[MUD-Dev] User-created content ownership

[Christopher Allen]

"Richard A. Bartle" <richard at mud.co.uk>:
> 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.

Ahh, but they do not 'sign away' copyright, instead they are giving
us a non-exclusive license to use it that is very broad. They still
own the copyright, we only have a broad right to use it.

It is important in particular for Castle Marrach, where players
suggest plots, perform plays, write poems, and create 'books' in
game to give to other players, etc. for us to have those rights. We
can't be in a position where we Out-Of-Character have to remove
every copy of a book that someone added to the game because a player
quit.

> 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.

This is all very possible if the content author was 'assigning'
their copyright. European laws on copyright are broader then in the
US, but some of what you are talking about is even true in the US to
a lesser extent. For instance, I know there was some changes to how
musicians work-for-hire worked in the last 90's.

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..



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