Re: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Copyright and Patent Law?
"Bent C Dalager" <bcd@pvv.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:fa1tkd$6va$1@orkan.itea.ntnu.no...
In article <wQZwi.1200$4_5.2528@wagner.videotron.net>,
Oliver Wong <owong@castortech.com> wrote:
If I understand your argument, then reward will probably decrease
(less opportunities to get rich quick), but so will the risk (less
chance
of getting in trouble for having your idea "too similar" to the other
person's).
I think it will be less of a lottery. That is, the maximum payouts
will probably decrease but there will be more low-to-medium payouts
because content production will become considerably easier and so
there will be more of it.
I still think you will be able to get rich quick, but perhaps not
quite that rich. In the entertainment industry, if you have a hugely
successful product and people know you're the one who made it you can
get filthy rich from personal appearances alone and give away whatever
your product is.
This actually brings up another issue. I think we're agreed that
trademark is at least semi-desirable. What do you make of Tom Clancy, who
gets paid money just for permission to use his name on the title of games?
"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" for example, was primarily designed by a
non-famous game designer, and while Tom Clancy did occasional provide some
input, many of his suggestions were vetoed (Clancy did not like the the
look of the 3 glowing lights on Sam Fisher's trademark headset, for
example).
I know some people who believe "Oh, it's a Tom Clancy game; therefore,
it must be a realistic tactical shooter", and this belief is generally
true regardless of whether or not Tom Clancy had anything to do with the
making of the game.
[...]
As mentioned earlier, not all MMOGs, but the most successful ones
(e.g. World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc.) needed multi mullion dollar
investments to actually get produced. So I suspect we will see fewer
MMOGs
of that caliber if the investors lose the "promise" of ROI that
copyright
provides.
I don't see why this would be the case. Under either regime, they will
require considerable starting capital and under either regime, the
game may flop. An MMOG that flops is worthless regardless of copyright
protection. An MMOG that is successful is a cash cow regardless of
copyright protection. The only possible threat is an MMOG that is
basically sound but administrated in a flawed manner. With copyright,
the game will flop and the money is lost. Without copyright, the game
will potentially live on on third-party servers run by people who know
how to administrate it (the original developers presumably still lose
their money).
I don't see any typical cases in which copyright or no copyright makes
a significant impact on the MMOG business model. (As an aside, I never
did quite understand why MMOG publishers charge money for the game box
- I am assuming it is to cover distribution costs but it seems like an
unwise threshold to put in place for their prospective subscribers.)
Well, without copyright, I assume it'd be legal to take all of the
assets from the "real" WoW server and host your own WoW server. (I'm not
sure if the WoW server code has been leaked yet, but I know other MMOs
have had their server code leaked already). You could then charge a fee to
access your server which is less than the fee Blizzard charges, and you
could do this openly, without fear, because it would now be legal.
Investors will see this and say "Well, I'm not gonna pay artists
millions of dollars to generate content for WoW2 if it means someone else
can just take that content, use it in their own servers, and directly
compete against me." So they don't. And we don't get WoW2 (or we get a
version that was developed with a significant lower budget, and thus had
less talent invested into it).
As for episodic content, it sounds like the writers will get most of
the benefits, while the programmers will get screwed over here. They
write
the engine/tools once, and can only sell it once.
The programmers will presumably go on to write something else once
they're done with this particular game engine. Much like a brick layer
will tend to go on to lay bricks on a new building once the current
one's done.
Yes, this argument is less persuasive now that I've found out you're
not concerned about the economic results of the abolishment of copyright.
=P
[...]
I didn't say anything about the budgets. The astronomic budgets we are
seeing these days in the movie and games industry are probably an
artifact of the copyright system in that it tends to concentrate
incredible wealth in a few hands and in that it makes previously
created material inaccessible for reuse. It is not clear that these
huge budgets are necessary or even desirable.
Which hands do you think the incredible wealth ends up in?
Whoever runs the finances of the company that holds the copyrights.
Eventually, the owners of same company.
I'm not so sure that the owners of the companies make incredible
amounts of wealth. I think they make about as much as most other companies
their size, including companies that don't sell intellectual property at
all. In other words, whether or not you are the owner of a company is
likely to have much more effect on whether you end up wealthy than whether
or not copyright laws exist.
