Author Topic: I know  (Read 20084 times)

MWRuger

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Re: I know
« Reply #20 on: January 17, 2014, 09:07:29 PM »
No, I'm saying that large corporations would have the means to still tie up IP while individual copyright holders, like say a self published poet, would not.

In fact, they could easily be at the mercy of large corporations who could steal almost with impunity and then claim copyright because they could defend it.

I can't imagine a worse solution to copyright abuse. The current systems DOES need reform to take into account digital technology and a changing world but it needs to be something that is fair and equitable to large and small copyright holders.
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Re: I know
« Reply #21 on: January 18, 2014, 02:58:10 AM »
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.
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Segev

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Re: I know
« Reply #22 on: January 18, 2014, 03:35:55 PM »
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.)

thunderforce

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Re: I know
« Reply #23 on: January 18, 2014, 04:17:22 PM »
The thing to remember about IP, copyright, patent law, and the like is that, particularly in the domain of intangible "knowledge" and infinitely-duplicable "creative" works (such as anything that can be replicated digitally or whose material composition is irrelevant to its utility and content, such as books or movies)...they're designed to allow us to treat them as "property" in the same way we would physical property.

And the thing to remember about that is that it's a social construct. There's nothing magical about doing it that way; if we could find a method to incentivise creation which doesn't rely on artificial scarcity it would be better; and in cases where the scarcity is all we get and the incentive is minimal (like, say, where the original creator is long dead and no-one is making any money off the product) we can recognise that the system is badly flawed.

Furthermore, of course, that's why we can't just blithely proceed to pretend it _is_ property. Physical property rights are a social construct as well, but the scarcity is not artificial.

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The old-time gold prospectors of California and Alaska panned for gold for hours upon hours and days upon days for years on end. If, once they were done acquiring it, somebody else could just take a look at it and produce copies that were just as useful as the originals for a tenth the effort, these men would never have gone prospecting.

And since the scarcity of gold would then be artificial, there would clearly be no point in them doing so. Rather than allowing the Gold Producers Association of America to bring in draconian punishments for gold copying with the aim of restricting everyone to buying prospected gold, any sane society would conclude that the best mechanism to promote the availability of gold would be to copy it.

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If Jed Clampett owns some back-woods land and discovers oil on it, and decides that he doesn't want to allow Exxon to come in and mine it out, no ethical nor moral way exists to demand that he give access to that oil.

This is a bit of a dodge; in essentially every jurisdiction, the state does reserve the right to demand your land if it serves the public good.

Furthermore, that is not inherently unreasonable; the only reason it _is_ your land is that the state is willing to enforce that right; absent a state, Esso can just turn up and start drilling. Physical property, beyond the level of what you happen to hold in your hand at the moment, is every bit as much a social construct.

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To try to force "sale" by deciding that not selling it means it's now something that can be taken for free, we effectively deny ownership to anybody. Without ownership, we cannot expect people to work to produce.

This is simply false. If someone writes a book, it's generally with the aim of selling that book. In a world with recovery of abandoned copyrights, the situation would be much the same when first writing a book; the loss of the ability to sit on it later and deny it to the world would be a very minimal factor. We can see this because people were perfectly willing to write books when the copyright term was 25 years; when it was entirely likely that an author would see their work enter the public domain in their own lifetime.

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it IS theft to partake of another's work without their permission.

No, it isn't. Theft requires "intent to permanently deprive". If I steal your bicycle, you don't have a bicycle anymore; if I copy your bicycle, you still have a bicycle, for all that it's tough if you planned to sell me the bicycle.

JaguarX

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Re: I know
« Reply #24 on: January 18, 2014, 05:04:28 PM »

No, it isn't. Theft requires "intent to permanently deprive". If I steal your bicycle, you don't have a bicycle anymore; if I copy your bicycle, you still have a bicycle, for all that it's tough if you planned to sell me the bicycle.

Intent to permanently depriving a person. Yep. In criminal law that is the just of it. But also the other part of that definition is not always simply tangible stuff, like a bike. Sometimes depriving of income, money, ownership rights, and sometimes sole ownership rights, distribution rights and etc, which can be theft also if the purpose was to or seemed to with intent to permanently deprive a person.

Segev

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Re: I know
« Reply #25 on: January 19, 2014, 03:25:28 PM »
Not everybody writes with the intention of selling. There are a number of people who write for their own personal pleasure, and are actually very shy about even sharing their work. It is, nonetheless, their work. If Critic O'Literary stumbles across it, and thinks it's the best work he's ever read, and wants to distribute it, but Shy McWriter doesn't want her work distributed at all, does Critic O'Literary have a right to take this "social construct" of IP and just say "everybody deserves to read it?" Under that justification, does Critic have a right to publish it against Shy's will?

