World of StarCraft modder shut down, pleads for Blizzard approval | Hacker News Reader

World of StarCraft modder shut down, pleads for Blizzard approval

arstechnica.com

12 pointsabraham20 comments

The game-maker's attitude really frustrates me. I understand that creating something in an existing universe that you enjoy is very gratifying and gives you instant exposure and fame in the fan community. But for chrissake people, just take 20 minutes and come up with your own intellectual property! If your game is really worth playing, it will stand on its own even if Samus and Raynor and Mario and Sonic are nowhere to be found.

Look at one of the most popular indy platformers ever created: Cave Story. I mean, it's called Cave Story! It's about a guy on a floating island, and his nemeses are a doctor in a funny hat and a bar of soap with eyes! The developer himself has explained that he came up with the entire plot during a commercial break of a Nip/Tuck re-run. It's not hard, and the game still contains dozens of homages to its predecessors like Metroid and Castlevania. In fact, if you Google "metroid castlevania indy game", Cave Story is on the first page. How's that for fan exposure? Not only has this guy created a game in the spirit of his favorites, and gained the respect and adoration of the existing fanbase, but he is also conveniently invulnerable to cease and desists.

Quit yer bitchin'!

Forging on ahead and leveraging the publicity of the cease and desist incident worked very well for the Words with Friends guys.

Derivative works are one of the most beneficial forms of work society can enjoy.

Unfortunately, we ban them.

Where do you personally draw the line between derivative works and stealing?

When modern copyrights were first created in the US, they were viewed as a necessary evil. Society trades some of its liberty (publishers' copying for 14-28 years, mainly) hoping this will increase incentive and thus authorship of new works. Back then, they were viewed as a "necessary evil".

Since then, a few things happened:

* The public domain is no longer expanded, copyright terms have become effectively infinite

* The view of copyrights as a trade was replaced by a view of "protecting authors"

* This view of "protecting authors" almost implies the view that infringement is "stealing".

* Everyone can now copy easily, not just publishers, so that the restrictions that applied to a tiny minority now restrict everyone's freedom much more harshly

I agree with the view that it may be a necessary evil (even though even at the time of copyright's inception there was some empiric evidence that copyright was in fact unnecessary to form business models around authorship). I personally believe:

* 5 years are a more reasonable copyright term in the modern age

* Copyrights should only apply to for-profit institutions (e.g: publishers), similarly to how they were practically applied in earlier days. Individuals should not be restricted by copyrights, and we shouldn't have a police-state surveillance to enforce copyrights or any other law against people in the privacy of their homes.

* Copyrights should not apply to "functional" works (e.g: Software). I see short copyright terms restricting our enjoyment of the arts and entertainment as reasonable, but copyrights artificially restricting our use of existing resources as very harmful.

* Software tends to form a "net-effect" following which makes it difficult to compete, even when you have better software (e.g: Windows isn't technically superior to Linux, but the huge net effect around it is simply too overwhelming to compete with). This means that opensource software cannot gain traction when competing with closed-source software, and that's harmful for society. Software should be open for everyone to modify and distribute by law.

* There are plenty of more efficient business models that will allow creation of useful software in the absence of copyrights (Contract work, pay-per-feature, support, etc)

* Any loss in incentive to create new works will be more than offset by the increase in efficiency (anyone can improve and extend any existing work, rather than having to duplicate it, in order to implement any idea).

* Derivative works are likely to form a huge stream of new works that we're currently losing out on, which is also likely to offset any loss of work due to lesser incentives.

In summary:

I don't view copyright infringement as theft at all.

You make it sound like they're making their own game and ripping off the Blizzard characters/mythos/etc, rather than using Blizzard's own content creation tools which they release in order to promote modding...

What are they going to do, give you modding tools and then tell you you're only allowed to use them completely out of context of the game they came with?

That's a good point. Blizzard is kind of feeding with one hand and slapping with the other in that respect.

For those who are interested, here's another copy of the removed video. Not sure how long it will stay up though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIOpHq0vUc

Why on earth would Blizzard-Activision want to stifle this? It makes two of their biggest franchises look awesome at the same time!

Edit: actually, this could be used as grounds for trademark deprecation down the road. EA could make a game using Warcraft in the name and use the existence of this as grounds for a defense if B-A didn't try to defend the WoW and SC trademarks. They should just license the rights to this guy imho.

I don't think this guy can afford the millions the rights to the franchise are worth. Blizzard is being completely reasonable here, and I think they've gone out of their way to encourage fan participation and usage of their material.

Can't he just change the name and keep working on it? Surely the name isn't a big deal.

The interesting thing is there are plenty of SC2 maps/mods that use the word "Warcraft" in their name. There are even ones with "World of Warcraft" in their name. Yet Bliz only chose to go after this guy. None of the other maps seems be getting this kind of attention. The practice of Bliz fans making mods using other Bliz IP has been going on for years. Even the original Starcraft game had Diablo maps. Something really struck a nerve with this one and showed up on the Bliz legal dept's radar.

I think you mean Activision. They own Blizzard.

No, I do mean Blizzard Entertainment. Besides the fact they have total independence from Activision in terms of operation. They've also had a long history of doing stuff like this. They shutdown the open source project Freecraft in 2003 long before the Activition merger.[1] Yes, Vivendi owned them at the time. But they have done some equally sketchy things before the Vivendi acquisition as well.

The original StarCraft client silently snooped through the players hard drive and sent the gather information back. They later patched out the spyware "feature" after being hit by a class action suit.[2] I see a lot of fans with the idea that "Bliz is this innocent goodie good game dev who was forced to do evil by their giant greedy parent publisher corps". Trust me, I worked for them. That is absolutely NOT the case. All of these decisions came from with in.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus

[2]http://attrition.org/errata/company/blizzard01.html

Rename to Empire of StarBuilders and move on.

The trailer looked amazing, I really hope he just changes the mod's name, and continues with its development.

I'm sure that trademark law specifies that you have to uphold any infringements to be allowed to fight for the trademark at a later date.

This is stupid, they should have just let the guy mod out the game and then buy it out if the guy is making good headway.

This is Blizzard we're talking about. Their production values and the amount of years they spend perfecting their games is incredible. I can't imagine them doing such a thing.

Precisely, it took forever for Starcraft 2 and it's little if any improvement over Starcraft (No LAN IMO made multiplayer a pointless feature in the game). The story is a great progression, but so was Brood War and that came out 6-months after SC1.

One step further and SC2 would have been Duke Nukem forever level of "perfection" - IE we've all retired and just don't have anywhere better to be.

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