If the main concern with copyright laws is that it may unevenly
distribute wealth, I don't think abolishing it will actually end up having
the wealth distributed much more evenly.
[...]
(2) I think it's relatively rare for a game company to want to use
the
assets of another game company. Usually, musings of the form "OH man,
wouldn't it be cool if {character from game X} was in {a different
game}?"
come from idle fans who were very unlikely to ever produce a game
anyway,
even if the companies signed over the rights to those characters.
There is plenty of reusable artwork in games beyond the main
characters. There are sound effects, music, generic dialogue,
textures, scenery of all shapes and sizes, generic creatures and
characters, motion capture, etc. In the extreme case, you can reuse
the entire game but write a completely different story. You could do
this whole cloth to any recent GTA game, for instance, since that
series doesn't have a recurring protagonist anyway.
Right, but my main argument here is that the generic artwork (sound
effect, textures, etc.) are typically not very expensive at all,
specifically because the creator knows that they can sell that same
content to multiple people. It's the "recognizeable" artwork which tends
to be expensive to create (and the lead characters in games are usually
very recognizable), and which most other game companies don't have a real
interest in using, specifically because they don't want people to see the
characters and be reminded of the game from which they came from.
I vaguely recall that in the original Doom, when people asked why the
protagonist was always seen to be using a rifle in multi-player even
when using something else entirely, the answer was along the lines of
"we didn't have the resources to do the artwork for the other
weapons". Doing such relatively trivial artwork must therefore be at
least somewhat taxing and being able to reuse such from a different
game is sure to an attractive proposition for the game developer on a
budget.
Well, in this specific example, I'm not sure reusing from a different
game would have been possible. The original DOOM used 2D sprites for every
character, viewed from 8 different angles, and each angle having perhaps 4
frames of animation, for a total of 32 sprites per character. The sprite
imagine was of the marine carrying the rifle mentioned above. I'm not sure
Photoshop was as accessible at the time as it is now, so basically to have
had the marine shown holding different weapons would mean you'd have to
redraw the entire marine again, holding that different weapon.
Chances are if you were looking for reusable sprites, you wouldn't
find a character who actually looked like the marine, and so you'd have
the unpleasant effect of the marine changing physical appearances (perhaps
to a topless muscle bound cigar smoker, if they used the sprite from Duke
Nukem 3D, for example) every time they swapped weapons.
Even if you did find a sprite that looked like the marine, you'd have
to be lucky and hope they used the same format as you: That is 4 frames of
walking animation (or a multiple of 4 frames, and you could drop the
excess frames, but you're in trouble if they use fewer frames), and from
the same specific 8 angles that DOOM uses. If they found sprites drawn in
an isometric angle instead of a "straight-on" angle, then again, you
couldn't really use it.
I don't
think Ubisoft/Tom Clancy, for example, would have much interest in Solid
Snake appearing in the next Splinter Cell game, except perhaps as a
parody
or an easter egg, where his appearance really isn't central to the game
at
all.
Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. Crossover stories have been at
least somewhat popular in the literary genre up through the years.
Well, companies frequently characters from more than one game
universe. Ubisoft, for example, has the rights to Prince of Persia,
Splinter Cell, Beyond Good And Evil, Rayman, Lost, FarCry, Dogz, and
several other games.
They could, if they wanted to, make crossover between these games. And
you sometimes see that (for example, Capcom has made games where Ryu from
Street Fighter and MegaMan from MegaMan meet, or you can see Commander
Keen in Doom 2, both titles owned by idSoft). But they're pretty rare, and
again, usually reserved as jokes or easter eggs. As far as I know, there's
no game where Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell, the prince from Price of
Persia, and one of the dogs from Dogz meet up and go on an adventure
together.
There doesn't even seem to be desire to make such a game.
Finally, I think there are some desirability to having games with
huge
budgets. These games tend to be the boundary pushers that show how to
make
new things possible in computer gaming. While not all of these games are
necessarily "fun", they are still valuable contributions to the gaming
industry in that they lead the way for other games (I'm thinking of Doom
3, for example.)
