I was reading an article over at New World Notes: Attack on Titan Fan Game in Second Life Attacked by Attack on Titan Publisher? This is an old concept, Second Life creators create world or roleplay based on a known product for which they don’t appear to have rights to do so. Here’s the thing, Attack on Titan is something I’d never heard of until I read Hamlet’s article. Obviously we all can’t know about everything, but the franchise gets free publicity via usage in Second Life.
Now of course Intellectual Property rights are a very important area and publishers need to ensure they maintain their rights, so ignoring IP is not a clever thing to do, no matter how much free publicity it brings to a franchise. However I’ve long maintained that companies should consider the potential of Second Life and the realites of what Second Life creators can afford, and come to a compromise that is sensible. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but Amazon have a model that could potentially be expanded to virtual worlds.
Kindle Worlds is the Amazon model, it’s where fan fiction can be published. There is a criteria but here’s some of the blurb:
“Welcome to Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries; Valiant Entertainment for Archer & Armstrong, Bloodshot, Harbinger, Shadowman, and X-O Manowar; Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga; Barry Eisler’s John Rain novels; Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines series; and The Foreworld Saga by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, Eric Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Cooper Moo. Licenses for more Worlds are on the way.”
Now Amazon Kindle is a completely different platform to Second Life and has less of the chaotic nature of Second Life, as once published, a story is published, but the idea, bring licensed products to a user generated content platform is something that Linden Lab should investigate.
Now first things first, you can’t just publish a Kindle Worlds story, it has be accepted, it has to meet the criteria, Amazon have a page with information for Kindle Worlds Authors. Setting out guidelines such as that for Second Life would be more problematic, but not impossible. The more difficult part for Second Life would be how would you pay royalties to the publishers. That’s probably a bigger sticking point than the guidelines because I don’t know how comfortable Linden Lab would be with a percentage of a Linden Dollar transaction going towards royalties.
Maybe Linden Lab could give a percentage of tier cost as royalties, that would be less problematic, but would of course hit Linden Lab’s own income stream. However, the thing with popular titles is that they can generate publicity for Second Life too, this doesn’t always work out great as we’ve seen in the past with CSI and I’m sure there was a Gossip Girl tie in of sorts.
Maybe Linden Lab could negotiate some deals and award the rights to publish content to someone such as MadPea Productions, who have a proven track record of creating compelling experiences within Second Life.
Now I know a lot of people would really prefer Second Life sims to have original content, not based on known franchises. That’s all well and good and I would love to see more ventures along those lines thrive, but the tier is too damn high! Maybe if Linden Lab could work out a way to pay royalties, they could also find a way for original creators to have the tier burden reduced with some sort of royalty based system whereby transactions are shared between the creator and Linden Lab, therefore giving creative ventures room to breathe.
I’m not saying any of this would be easy, but I do think it’s something that could be investigated to see if there’s any room for manoevure. A proper system for such worlds, as Amazon have, would mean that Second Life could potentially attract such franchises in an official capacity and content creators would have clear to follow guidelines on how to participate.
As I said, it’s far from easy, but it’s certainly not impossible, is it?
Hi Ciaran, you are proposing a really good thing here. Let’s hope that LL will give it a thought. I have taken it up in a blog post of mine: http://sl-playinstinct.blogspot.be/2013/07/what-happened-to-attack-on-titan-fan.html I wanted to shortly let you know that your question of “guidelines for professional use” are not a problem at all. This is something that Amazon has decided to implement from their side in order to guarantee the consumer a minimum standard. It is not a requirement of the Copyright.
Take the Paramount vs. SL Star Treck fans as an example. They don’t care at all what kind of (often lame) stuff is offered in SL. They only care that no one earns anything fro it. You find some more information on this issue in the discussion of this blog post: http://sl-playinstinct.blogspot.be/2013/07/copyright-holder-of-attack-on-titan.html
I swear I replied to this once Estelle, I must have intended to! Very good blog post you link to, you write very well.
Fansites are a problematic area, but yes, sometimes they get given a free pass. I went to a talk in Second Life once where the speaker was Gene Roddenberry Jr, son of Star Trek creator, he was excited about being able to fly, great event.