| Abstrakt: |
There is no doubt that works that incorporate or build upon existing copyrighted works are derivative works, but what encouraging those works means legally for companies and creators can be muddy. There remains an uncertainty as to who owns user-created content in a video game "co-created" by the players such as Roblox and Minecraft. While user-created content is not new in the video game industry, the ramifications of allowing and encouraging creation have not been discussed in great enough detail and are in dire need of a modern reassessment. The Dota 2 controversy shed light on how the industry's failure to properly address user-created content has led to companies missing opportunities to take control of genre-defining content made in their own games and using their own tools. Despite this spotlight, companies still have wildly varying solutions that are each insufficient in one manner or another in resolving the uncertainty or the issues stemming from it. This note aims to examine usercreated content and its copyright implications in detail, critique the current legal framework used to determine copyrightable elements in video games, analyze the approaches developers have used to capture user-created content into their intellectual property portfolios or mitigate the risk of indirect infringement, and offer a route of future study to better evaluate how to balance minimizing the risk of indirect infringement and players' interest in creating mods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