What if Shy is writing it with intent for it to be distributed, but it's memoirs of a time she spent working with high-powered political figures, and she knows it will make enemies? She therefore wants it published upon her death. Cowardly, perhaps, but is it not her right to reserve her work until then? If it isn't, why would she write it at all, lest it be forced into publication when it could make her suffer?

To say that property is a social construct is...partially right. The idea that the guy with the most and biggest weapons isn't the guy who gets to do whatever he wants with anything and anybody he wants is, indeed, a social construct. But to dismiss "social constructs" as if they are something mutable and all equally good or bad is a dreadful mistake. "The Right of First Night" that kings and other nobility claimed was also a social construct. "Honor killings" are social constructs. The idea that you have a right of freedom of political speech is a social construct. About the only part of the Bill of Rights in the USA that is not merely a social construct is the 2nd Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms. That one isn't a mere social construct because it's the one that is self-enforceable: if you exercise it, it becomes a lot harder for others to deny it to you. (Not that they can't, but they'd need more or bigger arms.)

"Social constructs" are optimization rules. Some are good and some are bad. They evolve first out of realpolitik ("No, you can't just go and take that man's daughter and wife for your own, because he'll come attacking us and we don't want to afford that war.") and then, eventually, start being deliberately designed to try to optimize human success (the Magna Carta, then the US Constitution, as examples). Property is a crucial one. Every society that has denied the right of private property based on the free-willed choice to exchange it for other property or for services has suffered amazing (by American standards) levels of poverty and scarcity. The more a society operates on the concept that a man's labor and the fruits thereof are his own until he exchanges them for something he wants, the more that society has prospered.

Intellectual property - IP - is the fruit of somebody's labor. If you want it to be produced abundantly, you will respect it as theirs to control as much as you would respect a cobbler's right to control the shoes he produces (until he sells them).

Again, because the scarcity-of-non-unique-product is non-existent in our digital day and age when it comes to IP, we need to find better ways of modelling it than we have. But that doesn't change the central point of this thread's danger: forcing people to give up rights to sole profit and control distribution of their IP would be to deny them the right to their own creations. It is no different than deciding that "hey, since Exxon wants the oil and can get it out more cheaply without paying the Clampetts for it, they should be allowed to go and get it for free. That's best for society, right?"

dwturducken

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Re: I know
« Reply #26 on: January 19, 2014, 06:05:39 PM »
Stepping back from the ideology, the real concern is whether or not the entity that owns the IP can do a damned thing beyond bluster. This is clearly not an entity that will stand for something like the King's Quest remakes. Given the client/server arrangement, the SCoRE efforts seem to be predicated on the assumption that the server is just technology, like (and I know this is a flimsy analogy) the "emulator" console that will play old Sega and Nintendo console cartridges. They aren't selling the old games, just a new box that lets you play the old ones that you already have.

There are a lot of fun theories and ideas floating around, at the moment, and that's a good thing. Maybe none of it amounts to anything, but it shows that we're still here and engaged. The "out there" and "fringe" ideas are still useful, even if nothing comes of them, but they get and keep us talking, and the ideas keep flowing. Fortunately, Joshex has a thick skin to be able to roll with the criticisms and keep coming back with new ideas or new ways of looking at old ones. Right or wrong, we need more of that.
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thunderforce

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Re: I know
« Reply #27 on: January 20, 2014, 12:36:47 PM »
Not everybody writes with the intention of selling. There are a number of people who write for their own personal pleasure, and are actually very shy about even sharing their work. It is, nonetheless, their work. If Critic O'Literary stumbles across it, and thinks it's the best work he's ever read, and wants to distribute it, but Shy McWriter doesn't want her work distributed at all, does Critic O'Literary have a right to take this "social construct" of IP and just say "everybody deserves to read it?" Under that justification, does Critic have a right to publish it against Shy's will?

No, because Shy has a right to privacy. An unpublished work would fall under that.

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To say that property is a social construct is...partially right. The idea that the guy with the most and biggest weapons isn't the guy who gets to do whatever he wants with anything and anybody he wants is, indeed, a social construct. But to dismiss "social constructs" as if they are something mutable and all equally good or bad is a dreadful mistake.

