it when information, once created, is so easily stolen through duplication, is very real.
(Now, if you want to discuss RIAA and digital media and whether free distributions via piracy are harmful or not, I think that is its own other thread. Suffice it to say that I'm in the camp that thinks piracy is
unethical, but that a lot of the RIAA-types out there are business dunces who don't appreciate just how much more money a certain level of free distribution can make, because it's near-costless
marketing. I also think NCSoft has made an incorrect business calculation in closing CoH; if I didn't, I wouldn't be part of an effort to capitalize on the hole they left in the market, and do it
right.)
