Little Big Planet and Copyright Infringement

Well, not all is cheery this holiday. It seems like the intellectual property lawyers are working overtime trying to collect holiday pay by demanding that Media Molecule, the developer of Little Big Planet, remove their copyrighted content from LBP.

Now, to be perfectly clear, Media Molecule is not using other folks IP (Batman for example) rather users are creating levels, stickers, and other content based on or using copyrighted material in the game. Like YouTube, users can upload copyrighted property, and then the copyright holder can complain and have it removed. To be frank, I think the copyright holder should have to go after the offender (the user) and not the conduit (in this case Media Molecule). But that's another issue entirely.

Most all of the content is completely non-competitive, meaning that there is no financial impact for the alleged copyright abuse. For example, if some gamer in Idaho makes a Batman themed Little Big Planet level it is highly unlikely that it will negatively affect Warner Bros. or D.C. in any way, the opposite is more likely, but the combination of an insane desire to "manage brands" combined with the fact that attorneys get paid by the hour lead to insane legal action against companies like Media Molecule.

They are not the first, nor will they be the last, to face this kind of legal silliness. Marvel sued NCsoft because their City of Heroes character generator could be used to create characters similar to those owned by Marvel, thus enabling copyright infringement.

Fortunately, there are a good number of companies who have decided that free advertising is actually a good thing, and have contacted Media Molecule telling them that they would not sue if users created content based on their property. In fact, Alex Evans, of Media Molecule stated:

...the other point is the number of IP owners who came up to us and said please whitelist us – we'll never ever ask you to pull infringing stuff. I can't say who that is, but those two things really shocked me, I think it shocked [the IP holders], who were like, hang on, my IP's being represented and it's being represented really well. The IP holders have to have last say over the representation of their brand, and that's fair enough, so we've always got to have a method for people misusing a brand, but what's been really lovely is how well represented so many brands are.

Let's hope either the law or companies catch up with the culture and realize that Web 2.0 and Game 3.0 are here to stay. Folks have always extended the culture of the media they love. IP holders should appreciate it, rather than try to silence it.

[Source: Kotaku]