I'm not (well, I am saying they're mutable, because they are; and indeed you neatly provide examples of that by listing some which are thankfully no more); I'm doing precisely the opposite, drawing a distinction between those which are beneficial and those which are harmful, and suggesting that the latter might usefully be abandoned.

Segev

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Re: I know
« Reply #28 on: January 20, 2014, 02:03:49 PM »
Whereas I tend to think they're less social constructs and more evolved standards based on objectively calculable best-results.

The fact that you never, ever get away from "pay for what you want" and "property belongs first to the guy who makes it" - the fact that if you try, you find black markets evolving faster than you can blink - tells me that property ownership is practically a natural state of human nature. A man instinctively feels he owns his labor, and will only work best when given something he feels is worth it in return. Theft - through extortion or brute force or guile - can work, but they inevitably diminish the overall productivity of the society in which they happen. Respecting property rights - the right of a man to his labor and the fruits thereof - always leads to an overall increase in the wealth and prosperity of the society and the individuals who make it up.

So much so that, absent laws and governments, the first-order despotic regimes that evolve in anarchy form from men protecting what is theirs. And the standards for what is "theirs" tend to be universal on a coarse-grained level, to the point that it is relatively easily recognized when one is a thief, brigand, bandit, or extortionist versus the rightful owner of property that one is protecting. Usually enough, at the least, that it seems obvious to me that there is a natural right to property inherent to the human condition and associated nature.

(The competing, destructive aspect is that very theft, banditry, and extortion to attempt to take what one has not created. To better oneself at the expense of others.)

Joshex

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Re: I know
« Reply #29 on: January 21, 2014, 02:19:21 PM »
Josh, I appreciate that you addressed my concern about how your ideas here could basically legalize IP theft. I've enjoyed reading the other responses too. It's obvious from the other responses that the biggest issue with your ideas is the role of "official availability". That's the first hurdle. While I'm doubting the UN will want anything to do with IP reform anytime soon, if you can tweak the issues with "official availablity" you may be on to something.

I'd like to add that there are a lot of IP in the world that are proprietary. They're that way for good reasons. Requiring those IPs to be officially available could do many small startups a LOT of harm, and protecting proprietary IPs would create an exploitable loophole where companies could hide the IPs they want to "sit on". You can't make laws forcing companies to act ethically, it's been tried before and generally backfires.

You can, however, create a set of ethical IP laws that companies can voluntarily adhere to - like Creative Commons copyrights, but for IP Rights. Getting businesses to embrace your new IP standards voluntarily will affect more change than the UN trying to force them all to act ethically with new laws.

Just something to think about.

Also, regardless of the issues in your new law ideas it's clear you put a TON of work into this and I, for one, APPLAUD YOUR EFFORTS. Don't get discouraged, you may be mere minutes from achieving something great. Tweak, tweak, tweak - and see what you end up with. Good Luck!

thanks for the insight, sorry for leaving the thread unattended, had to go to hong kong to re-enter china so I can stay another 3 months, then I caught some sort of cold. oh well.

Indeed it seems Official Availability needs to have it's definition changed to prevent abuse

No, I'm saying that large corporations would have the means to still tie up IP while individual copyright holders, like say a self published poet, would not.

In fact, they could easily be at the mercy of large corporations who could steal almost with impunity and then claim copyright because they could defend it.

I can't imagine a worse solution to copyright abuse. The current systems DOES need reform to take into account digital technology and a changing world but it needs to be something that is fair and equitable to large and small copyright holders.


taken into account, I'll edit the text when my head is clear from this cold.

Segev I've read some of your concerns as well and will try to incorporate them as soon as possible.
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LadyShin

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Re: I know
« Reply #30 on: January 21, 2014, 07:15:36 PM »
.....But again, I like your line of thinking and think you are on the right track. But besides all that I wrote above, the main thing is to remember that corporations and businesses have a lot of pull in what laws are passed or changed....

This line here is inherently true: There have been major pushes for the courts to recognize corporations as citizens, thereby allowing them to cast popular votes to sway the outcome of elections.
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Ironwolf

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Re: I know
« Reply #31 on: January 21, 2014, 08:58:42 PM »
Ladyshin with all due respect - unions have had the same powers for decades.

MWRuger

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Re: I know
« Reply #32 on: January 22, 2014, 12:02:33 AM »
Unions in no way have the money corporations have. They have been in decline since the early eighties. If they had that kind of power, they wouldn't be losing in almost every fight to protect civil workers pensions (too many cities to mention).
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MaidMercury

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Re: I know
« Reply #33 on: January 22, 2014, 07:13:45 AM »
Honest to goodness -- you have greater chance of convincing the Chinese government to provide you with nuclear weapons for free with free shipping than you have of making any change whatsoever to IP laws -- even the most minor little change.

