Here’s the background: Family Guy needed some old-school Nintendo gameplay, so they ripped a couple of gameplay videos from YouTube and used them on their show. Without permission, of course. But wait! It gets better. You see, once the show was up Fox’s automated anti-piracy trackers sent YouTube takedown notices for the original videos, which YouTube automatically honored. It took a little while for the resulting screams of outrage to be heard, YouTube put the videos back up, Fox admitted that they did this and they didn’t say they were sorry: you know the drill.
But here’s my question: somebody owns the copyright to that video. I don’t know whether gameplay videos count as copyright-worthy – this is so totally not my field – but even if the gameplay people don’t then the people who made the game in the first place do, right? And did Family Guy get permission from the owners of that intellectual property before they used it? A related question: did anybody get paid? Somebody should have gotten paid.
Moe Lane
PS: I know that this doesn’t sound like much, but it is kind of emblematic of a larger problem.
It’s an active area of dispute. Nintendo asserts a blanket copyright claim on all YouTube gameplay vids of their games. They don’t have them taken down, they just confiscate the ad revenue for any that are monetized, which YouTube’s policy totally allows.
Double Dribble is a Konami game, so Konami could assert a YouTube copyright claim on it if they cared to. But Konami is off in lala land when it comes to games these days so the fact they don’t is less evidence of benevolence and more their total indifference to their own history.
A performance is normally protected by copyright.
But Nintendo and Fox have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money. Plus Congress has made it clear with the last few revisions of copyright law that the entire purpose of copyright law is to protect large companies that can and do contribute to re-election funds.
(Is that too cynical, or too accurate? It’s getting hard to tell.)
This is the main problem with copyright law, in my opinion. I have no problem with long terms, or even super-long terms. What I have a problem with is massive companies being in the position to demand work-for-hire on intellectual property as part of a standard contract.