Muzman on 13/12/2013 at 17:23

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Joe's views are charmingly naive and quaint. They sound like something from ten years ago. Not that they are unreasonable but the parties who put these laws in place have shown that they are not on several occasions.

As TB describes, the system is clever but dumb. It can only really do precise matches so it gets music and trailers and cutscenes a lot. The way rights works also complicates things since you can actually have permission in one territory and get flagged by the holder from another territory. Crying fair use doesn't really help, since fair use hasn't really been tested in court yet, if I remember rightly. And there's even been debate on whether the DMCA could destroy it entirely.

17 seconds of a song you don't have explicit license for? Hell yes they'll take all your money. Expect the worst from the music industry. Much of this stuff is all because of them anyway.
It would be good to see a reasonable revenue sharing arrangement like he describes. I don't think they have a centralised revenue licensing and collection system like Aus in the US though (Big Government Socialist Devilry). The generally hostile legal environment I think would also prevent youtube from performing such a role, with content they inadvertently host at least. (that seems like it could work great though. You could upload whole old movies and no one would mind.)

demagogue on 14/12/2013 at 05:27

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Monetization is an incentive for content producers to invest in uploading good shows. If that's dried up for video game content, then that means videos on game content are going to stay perpetually amateur. So we'll still get LPs and tutorials I think, but something like the Yogscast serials and very popular review serials I think are going to go under. I don't like all popular game videos, and the ones I don't like I'll won't miss, but I'll miss some. But even aside from that ... ok, I think I should step back to explain what I don't like about this.

The promise of YouTube is that it's a new medium for content production that doesn't work like traditional TV serials or movies, but you can have this new type of serial that's very connected to its audience in an interactive way, it's something they participate in, in a way completely different from anything TV could ever be like. It's not even like reality-show-plus, which is how some people were talking about it, but this completely new thing that I sometimes saw as having a bigger future. I mean I don't even have a TV anymore; what I do watch is online on my own time, and more & more I'm watching YT serials as part of things I'll watch during a week, but for them I'm also going to forums & (speaking of the games ones) doing other interactive things with them, through mods, in MP, or in other quirks of the game, etc. So there's a trend there.

Now the connection to game content is that for these kind of bottom-up serials to work, a vital limiting piece for local groups to deal with is in the content production itself... There's no way they can buy all the locations and equipment and extras to do actual TV shows, and it's even worse because the public can't share those spaces with them, but they can still script all of this stuff. Games give these groups the world where they can still bring the scripts to life and bring the audience into the world at the same time. So that's why I think shifting income away from the content-producers back to the game companies effectively closes off these entire worlds from production.

It's interesting that people start to think about the spaces in games as public spaces. It almost feels like a rule saying if you film a sequence in the space of Times Square, you have to give all your income to New York City. You're not going to see stories set in Times Square again, and in the end that would suck out the energy of what Times Square represents as a space. I mean it'd be a stupid thing for them to do since it's very vitality thrives on the public's imagination created by all the creative movies and shows and videos that mythologize that space. So my intuition is that there's an argument that these spaces in games should sometimes be thought of as a public space people should be allowed to use to produce their own content supported by profit to keep it thriving (without profit, what's the point/possibility of staying tapped into your audience?), that's the future trend, and companies that aren't on board with that trend are going to be on the wrong side of history sooner or later and miss a giant opportunity in the end. I mean in an analogous sense that Times Square as a mythologized public space makes a lot more money for NYC in the end than if it were a closed space. People need to buy the game to get inside the serials' world in the same way people need to spend money in NYC (hotels, taxis, restaurants) to participate in the Times Sq mythology. Games should be on the side of letting the incentives stand (monetization for content producers) for mythologizing their spaces. I think I need to say more to fill the argument out, but this is my first thinking on it for now.

zajazd on 14/12/2013 at 10:47

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Time to get a real job.

Yakoob on 14/12/2013 at 18:01

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While I agreed before that most podcasts are random/boring and relying on YT for sole income is risky, don't underestimate the time, effort, and money that goes into producing a quality and consistently updating video show.

Yakoob on 15/12/2013 at 00:31

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Ah gotcha. Good sarcastic remark then, sorry if I was too pre-emptive - you never know on TTLG :p