Really?...Good....I have this pesky old tree stump in my back yard that has resisted chemicals, chopping and Statesman doesn't return my emails,   soooo,  the prospects of a 'FREE" Nuclear weapon is intriguing. ;D

Segev

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Re: I know
« Reply #34 on: January 22, 2014, 07:22:07 PM »
Unions in no way have the money corporations have. They have been in decline since the early eighties. If they had that kind of power, they wouldn't be losing in almost every fight to protect civil workers pensions (too many cities to mention).
Actually, they're losing these fights because the workers they "protect" (who don't want the unions' protection racket nor the unions' hands in their pockets nor to support the political causes towards which the unions put a lot of the dues) are voting for laws and legislators who pass things that reduce unions' power to force people to join them, whether they want to or not. ("Join or you can't get a job in your field.")

Unions are VERY powerful, politically, and if they have the right to speak out using money taken from their workers' dues, then so should the corporations have the right to speak out using the money that belongs to their shareholders. Because those shareholders ARE the company's owners, and they have as much right to be heard as do the unions.

If your argument is that the corporations are only representing the CEO and the Board with this money, then I turn around and point out that the same can be said of unions and Union Bosses.

And, um, nobody has ever sought to give corporations-as-entities voting rights. >_> Just protect their right, as conglomerations of people who have First Amendment rights, to exercise the right to speak freely. Which includes the right to use their money to buy air time. Just like unions, just like special interest groups, just like anybody else.

Thunder Glove

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Re: I know
« Reply #35 on: January 22, 2014, 08:23:50 PM »
Still seems unfair.  I think the most telling illustration is Matt Miller, who created Positron for a tabletop RP game long before CoH was a glimmer in anyone's eye, and he now can't use the name or the character because it's "owned" by a company in Asia, a company that had nothing to do with the character's creation, nothing to do with writing any of the character's dialogue, or backstory, or anything.  But they paid him a salary for a couple of years, so suddenly they own it.  They didn't go up to Matt and say "Here's $X for your character", but they own that character just the same.

Intellectual property is almost always owned by people who had absolutely nothing to do with creating it, but by corporations that treat creative people as interchangeable and those people's creations as commodities instead of art.  It's reasoning like that that led to the creation of companies like Activision (back when they were composed of former Atari employees who were sick of not getting any credit for their games, so they quit en masse and started making their own games) and Image Comics (which publishes comics, but doesn't lay any claim to ownership of the characters presented therein), and there should be more of that.

And less "Sorry, you can't play your favorite game of all time because someone thousands of miles away got huffy."

MWRuger

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Re: I know
« Reply #36 on: January 22, 2014, 09:11:31 PM »
I would gladly give up  union money in politics if corporations would do the same. Or even disclose to the shareholders where the money they donate goes. If, as you say, those donations represent the wishes of the shareholder's what's the harm in telling them how they spent it? Justice Kennedy, who voted for it, thought that was what was going to happen. But I guess liberals aren't the only ones living in ivory towers.

Citizen's United didn't level the playing field, it dug a huge sinkhole and tossed the Republic in.

But the argument ultimately fails when you look at the money flowing into Super PACS since Citizen's United passed. It's massive compared to all the money spent in previous election cycle, surpassing what Dems and Republicans raised together.

Further, simple math should tell you that if union membership is declining as you say then the money they collect is shrinking, not growing. Corporate profits have never been higher. Corporate donations have never been higher. If you follow the money it's pretty clear who has the power. Who has benefited?

We might discuss the efficacy of corporate donations, but not it's existence.

Specifically, in this thread, the RIAA and MPAA have spent lavishly to lobby, conjoule and bribe to extend copyright far beyond what the founding father's wrote into law. Those are both well known mouth pieces for big media companies. It is their interest to lock up content forever, or least as long as they can squeeze a buck out of it. It is not in the interest of the public. It seems clear that the intention was to protect the creator and his heirs for a reasonable time, not forever.

The question is simple: At some point a work or art, whether written, recorded or painted,  belongs to the world as part of it's cultural heritage. The argument is how long does that take?

Corporations say "It never happens. Steamboat Willie is ours forever and ever." I say 25 years from initial creators death.

