Insert Credits

Imagine that I’m a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (I know, huge stretch of the imagination there). Now imagine that I decided I was unhappy with the way the series ended and decided to publish my own sequel that I’d been working on for the past decade or so that neatly wraps up the series in the name of fans everywhere. And imagine that I did all of this without the permission of the Tolkien estate.

Now the Tolkiens have shown themselves to be perfectly willing to pick over the dessicated carcass of J.R.R.’s voluminous notes to make a quick buck on so-called unpublished masterpieces, but chances are if I tried to do something like that you’d find me getting my ass sued off faster than you could say “Holy torts Batman!” And the Tolkien estate would be well within their rights to sue me into the ground and make sure that my fan masterpiece never saw the light of day.

So why is it that the Internet gets upset when Activision, who recently acquired the rights to former gaming giant Sierra’s properties, decides that they’re going to flex some legal muscle and stop a fan project to make an unofficial sequel to the King’s Quest series?

Here’s just a small sample of the fine Internet lawyering going on in the Joystiq post:

Activision isn’t supporting indie developers!

Well, no. This is not a case of independent developers versus the evil corporate machine. This is a case of a group of fans using someone else’s intellectual property in a game that they are developing in violation of even the most generous interpretation of our oft draconian copyright laws.

Activision couldn’t lose money from this project!

How do you figure? Activision has no plans for the moment for making a new King’s Quest game, but if they ever did decide to exercise the right to use their intellectual property then this game would be in direct competition. It’s a hypothetical situation where they are losing potential money, but copyright law is designed to protect IP holders’ hypothetical potential money.

Companies like Valve support independent developers!

The guys who made Counterstrike weren’t make Half Life 2. Early DOOM 2 modders weren’t making DOOM 3 with the engine. There is a major difference between developers who release map creation utilities and a team that is coding a direct sequel to a series from the ground up.

There’s no way anyone could confuse a fan game for a legitimate professional release!

Never underestimate the power of idiots and assholes on the Internet. The fact that I’m forced to make this post at all should automatically invalidate this argument.

So it sucks for the people who spent the last eight years of their lives putting together this game. It sucks for the community that grew up around this project. It sucks for the retro fans who just wanted a chance to revisit one of their favorite abandoned game franchises.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Activision is acting perfectly within their rights here. Fan fiction and fan projects like this are a violation of copyright. They always have been, and they always will be within our lifetime unless there’s a major overhaul of existing copyright law. And yet we get the same annoying people crawling out of the woodwork complaining about their rights being violated every time one of these projects is crushed under the cold and uncaring heel of some bigwig corporate attorney.

How many cease and desist orders will it take for these people to realize that it’s the fan projects that are the problem, and not the lawyers?

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I do write about the iPhone from time to time here. So if you’re going to take the time to leave a comment with a link back to your iPhone scam site then it would be a good idea to leave said comment on a post about the iPhone rather than one about Patch 3.3.3 for World of Warcraft. Sometimes it helps to take that extra step when you’re already going to so much trouble to siphon off a bit of my small audience.

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We get some odd search terms leading people to the site. I could just chuckle while scrolling through Analytics and move on, but then it occurred to me that I could have more fun sharing some of the better searches with you, the reader, and milking a few posts out of it.

Today’s search term was “worst mmo decade.” My guess is that some industrious spider has already crawled my Games of the Decade entry on Dark Age of Camelot yesterday and that’s what led the poor searcher to the site.

I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for in that article. Just in case you ever come back to Insert Credits, the worst MMO of the past decade was Lineage II followed closely by Aion. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is probably Korean.

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A group of gamers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Square-Enix claiming that the company used deceptive marketing practices in advertising Final Fantasy XI.  The logic of the lawsuit is as follows:

• Every Final Fantasy game to date hasn’t required a monthly fee.
• Final Fantasy XI, being an MMO, requires a fee.
• Requiring a fee for a series that doesn’t normally require a fee is too much for the average consumer to handle.

Really, I wish them the best of luck in their lawsuit and I hope that it doesn’t hurt them too much when the judge throws them out of the court.  Final Fantasy XI was advertised and marketed as an MMO from the get-go.  The box clearly advertises a free 30-day subscription on the front which implies that there will be money changing hands at some point to keep the subscription going.  I try not to be overly judgmental or snarky here at Insert Credits, but there are times when the stupidity shines forth so brightly that it burns.

There is good news from this though.  If they do happen to win then I’ve got a great idea for suing Blizzard for luring me into the Warcraft universe with a series of blockbuster strategy games before switching to that silly fee-based platform for World of Warcraft.

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