Paying for mods

[wolfigor]

In my personal view the relation between game and mods is symbiotic: they help each other.

For example the value of Civilization is enhanced by the availability of mods and people buy the game knowing that there will be a healthy mod communities tailoring the game for many different "tastes" and often fixing bugs and problems.

Also the tool for modding are usually something that developers for the game build for their own use, to simplify modification of the game.
In reality giving out tools to the community does not bring a big additional development cost.

In my view Valve has right to a share of the profit from Mods published in they framework because they provide and evident service (the framework itself)

Like Apple getting a share of app & content sold via their store is justified by Apple providing curation, distribution, and a framework to handle payments.
The most typical split in those case (appstores for mobiles) is usually 70% for the developer and 30% for appstore owner (e.g. Apple) who pay from their part of the share for delivery costs, CC charges, and so on.

70% for the developer is OK.
25% for the modder it isn't: some mods can be trivial and not worth anything but some of them are almost a complete different game (e.g. Civ4 - Fall from Heaven) and they would deserve much more than a mere 25%!






about the "case" of Twilight fanfiction, I tend to agree with Mise that it can be considered derivative work and thus protected by fair use [I don't know if this has been challenged in court].
In this view who owns the rights of Twilight cannot pretend money from the writers of fanfiction.

However if the fanfiction wants the stamp of approval from Twilight (being part of the official "universe") then there is a reasonable reason to pay for it.
The "seal of approval" gives more value to the derivative work, can be used for marketing, and in theory is certified to work within the plot of the original novel (similar to mod not being broken by games updates).

 

[BvBPL]

Every good that has demand affects the general welfare.

Intellectual property is not a good. It may be recorded on a physical medium, but that does not make the intellectual property a good. I point that out not to be pedantic, but because you're taking a lot of little pieces of law from other areas and applying them to intellectual property. That's not a great way to examine the law because it can get confusing quick.

For example, you raised the question of a town that has a law that says it is legal to paint your house green, and you stated that the law was unnecessary because it preserves a right protected by other rights. That may be generally true, but that's not always the case. There are a variety of means by which homeowners associations, local organizations, and developers can regulate what homeowners can do with their houses. This sort of thing can to a peak in El Paso, Texas where a local school was being painted with a mural of the US flag. This mural violated the immediate community's color guidelines about what color buildings could be painted. I guess the opponent of the school's mural relented, but if there was a local law that said "owners have a right to paint the buildings with the USA flag" then it wouldn't have been an issue.

The right to paint one's house green is an interesting idea to bring up in a discussion of intellectual property law. Intellectual property rights, particularly copyright and patent areas, are not a unitary indivisible rights. They are instead a collection of specifically enumerated rights. In the US they are the rights to reproduce the work; to distribute copies; create derivative works; publically display the work; publically perform the work; and to digitally transmit it. The European model also includes moral rights which basically protect the work from being placed in an infamous context.

Those rights are necessarily separate. The playhouse that wants to produce the Crucible doesn't want to distribute copies of the work so there's no reason why they would purchase that right. The publishing house printing the hot new novel needs to be able to reproduce it, but not necessarily the right to create a derivative work from the novel.

The system also allows for the retention of rights and limited licenses. For example, when Rand licensed the right to produce a film based on Atlas Shrugged, the film being a derivative work, the license granted to filmmakers stated that any such film must include John Galt's speech from the third section of the book unedited. That speech is absurdly long. In my copy of the book it runs some fifty-five pages in a small type paperback. I've heard it would take three hours to read the speech aloud. It seems an artistic nightmare to try and put that into a movie, but the speech was critical to Rand. She saw those fifty-five pages, which I am guessing is about thirty-five thousand words, as a concise summation of her political philosophies so it was important to her that any subsequent work include it in full.

The separateness of various intellectual property rights allows for a whole bunch of flexible and interesting assignments of rights. For example, the Tolkien estate licensed the right to make movies to another company that eventually licensed the same to New Line. The license allowed for derivative works in the form of tangible merchandise to be created from the movies. That became a cause for dispute as Warner Bros., New Line’s parent company, began to produce “online slot machines” that the Tolkien estates claims are not tangible and therefore outside of the license.

People demand it because (they believe) it increases their welfare. The equilibrium in a free market is the point at which the welfare of all participants is optimal. The purpose of laws such as IP rights, property rights, and so on, is to create a market that functions as efficiently as possible; that is, one that gets as close as possible to this optimal equilibrium.

