The French Democratizer
Having returned from my West Coast trip (see GameSpot article from last week) and tending to some much needed project work, I've also been following the slew of press behind Alex Chan's The French Democracy. While he's been handling numerous interviews in his native country, the Machinima has also been receiving its fair share of international coverage as well. Here's just a few articles that have surfaced over the past couple of weeks:
Somewhat obviously, The French Democracy has become the first point of contact for many around Machinima. It's less than a month since its creation and it has opened the door to many folks who have purchased The Movies for the sole purpose of creating their own Machinima works. While I'm sure Activision/Lionhead is ecstatic to receive such attention and interest in their game, it does skate dangerously close to the edge of artistic freedoms by which creative expression takes place. Matteo Bittanti, a visiting scholar at Stanford, explores this in a current blog posting on the How They Got Game 2 site. Machinima up until now has been supported by games developers - mostly because the works are tributes to the games for which they are based.
However, The French Democracy proves that Machinima can be a powerful medium - showing that it can extend the thoughts of individuals into areas the game developers might not be so quick to embrace. In the case of The French Democracy, Lionhead finally acknowledged the buzz around Chan's film in this press release (aside: the obvious exclusion of "Machinima" in the release). Will a Machinima surface that forces a game developer to issue a damage control press release stating they have nothing to do with the work?
This subject matter was touched upon during my Stanford visit, during a luncheon held by the organizers, Galen Davis and Dr. Henry Lowood. One interesting example is the UT2004 mod, 9/11 Survivor - where the player attempts to flee the damaged (and eventually collapsing) World Trade Center towers. While Epic Games has been a large supporter of Machinima, these areas of exploration can make a developer particularly uncomfortable. However, as a supplier of technology, do they get to dictate the how, what and why tech is used? Alternatively, questions like: does Adobe answer tech support emails of a group using Photoshop to create particularly offensive propaganda posters? Or does Panasonic tell the makers of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price not to use their cameras because Panasonic won't be able to sell their products in the subjected retail outlet?
Someone will create Machinima that will surely raise the hackles of the game developer (and possibly others). This is inevitable. It's what art does. I believe it is in the interest of the developers to handle the "how" specifically and not become mired in the "what" or "why." The developers, and technology, are enablers. Playing separators in a game of artistic Church and State will only lead to more difficult conversations.
Ultimately, The French Democracy fulfills Machinima's promise of being an artistic medium. It also introduced Machinima to a tier of individuals who would have never considered video game technology to be such a creatively expressive platform. And that's good for both Machinima and the games industry in general.
- Associated Press
- The Washington Post
- MTV.com
- Business Week ( and here as well).
Somewhat obviously, The French Democracy has become the first point of contact for many around Machinima. It's less than a month since its creation and it has opened the door to many folks who have purchased The Movies for the sole purpose of creating their own Machinima works. While I'm sure Activision/Lionhead is ecstatic to receive such attention and interest in their game, it does skate dangerously close to the edge of artistic freedoms by which creative expression takes place. Matteo Bittanti, a visiting scholar at Stanford, explores this in a current blog posting on the How They Got Game 2 site. Machinima up until now has been supported by games developers - mostly because the works are tributes to the games for which they are based.
However, The French Democracy proves that Machinima can be a powerful medium - showing that it can extend the thoughts of individuals into areas the game developers might not be so quick to embrace. In the case of The French Democracy, Lionhead finally acknowledged the buzz around Chan's film in this press release (aside: the obvious exclusion of "Machinima" in the release). Will a Machinima surface that forces a game developer to issue a damage control press release stating they have nothing to do with the work?
This subject matter was touched upon during my Stanford visit, during a luncheon held by the organizers, Galen Davis and Dr. Henry Lowood. One interesting example is the UT2004 mod, 9/11 Survivor - where the player attempts to flee the damaged (and eventually collapsing) World Trade Center towers. While Epic Games has been a large supporter of Machinima, these areas of exploration can make a developer particularly uncomfortable. However, as a supplier of technology, do they get to dictate the how, what and why tech is used? Alternatively, questions like: does Adobe answer tech support emails of a group using Photoshop to create particularly offensive propaganda posters? Or does Panasonic tell the makers of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price not to use their cameras because Panasonic won't be able to sell their products in the subjected retail outlet?
Someone will create Machinima that will surely raise the hackles of the game developer (and possibly others). This is inevitable. It's what art does. I believe it is in the interest of the developers to handle the "how" specifically and not become mired in the "what" or "why." The developers, and technology, are enablers. Playing separators in a game of artistic Church and State will only lead to more difficult conversations.
