[MUD-Dev] Future of MMOGs

[Koster]

From: Crosbie Fitch

> For god's sake people wake up! Copyright is a line in the sand and
> the tide don't give a shit.

No, it doesn't, and it is inevitable that the public will
disseminate every last bit of information as technical barriers to
doing so fall.

But that leaves us with a dilemma whereby quality information and
entertainment is hard to come by. After all, it takes time (and by
extension money) to create it, and if creators cannot derive revenue
from it, many will cease to create it as they go do something else
in order to make a living.

"Ah!" you cry. "There are enough people willing to do it for the joy
of it!"

First off, the answer is "no, there aren't."

Second off, even if they do it for the joy of it, the proportion of
those people who have enough time to practice at whatever it is in
order to get really good is very small. There aren't any human
endeavors where raw talent makes up for years of hard work.

Thirdly, if there were, they couldn't distribute it, since
distribution also costs money. And not just distribution, but simply
getting read/heard/seen at all, in a sea of undifferentiated crap.

You see, copyright being a line in the sand that inevitably falls
also leads towards another conclusion. "Don't broadcast anything." 
Hence the movements towards making you subscribe to your CD
collection. With a robust enough subscription system, you could
charge enough to overcome the inevitable loss of revenue from leaks,
you could track whence the leak came from via watermarking, and
arguably, you could get heard/seen/read by MORE people...

"Information must be free" just leads to proprietary information
databases, not to free information. Some proportion of the
information (in the form of trademarks, no doubt, rather than
copyrights) would be presented outside the proprietary area in order
to entice people to enter, and the rest, well, you're gonna have to
pay for, and likely pay more than you do under the current
system. This is what we're seeing happening across the Internet now.

Obligatory mud material: it's been shown repeatedly that many
players will prefer to go to muds with established (even illegally
used, and copyrighted) settings over ones with original settings. It
has also been shown that players will prefer to go to a place where
there is an expectation of reliable customer service. The latter
costs a lot of time (read: money). The former is the best leverage
for getting that money.

We may have all grown up on Tolkien and Forgotten Realms, but their
use in muds as world settings is undoubtedly an exploitation of
others' hard work (and also an expression of the fact that the vast
"free" community that many claim would supply alternate content has
the creativity of a hill of beans).  And information may inevitably
be free, but you wouldn't have Forgotten Realms to grow up with if
TSR had been unable to make money off of it. We've seen in the past
companies and authors' estates shutting down muds because of their
use of intellectual property; from their perspective, this is a very
smart move. The books are in many ways potentially merely loss
leaders for the pay-for-play mud.

I admit I'm conflicted on all of this. I am a member of ASCAP and of
the IGDA and the AIAS; I'm also a geeky guy with MP3s and
region-free DVDs from Asia who puts up short stories on his
website. This whole situation is not as linear as "it's a line in
the sand, and it's gonna get crossed." It's more like pushing a
gyroscope--this push towards the death of copyright is just going to
make the whole thing precess in a different direction.

-Raph

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