(Which would not unlock COH in any circumstance and why this idea of changing copyright is unworkable in COH's case. Besides, Ex Post Facto would certainly give NCSoft time to mend any deficiencies in regards to protecting the IP)
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MWRuger

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Re: I know
« Reply #37 on: January 22, 2014, 09:20:38 PM »
Still seems unfair.  I think the most telling illustration is Matt Miller, who created Positron for a tabletop RP game long before CoH was a glimmer in anyone's eye, and he now can't use the name or the character because it's "owned" by a company in Asia, a company that had nothing to do with the character's creation, nothing to do with writing any of the character's dialogue, or backstory, or anything.  But they paid him a salary for a couple of years, so suddenly they own it.  They didn't go up to Matt and say "Here's $X for your character", but they own that character just the same.

Intellectual property is almost always owned by people who had absolutely nothing to do with creating it, but by corporations that treat creative people as interchangeable and those people's creations as commodities instead of art.  It's reasoning like that that led to the creation of companies like Activision (back when they were composed of former Atari employees who were sick of not getting any credit for their games, so they quit en masse and started making their own games) and Image Comics (which publishes comics, but doesn't lay any claim to ownership of the characters presented therein), and there should be more of that.

And less "Sorry, you can't play your favorite game of all time because someone thousands of miles away got huffy."


Oh it is unfair. "work for hire" contracts for creators can not help but screw the creator. But, like Wille Sutton, who famously responded that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is",  If you want to work in creating things like MMO's that's what you have to do. His best option would have been to not use the character in the game, especially if he could prove that it was created before he signed with Cryptic. Actually, probably anything he created while he worked for Cryptic or NCSoft, whether they used it or not, is legally theirs. That's the way most work for hire contracts work. Assuming they didn't make him sign a non compete clause, he can go on and work for another company who do the exact same thing.

Or inventors. If you work for a tech company and invent some totally unrelated thing on your own time there is a pretty good chance they either own it or a very large piece of it.

Why do people do it? Because a little bit of something can look awfully good when you have nothing.
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Segev

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Re: I know
« Reply #38 on: January 23, 2014, 02:48:00 PM »
If the creators know they're being hired to create something for somebody else, it's not "unfair." You're right, that's where the money is. They could not GET paid to create these things for more - or, if they could, they should go out and find those means.

"Fair" is such a strange concept. We all think we know what it means, but in truth, the only "fairness" lies in giving men the freedom to choose whether to labor or not, and for whom. "Who" he works for could also be "himself," note.

Working with MWM, I am honestly hesitant to include Segev Stormlord in the game we're making for much the same reason as you listed with Matt Miller. It has its enticing aspects: I'd get to see my character enshrined in published work, among other things. But it also means that Segev becomes the property of MWM, and not mine to do with as I pleased.

Consider, though: If I took Segev and tried to sell products based on him right now, there'd be very few (I would dare say "no") buyers.

If Matt Miller had done the same with Positron long before the character made it into CoH canon, I suspect that, too, would have been largely devoid of monetary benefit to him.

By including Segev in City of Titans, or Positron in CoH, these characters (would) gain public awareness and appeal. Their value as a branded item increases.

Matt Miller doesn't own Positron anymore; he sold it to CoH as part of his work for it. The whole body of work that is CoH built the value of Positron as a piece of IP; it was the work of MANY people, paid for with money by those who would own it, that went into building value in Positron.

The same would be true of Segev Stormlord, if he became included in City of Titans. He would be a valuable piece of intellectual property because he is a part of that larger work which has given him visibility and built his popularity. Moreover, I know, going in, if I allow him to be included, I am giving up my exclusive rights to the character to MWM. I know it, and it's my choice. It's not theft, and it's not "unfair." "Unfair" is denying people the right to make a choice. If "unfair" is "two unpleasant alternatives," though, then it is life that is "unfair," and there's no use griping about it.

"Fair" is such a funny concept. We all think we know what it means, and often can agree, but when we can't, boy does it get heated.

Thunder Glove

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Re: I know
« Reply #39 on: January 23, 2014, 03:55:26 PM »
Yes, but since it's a small brand-new company composed of volunteers who are specifically trying not to repeat the mistakes that NCSoft made, MWM can just as easily write into the company credo from the start "NPCs placed in this game remain the property of their respective creators" (with more legalese, and with the caveat that MWM retains rights to use the characters in the game once they're placed so a disgruntled creator can't just demand the character be taken out of the game once it's been incorporated into existing stories and lore, etc, etc - I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure you get my meaning), rather than "All NPCs placed into this game are ours, all ours, forever and ever, and we can do whatever we like with them!" like a typical MMO.

I thought the whole idea was NOT to be a "typical" MMO.