The_Kodu said:
Rayce Archer said:
She didn't steal any. Video of someone else's work does not belong to the individual who records the video. Or to put it in real-world terms, video of a MLB game doesn't belong to the players, it belongs to major league baseball.
Publishers "own" footage of their games and permit its use by tacit noninterference. Lets Play-ers don't own any of it, even what they record, and neither does Anita.
Already gone through this multiple times. Lets Plays count as transformative works so yes the recording is owned by the player. The art assets, mechanics and even code of the game is owned by the publishers but the performance is owned by the player.
In MLB the league organises the deals etc and pays them. In the same vein any pro gaming event footage is owned by the league organises not the players as the league organised the matches and recording.
Captcha knows why people are on about Anita.
Emperor's clothes
Just being transformative does not guarantee a work protection under fair use. It simply protects new components of that work. So the narration and any other original content are fine. But does the footage count?
I think you'd have a hard time defending that in court, if it came to it. First off there's portion-of-usage, or what is commonly known as the "heart of the matter." In other words, does the derivitive work (which I would argue is what a let's play is) contain a distinctive portion of the original work? This is debatable in most cases, but with Let's Play videos it certainly isn't since by definition they show the whole game.
Further, you have the issue of nature-of-work. Most modern video games are protected by clauses in the EULA which preclude fair use by your acceptance. For instance in the EULA for Spore, the user cedes not only rights to any creature they create but any video or still images they create in or from the game. Even if your work IS transformative, you don't magically overcome a signed contract just by playing and recording a game, which is WHY you signed said contract in the first place.
Finally I don't think the intent of a Let's Play is transformative. They have no academic value (except maybe Tresspasser, lol), they don't support a broader journalistic initiative, and as recordings of a game being played they really don't modify the original work from its core intent or nature. The best analog to a let's play would be a guitarist in a signed band shooting cell phone video of himself during a concert. Yeah he's playing the music, and yeah he's recording the video, but that doesn't change the studio owning his footage.
Note that this is not especially meant as a criticism of Let's Play videos so much as an observation that no, as much as they might wish it, Let's Play-ers have no exclusive rights to the video they record. Similarly, the TVWiG videos MIGHT count as transformative since they are ostensibly scholarly or journalistic works SUPPLEMENTED by recorded examples of the content being criticized. This would be true even if Let's Play videos were transformative (again, I don't think they are) meaning that Anita still hasn't stolen anything except where bound by contract and restricted by the creator's decision to take legal action. Which of course nobody will because nothing says "I'm sexist scum and I make games about hating women" faster than suing someone for making a video accusing you of being sexist scum and making games about hating women.
Wait shit, Ubisoft would totally still go for that.
What this really comes back to is the whole "Waaaaah Anita Sarkeesian is complaining about games and she doesn't even play them" argument which is variably fallacious depending on whether we consider TVWiG an academic or a journalistic series.