The question then is whether or not this desirability outweighs the
cost. And, of course, it is not a given that you wouldn't be seeing
high-budget games without copyright. It all depends on finding a
suitable business model for them. And we shouldn't underestimate
personal hubris either - if John Carmack makes $100M from being a
brilliant programmer it's not unthinkable that he'll front $50M for
the game to outshine all games, as a monument to himself :-)
I was thinking of mentioned John Carmack in my earlier post as well. I
think Carmack is the last "famous programmer". There are still great games
being made, arguably games much better than Quake, Doom, and other Carmack
titles, but few people know who programmed those games.
Eventually, John Carmack will die. Then what? I think most rich people
would, if they wanted a monument built to themselves, have sculptures, or
something equally lasting built. Games tend not to age very well. The only
reason John Carmack himself might be interested in having a game built is
because of how closely his identity is associated to games in general.
Well, if they have the same game over and over again with slight
changes to the storyline, I think that'd be a step backwards.
It would rather be a case of a game living on and evolving over
time. While this happens, other new games would also be coming out. It
would serve to stiffen the competition though, which should
theoretically cause an increase in game quality overall.
But a decrease in customer satisfaction in the game itself. There's a
quote from the video link I posted, and I'm paraphrasing it from memory
now:
"20 years ago, there was only 1 kind of Jeans. I went to the Gap,
bought a pair of jeans, and they fit me okay, and I was happy. Today,
there are over 200 kinds of jeans. I got into a store, and I say I want to
buy a pair of jeans, and they ask me do I want slim fit, tight fit, low
fit, etc. And I have no idea. I buy a pair and I walk out of the store,
wearing the best fitting jeans I've ever worn in my life, and I'm feeling
miserable."
I suspect a similar thing will happen if there are multiple versions
of the same game. Since the "goodness" of a game is subjective, there will
be multiple competing versions, all claimed to be the "best", depending on
whether you prefer the game to have a lot of slapstick humour, or darker
gothic themes, or whatever.
Fragmentation is a "bad" thing when it comes to games, in the sense that
it lessens the enjoyment of the casual gamer. I know a lot of
Free-information and/or open source advocates believe that the more
choice, the better (and I'm not sure if you are of that belief as well),
but I'm convinced it isn't. See "The Paradox Of Choice" if you're
interested in hearing arguments as to why it isn't always better to have
more choices (there's a book by that name, as well as a free video by
the
author lecture at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200)
This hints at one of the business models you could go for without
copyright. In short, the modern upper middle class is by and large
sufficiently wealthy that their time is more worth to them than their
money. Therefore, if they know that EA Games publishes high-quality
entertainment through their for-pay service, then they are going to
pay the $10 a month or whatever and get their entertainment through
them (say, a copy of Oblivion). They /could/ have gotten that same
entertainment for free by spending time following the online gaming
communities and evaluating what everyone is saying about the different
variations of the Oblivion storyline and then use this as a basis to
decide which one to download but they prefer to spend their time on
other pursuits instead. So they pay EA Games money to make an informed
decision on their behalf.
Alternatively, they just get EA's Oblivion for free from a bittorrent,
since it's now legal to pirate, right?
You could make money being a "game advisor", researching all the
existing games and recommending one to rich people. But you might not be
able to make money in actually producing and selling games. And so then
there might not be very good games for these game advisors to recommend in
the first place. It really all depends on whether and how the game
industry will be able to adapt to the abolishment of copyright.
Instead of a $10M art budget
to build all artwork from scratch for each and every game, you would
(could) reuse most of it from other sources, tweaking to fit your own
use, and get away with relatively low expenses. This is rather similar
to how we /used/ to be building our culture back in the olden days.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Are you saying in the
old
days, games were always hacks of other games, or are you speaking in a
broader context (outside of computer games)?
The broader context. New stories are based on previous stories written
by other people etc. But if you follow the evolution of e.g. chess, I
am sure you will find that it is equally valid for games.
The manner in which new games are based on old games today is not in
any way hindered by copyright. You might consider Doom 3 to be an
excellent FPS, for example. Well, copyright doesn't stop you from making
your own FPS which is very similar to Doom 3. idSoft, the owner of the
Doom3 doesn't own the concept of zombies, or first person view, or guns,
or anything like that. Just don't call your game "Doom4", and don't call
the most powerful weapon the "BFG" (call it the "GFB" if you prefer), and
you're fine.
- Oliver