[MUD-Dev] User-created content ownership

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 30th March, 2002, Christopher Allen wrote:

> You hereby grant Skotos a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive,
> sub-licensable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce,
> modify, adapt, publish, distribute, publicly display and perform
> any and all of your Participatory Content in all media now known
> or later developed.

I'm not a lawyer (because if I were I'd be charging £400 an hour to
tell you this), but I seem to recall that in the UK you can't ever
sign away copyright, whether you want to or not. There have even
been cases where artistic work done for hire (ie. paid for) has had
an injunction slapped on it because the artist's integrity has been
compromised.

The big argument at the time the law came out was that newspapers
who bought photographs from professional photographers would in
theory be unable to crop the images to fit, even if they had the
permission of the photographer. I believe that because of this there
may have been some compromise position adopted, to do with creating
a new work of art from old (collage style). This, though, is now
under pressure from the music industry where the routine sampling of
works is starting to annoy those people who created the original
work.

Because of this, I very much doubt whether an actor could insist
that a movie, once released, be recalled; however, someone who
designed a wonderful, atmospheric fairyland area in a MUD might have
a legitimate claim under UK law if you were to put the major part of
it into another context, say a much darker game as some kind of
ironic statement about lost innocence or something.

		Richard

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