The Problem with Painting By Numbers

[p]One issue that pops up in the forums now and again is the issue of copied heroes. In short, this sees someone take an existing hero and attempt to transpose it into CoH. This can be done for many reasons – love of a character and desire to expand them in new ways, lack of imagination, to cash in on the character’s reputation without having to build one yourself – but at the end of the day the result is the same: a recognisable entity is created to play in the CoH world.

[p]There has been a lot of discussion over how legal this is to do. I am no lawyer and I live in a different country to the majority of those who will play CoH, so my legal qualifications are pretty much zilch in this area. But as far as the general line of forum board legal knowledge has said that provided you don’t copy a character greatly in both appearance and name, then you should be able to get away with your little homage to your favourite character. As such, you could create a character in orange spandex, give him the Claws powerset and call him “Coyote” and you’d probably be okay (provided that costume wasn’t too close in appearance to that Canadian mutant’s).

[p]Oh, and parody is apparently acceptable – if you can duplicate a character but in such a way that sends up the original, you shouldn’t be vulnerable to losing that character due to intellectual property laws.

[p]And that’s what this issue moves around: intellectual property. Comic book characters are intellectual property, sometimes of the authors who create them, but more often of the comic book companies that print them (who are in turn sometimes owned by other companies). It is off the back of these characters that comic book companies make their money. For the big names, this money comes not off the actual sale of the comics, but the licencing of that name to other merchandise sellers.

[p]The last thing a company that owns the rights to Captain Perfect and are shopping around to try and get a movie for that character is to see someone else using that character without paying for it first. This is for a number of reasons, but a big one is that if a company shows a willingness to let others use its intellectual property for free (and inaction can equal willingness in this case) then it has been known for courts to rule that said intellectual property is now public domain, free for anyone to use. Could you ever imagine Marvel letting something like Spiderman even get close to a situation like that? I can’t. And that’s why they will go after people selling unlicenced Spiderman shirts and creating Spiderman skins for Freedom Force – because they want as much control over that cash cow (or spider) as possible because the alternative is that they lose it.

[p]That’s the technical side of it, according to those who populate CoH forum-land. But there is also another side that might see Cryptic / NCSoft come down on characters that bear more than a passing resemblence to existing characters.

[p]This issue is the risk of a lawsuit. Even if Cryptic / NCSoft is technically correct that your “Coyote” character isn’t violating the intellectual property that surrounds “Wolverine”, they don’t want to face a lawsuit to prove it. In real terms, your $15 a month isn’t worth the costs of even starting a legal defence from DC, Marvel, or even Dark Horse – it’s much easier to just delete “Coyote”, warn you not to copy existing characters and keep self-censoring their servers to avoid any problems.

[p]As I understand it, when you create a character in a MMOG, that character becomes the property of the company running the MMOG (depending on the Terms of Service). This means that although you are the one who creates the character, it is that company’s responsibilty to manage it. They will want to avoid as many problems as possible, with preventing players from ripping off existing characters being right up there on that problem list. As such, I’d expect Cryptic / NCSoft to take a very short leash on characters that might duplicate existing characters.

[p]Given this situation, I guess the lesson will be: don’t paint your hero by numbers in CoH. That way you won’t logon one day to find it deleted and all your hard work gone.