Several sites have raised an issue with Sony’s new PSN Terms of use, pondering over who will own the rights to anything created using LittleBigPlanet’s Create mode, with it seeming very likely that Sony will own everything.
The paragraph in question by sites such as Gamepolitics, GameCulture, and I have the princess, is below:
You also authorise us [Sony] and our affiliated companies, without payment to you, to license, sell and otherwise commercially exploit your User Material
Whilst to me this doesn’t read anything necessarily about ideas or written content within levels becoming the property of Sony, or perhaps that sticker of your cat’s face that you made, it does give them the right to charge money to others for playing your level. GameCulture notes:
...in three weeks, we could all be working for Sony, crafting and sharing levels that Sony owns outright. Perhaps some of those levels will end up being packaged as downloadable content, much the same way that fruit of some of LittleBigPlanet’s best beta players is being packaged with the official release.
Of course, there’s nothing untoward about any of that. After all, the LittleBigPlanet model encourages users to share their levels for free. The revenue we generate for Sony by building their content for them is just part of the genius of their business model. Crowdsourcing for teh win.
But how does the equation change as user-generated content becomes less a matter of remixing existing intellectual property by ‘modding’ a game and starts to look more like the creation of original work? What happens when the systems game developers build for us are less games than platforms for the creation of new games?
When Sony is done rescuing their golden boy from the tarnished brush of controversy, it would be nice to have them clarify this in non legalese.