No, that’s not the purpose at all. Intellectual property rights are set up to generate economic inefficiency. Copyrights and patents set up artificial monopolies for the products protected. A holder of a copyright can choose to never make that product available at all by never licensing it, and can choose to pursue injunctive relief against anyone who does attempt to make it available. The copyright holder could also decide to use the work in a less than efficient manner for whatever reason, as Wu Tang did with their album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.” The byword for copyright is not economic efficiency but author control.

So, if I sell a house, should the right to any future gains in the price of the house as a result of renovation or refurbishment be automatically sold along with the house, or should the right to such gains be explicit and separate in law? If I buy a house, renovate it, then sell it, would you classify me as a "piggybacker"? Or would I be creating genuine, legitimate value, to which the original owner of the house has no particular right?

A house is not analogous to a video game.

If you produce a mod for a game that had a $85 million marketing budget that sold seven million copies in the first week then you are piggybacking that success that you did not contribute to.

 

[Mise]

Literally nothing you've said in relation to the economics of IP is factually correct. It's all based on a gross misunderstanding of economics. Like, seriously, it's just factually wrong, and I'm just repeating myself to say it.

IP is a good. It just is. I mean, the vast majority of your post attempts to explain why each separate right is a legitimate economic good! The purpose of IP rights is absolutely not to generate economic inefficiency. That's just... wrong, and again, I can't keep saying it. I mean, if you're arguing that IP rights generate economic inefficiency, then this is a very good argument that we should scrap them entirely! It is not creating an artificial monopoly (well, an industry might be monopolistic, depending on whether the conditions of monopoly are satisfied, of course). It is creating an excludable good out of a good that is not naturally excludable: it's creating artificial excludability. You need to read up on what markets are, how the pricing mechanism works, what efficiency means in terms of markets and price, what excludability is, what a monopoly is, hell even what a good is, because literally everything you've described is just wrong. I've tried to be patient and explain the economic principles here, but either you're not understanding, or you're understanding and rejecting them. If it is the latter, and you simply reject the basic principles of economics, then that's fine -- but don't pretend that this is how the system has been designed.

Seriously, your understanding of economics is massively wrong, and I implore you to learn about economics before trying to tell me that IP is not a good, that IP laws are purposely designed to create economic inefficiency, that entertainment products don't affect the general welfare, that the only things for which markets are required are "necessities" such as food, housing, clothing etc, that markets are only free if there is no state intervention, that "property rights" is not a state intervention, but "IP rights" is (even Randians accept the necessity of IP rights as a state intervention to create free markets!!), not to mention confusing an individual's poor purchasing decision with a systematic market inefficiency or failure. Honestly, the amount of sheer nonsense you've said in this thread...

 

[Tahuti]

To embellish on Mise's points: IP is property because the government says it is. It may be an artificial monopoly, though one to protect the labour and investments used to made IP. The IP itself isn't scarce, the labour and investments necessary to create it are.

Certain IP protections certainly are excessive and arguably discourage innovation, such as Software patents and copyright protection after an author's death. However, it is unlikely that largescale software development would be possible without IP. Hell, even open source software development relies on IP; there would be no way to enforce the GNU/GPL licence without recoursing to IP law.

 

[BvBPL]

...I implore you to learn about economics before trying to tell me that IP is not a good....

When you start with stuff like this you lose any credibility as an authority.

Intellectual property isn't a good. A good is a material, produced thing. Because intellectual property is a collection of intangible rights it is not a good.

That's really basic stuff you're getting wrong here. Never mind about the rest of your absurd ramblings.

 

[Arakhor]

The concept of goodwill is extremely intangible, yet it's a fundamental part of balance sheets when calculating how much a particular business is worth.

 

[Mise]

An economic good is anything with utility; alternatively, anything that there is demand for. There are tangible and intangible goods. Intellectual works are intangible goods. You're talking nonsense.

EDIT: Even if you used the right phrasing to describe your ideas, i.e. replacing "goods" with just "intangible goods", it still isn't right. You'd be saying that economic analysis only works when we talk about tangible things like chairs and fish, whereas in fact it works just fine with intangible things as well. Most of our economy involves buying and selling intangible things; most of our jobs are producing or doing intangible things. Economics works just fine on intangible goods.

 

[BvBPL]

You'd be saying that economic analysis only works when we talk about tangible things like chairs and fish, whereas in fact it works just fine with intangible things as well.

No. I never said anything like that. You have an active imagination.

 

[Mise]

No - you said that IP wasn't a good at all. I was merely trying to be as charitable as possible in my interpretation, since what you actually said was just plain wrong.

So, do you accept that economics works fine with intangible goods, such as IP? Or do you still reject the idea that IP is a good entirely? Do you at least accept the existence of intangible goods (contrary to your previous post, in which you explicitly stated that goods must be tangible)?