Grand Theft Copyright
There’s much to say about the GTA Hot Coffee mod — some of it constructive. My personal concern is how we’re sliding unnoticed the wrong way down a copyright scale.
But before that, a brief synposis. The video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a wide and sprawling affair. The player is given pretty free reign to drive where they want, walk around, buy and sell what they like, and so on. But the world is populated pretty much only with pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and the like. So as a player, this is your world and you spend your time… well, you can guess. At one point you can pay a prostitute for sex (which boosts your health score) then beat her with a baseball bat to get your money back. This is not a game for children. Rest assured it is rated, marked and sold as such.
Now Rockstar, the makers of the game, are being sued by an 84 year old woman because when she bought it for her 14 year old grandson he downloaded — from a source totally independent of Rockstar — a modification which revealed an otherwise-unavailable dry humping scene.
Told you there was much to say.
But here’s something which caught my eye, from a feature today on the affair:
And it’s not just Grand Theft Auto that is under threat of legislation. Even “family” titles, such as The Sims 2, are in the prosecutors’ sights. Late last week, a Florida-based attorney, Jack Thompson, said The Sims 2 is the games industry’s “latest dirty little secret”. He alleges it contains “full-frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia and pubic hair” - body parts that are pixelated in the off-the-shelf version of the game, but can be revealed with a downloaded “mod” from the internet.
In a letter to the chairman of Electronic Arts, publisher of the Sims, Thompson wrote: “To the extent that your company does absolutely nothing to crack down on this apparent infringement upon EA’s copyrighted material … then EA collaborates, in every sense of the word, with the modders to put this material into the hands of consumers, many of whom are children.”
So these companies are under threat of litigation for not protecting their own copyright. See how we’ve slid down the following history of copyright:
- Once upon a time there was no copyright. Creators had no protection. All power was in the hands of the public, who could copy anything at will.
- Then the first copyright laws appeared. Creators had some protection and could exploit their own works. But this was limited in time, and after that initial period of exploitation it was opened up to all.
- Over the years that grace period was extended. The balance was shifted to give creators more power, and correspondingly less to the public.
- Now it looks like the creators are being required to maintain that power. They no longer have the freedom of what to do with their work. They are required to keep it from the public.
A likely side effect is that only large companies — those with the power to enforce — will be able to produce creative works. If you can’t enforce you can’t have the copyright.
Of course this is not happening now, but you can see that we are being pushed in that direction. If no-one does anything then yet another quiet social revolution will have occurred, and we’ll be all the poorer for it.
