Ever Had a Bologna and Potato Chip Sandwich?

Online Multilayer Games: A Virtual Space for Intellectual Property Debates
Sara M Grimes:

• Canadian
• PhD Candidate with the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University
• Founder of the ACT Games Lab

• Researches the “legal and ethical dimensions of children’s evolving relationship with new media technologies, the rationalization of children’s play within commercialized technological systems, and the political economy of digital games”

• http://www.actlab.org/?page_id=26
• http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/

• Copyright law has changed very little since it’s creation, and any changes enacted are usually to the benefit of the large corporations who own the copyrights.

• Even with the creation of digital media whose creation and duplication is not to the detriment of the original copyright holder
• Copyright law is still based on finite commodities, such as books or toys

• Major corporations continually work to change copyright law to their benefit, and limit the right of others to public works

• Software created today would be subject to 95 years of copyright, and as such is permanently copyrighted due to the advance of technology making the software obsolete before the copyright ever expires

• Corporations are trying to take advantage of people playing games by enforcing copyright law and stripping players of the time and effort that they have put into a game.
• Examples:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTEA
• http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/

• The same copyright laws apply to online videogames, though the laws do not take into account user participation

• End User License Agreements usually state that any activity taking place in the virtual world is owned solely by the copyright holder.
• But that definition is becoming increasingly less viable as the worth of virtual property is called into question.

• In online games more than anything else most of the value of playing comes from interacting with other people, so much so that it has become one of the main selling points of such games.
• If this is a selling point, are these other users the property of the copyright holding corporation? Does their use of the software and the game world generate unique content that the corporation can then exploit?

• If this is indeed user-generated content, is it really right for it to be owned by the corporation or do the users in fact own it themselves, having created the environment and the experience of the game? Many online games fail because they don’t have enough players to create a unique experience.
• Example: If you make guitars and sell them, do you own all the music that is ever played on those guitars?

• On the other hand, if the corporations were to give in to the users and sacrifice their copyrights, than it would undermine their business model. And after all, without the corporation, there would be no game at all, since they maintain the servers, and support to keep the game running, not to mention the actual creation of the game in the first place.

• At the same time, users put in hours and hours of their own time to develop their own content and characters, whether through direct interaction or through other means, such as customizing a character, modding and actual creation of new content

• Modding is said to actually increase the life of a video game for around 6-24 months of playtime. Modding is user created content that enhances the functions already available in the video game. These users create mods for free, and do so at the benefit of the corporation. They add value to the game that the users who create the mods never see.

• Forums and Fansites also contribute to the value of the games through support and advertising

• Many large video game companies such as EA and Blizzard, actively encourage the creation of web forums, fansites and mods, but provide no rewards or incentives to do so. They reap the rewards of other people’s works for free, but then do not allow the users to financially benefit from their work.

• Since such effort is put into these games, they become much more than the data that makes them up, thus giving the virtual world a real world value

• Virtual content is now so valuable that governments have had to step in on cases of hacking and unjust game practices
• In South Korea, the police “actively prosecute people who hack games, and a they give more weight to cases in which valuable game items are destroyed or transferred” (Castronova, 2003)
• Also: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2008/10/31/real-taxes-for-real-money-made-by-online-game-players/
• “State involvement is rationalized by the fact that in-game assets take time to acquire or build, can be observably bought and sold on real-world markets, and that layers are manifestly distressed by the ‘unfair’ loss or theft of their game items” (Castronova, 2003)

• A lot of the weight behind the importance of in-game items is provided by an economy that is created purely by the users of the game. Though this is generated within the framework created by the corporation, the framework would be useless without the input of the users, and thus the users have a stake in the value of the product.
• See: Analogy about the guitar

• In almost all games, the primary purpose is to generate wealth in order to acquire more virtual possessions. Thus the game is created with the acquisition of new items in mind, except that the users, once they have these items in their possession, they are then denied any real world value that those items may have because of copyright and the end user license agreement.
• That is to say, should items that people have worked for, and in many cases spent real world money for, have a real-world market value even though they are virtual? We know that there is a market for these items, as witnessed by websites devoted to selling virtual money and online game accounts and characters for real money.
• http://www.wowgoldtm.com/
• http://www.mmobay.net/

• The main issue in contention here is: Who actually owns this virtual content? Is it the industry that originally created it, or the user who spent their valuable time and money to create wealth within the environment?
• Who owns the environment? The industry, who again created the environment or the users who gave it life and form?

• However, “…no matter how vividly layers identify with their avatars or treasure their special, customized swords, the swords, chairs, princesses and dungeons of EverQuest are first and foremost strings and strings of computer code”
• We must keep in mind that the users are still just players in a game. The game was actually created by a professional team of designers and scripters. Ultimately, the content made by the users is secondary to the content created by the original creators. The programmers actually worked on the game, the players just play it and happen to make a difference.