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Remember Crysis? That mediocre first-person shooter with massive hardware requirements that turned “But can it run Crysis” into a phrase that still hasn’t left the geek culture consciousness? The studio behind the game, cleverly named “Crytek,” has been working on the sequel (scheduled for release in late March). An unfinished version has leaked online, prompting [...]

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Game modding communities thrive on the free exchange of knowledge that ranges from the developers adopting a mod-friendly attitude to the hobbyists who share their work and knowledge with comrades. The community thrives on clever innovation, on people picking up a project where others have left off, and on learning by imitation. Yet interestingly, the [...]

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Many of my budding artist friends appreciate their obscurity problem and want to share their work without the encumbrance of copyright. Yet they are worried about others using it for commercial purposes, the same fear that drives people like Cory Doctorow into the arms of Creative Commons licenses. This idea of somebody else, maybe a [...]

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Ignorant corporate executive Cory Ledesma thinks buying games used somehow cheats developers (read: his company, THQ), so he doesn’t have any problem with tying a game’s online multiplayer  mode to a one-time-use code. This is the kind of ridiculous decision one can expect from the knee-jerk fiscal entitlement mentality everybody making things seems to have [...]

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I may not be the biggest fan of Tim Buckey’s opinions or comic, but there are so many things wrong in his latest post lambasting the “sense of entitlement” among gamers that I was compelled to respond. I can always rely on Tim to roll out some of the most rampant industry fallacies, so deconstructing [...]

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Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the clear thinking with respect to filesharing and intellectual monopoly (imaginary property, if you will) is filtering into more mainstream channels. I was rather pleased to see these two pieces by Joe Konrath and David Gerrold; both say some excellent things before veering off into the content industry’s Bizarro [...]

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Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium Wordpress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than [...]

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Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body.

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Despite the attempts to elevate it to something tantamount to actual items, so-called “intellectual property” occupies the Land of Make-Believe along with unicorns and elves. Yet the very suggestion that the monopoly privileges associated with IP are invalid raises hackles and provokes fervent responses from the faithful.

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Yesterday people both on- and offline were crowing about how Pink Floyd “won” a legal battle with their record label, EMI. At last, the band can force their fans to buy digital versions of their songs as full albums, rather than individual tracks. Wait, what? This was worth fighting over?

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