Ultimately, The French Democracy fulfills Machinima's promise of being an artistic medium. It also introduced Machinima to a tier of individuals who would have never considered video game technology to be such a creatively expressive platform. And that's good for both Machinima and the games industry in general.
7 Comments:
It's posts like this one that keep me coming back here, Paul. I don't know how much better you could have stated the issues swirling around "The French Democracy". I'd like to think that Lionhead and other game producers would take the high road, but I'm not so sure that would happen if the content of the machinima made them look bad.
Another problem that has come up is that Alex claims that Lionhead owns his creation (the story, characters, etc) because he uploaded it to their website. I haven't checked this myself yet, but he claims that the terms of uploading to their site include giving up your creative rights. Man, I hope that isn't the case.
Great post Paul. This is the #1 problem facing Machinima right now in my opinion - the big, bad intellectualy property question. I posted some thoughts on this post in my blog.
Lionhead doesn't own user-submitted content, Activision does (by virtue of the EULA for 'The Movies'). But Lionhead is granted a sweeping license to the content when you upload it:
"...by submitting your movie to the Lionhead web site, you grant Lionhead a non-exclusive but otherwise unlimited license to your Additional Content. The license, in short, permits Lionhead to exploit, sell, rent and even sub-license your Additional Content" -- from 'The Movies' and Intellectual Property at Clickable Culture.
Also see All Your Movies Are Belong to Activision.
Exactly the points.
However, I imagine a number of these issues might fall away (not entirely mind you) once a definitive Machinima application is released - one that shows up in the seat-licensed mold (ala Photoshop), and includes a large library of assets to use. The Movies can be considered a test market for such an application - which I believe shows there is definitely an interested (and buying) public. I anticipate that we'll see/hear such an application in 2006 - possibly more than one, and it might even include some of the larger names in the 3D software industry.
Sounds like its time for a 2006 prediction posting. (c:
It seems to me that game developers that create the tools to create and export movies (like Lionhead's The Movies) are in exactly the same position regarding intellectual rights that word processing program developers like Microsoft are in whenever they include a font that they have designed. Though Microsoft owns all the rights to the Verdana font which they created, they do not hold any rights to the documents people create in Word using the Verdana font.
Filmmakers who use the models/fonts/sets in The Movies own their movies just as writers own their documents.
Al Cima, I think the copyright system may be a little crazier than you believe.
Word documents are indeed not works that most law would consider to be derived from the copyrighted Word program itself. Neither are prints of the documents. (Screen grabs of the wysiwyg display generated whilst Word is editing the document might be especially if e.g. you can see the program's user interface.)
However, if you get someone to agree to suitable terms before licensing them to install (i.e. make a copy of) the program on their machine in the first place, you can forbid particular uses (such as printing, or using in a commercial film) if you so desire, even if you didn't own any other assets involved (e.g. even if a public domain font were used.) Microsoft/Word does not have such clauses in the license, but many of the games used to produce machinima do: you are explicitly denied various rights to use the output of the game program even if you don't make use of any of the art assets.
Aside from this issue of recinding rights on install, I think that the situation with fonts is also, alas, different by default than you suggest.
Documents that merely name the fonts (e.g. the *.doc electronic form stored on a PC) are not derived works of the copyrighted fonts. But documents printed to paper probably do count as derived works with respect to the fonts, as would screen-grabs including those fonts. You've used copyrighted art (the font design) to make a derived work (the print-out or bitmap.)
The reason you can print such documents free of fear of copyright infringement is because the owners of the fonts typically explicitly grant permission to do so. Here's Microsoft summarising this for the fonts they own, for example.
(I could have got this wrong. All this can be a tricky area and the details vary for individual jurisdictions and licenses, so even if I was a lawyer I'd be disclaiming wildly.)
Anthony,
Your points are well taken. You bring up some interesting perspectives on the fonts issue.
However, the problem for Lionhead arises from the two differing license agreements pertaining to 'The Movies.' The agreement for uploading user movies to their site claims they have an unlimited and non-exclusive license to use the film in any way they see fit. It maintains their ownership of their own in-game assets and it also states the user's continuing ownership of the final film as a whole.
The actual game license (in the box) states that the user owns his/her film and that Lionhead owns its own assets used to create that film. It claims no unlimited rights for Lionhead's use of the final film. Since they explicitly give users the right to post their films on the internet (anywhere they want, not just Lionhead's site) without any restrictions, they release any rights they may have to restrict the use of the film by the user. This is essentially similar to what a font-maker would do when releasing a new font. The same could be said for a filter effect included with Photoshop. The artist using a blur on his image would not be prevented from posting his original image on the internet by Adobe.
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