Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks agoSimilarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.
This is basically what I’m saying:
- creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building/modding upon opensource gaming projects are
- no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
- creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
- no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks ago
It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks ago
It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.