(new post - art meta) a speedrun, and copyright bad
(view directly on the blog here: https://cerberus.bearblog.dev/a-speedrun-and-copyright-bad/)
i'm a very longtime appreciator of games done quick, a biannual marathon stream where volunteers complete speedruns (or do other sorts of skill expression exhibitions) of a revolving door of games for an entire week while soliciting donations for charity. it's increasingly become something of a convention as well - the marathon just a couple weeks ago hosted community panels and had an artist alley for the first time in the event's history.
i'm kindof obsessed with GDQ, which you may know if you've been following me for long enough. it has its issues and groan-worthy moments, to be sure. but it's an extremely unique and remarkable thing in our modern era, like a time-bound third-place of the internet: it's a community space for enthusiasts to gather for an ostensibly good cause with legitimately good effect, two things that only align with the moon and stars in NGO settings. it's generally earnest and welcoming when i feel much of the online is cliquey or isolationist. an event of this magnitude done by people who've had to figure it out on the fly, publically as everyone watches, is unheard of. the ship has tightened up a lot over the years, but it's still unpolished enough that i don't feel too grossed out being parasocial about it. this also means the focus on the charities (prevent cancer foundation and doctors without borders, depending on the time of year) and the community doesn't feel too self-aggrandizing.
on that tuesday, there was a run of A Plumber For All Seasons, a Super Mario World-based fangame. the commentary points out that this game is notable for being the first SMW romhack featured on GDQ that isn't a kaizo1 romhack, specifically - it's just a "normal" game that may as well have been released by nintendo itself. i had this thought while watching - "kinda funny to see a mario game not made by nintendo that very easily seems like it could've been". i was then astonished to realize that, what i was feeling was actually a sense that it was immediately obvious how much more passionate this was; the game is awash in how meticulous the artistry and general design was. look at that fucking background art, for god's sake. that's not to say that modern mario is bad, but look at the years and years of New Super Mario Fuckers Wii U Gold Edition and tell me that this doesn't instantly scan as just, so... inspired. Mario Odyssey is good, but i don't know if it really struck me like this.
nintendo has cast a shadow on fangames with the stalking threat of cease-and-desists. if people were encouraged rather than afraid to dedicate huge chunks of their time to projects like this, what might exist now that was made untenable? some respond with saying it's nintendo's right under copyright law to crack down on these projects, but i think it's plainly lame to base your morals on what's currently legal or not legal. the law develops for and responds to those who can afford to enforce it, and we see that in how disney was one of a few companies that lobbied to extend copyright protection to 95 years.2 it's not fate or common sense that IP is so draconian now, it's merely history. intellectual property, as with all private property, protects the interests of a specific few at the expense of our collective heritage. it buttresses a myth that art is created without influence and originates only from the aether of their mind, as a part of their Brand. after all, disney's most beloved works themselves were derivative of things that had entered the public domain:
On the other hand, Disney itself is a talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain. In fact, the public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. The Lion King draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Biblical stories, and possibly an epic poem about the founder of the Mali Empire. Fantasia's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in other segments the Fantasia film showcases public domain classical music. Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.
— "Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle" [https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/]
when it comes to these artistic works, we recognize them easily as being part of our collective heritage and free for anyone to iterate on, remix, or re-invent. when we talk about the classic disney works however, suddenly it's their "property" and they have the right to "protect" their interest, even when the original creators are long passed on or no longer involved...
how can people think that this model benefits our media culture? i think especially independent artists defend this system because we are scared of people "stealing" our ideas. this has really hit a fever pitch in the last year with the encroachment of genAI. sometimes this is mere insecurity around someone deriving something from our work, but i don't deny that this isn't baseless. i have experienced an instance where for a while, someone much, much more popular and connected than me would be very clearly inspired by art i'd posted mere days before, down to usually using the exact same caption (a gray area but it is a weird feeling); they then went on to eventually copy some of my website's bio for their own (undeniable, if weird, plagiarism). it's a very small and relatively harmless instance, to be sure. but the problem here is not simply the passing on of the expression of my ideas - it's the stripping of credit and fashioning yourself as the sole originator to a larger audience. hbomberguy's bombshell video about plagiarism on youtube was excellent, but had the unfortunate knock-on effect of making many onliners think that any exchange of ideas or derivation is "plagiarism". the problem with james somerton wasn't that he simply repeated ideas from other people - it was the power dynamic inherent to someone with a larger audience stripping credit from work generated by queer people with much less connections and clout than him. people were accusing Palworld of plagiarizing pokemon. like, dude. pokemon is the most profitable media franchise in the world and it's not even close3. everyone and their dog knows where that design language and type of gameplay comes from. it's not losing anything to a new studio with a much smaller audience ganking their shtick and trying to do it even better. considering the state of their recent game releases, i would say it's extremely deserved and something i hope happens more often. and you could argue that it worked: Palworld took off, which scared the pokemon company enough to patent the concept of Switching Between Mounts for different terrains4. it's a miracle that the very beloved starfox fan show A Fox In Space hasn't been hit with much, much worse by now.
put another way: we need to stop conflating legal copyright infringement with moral stealing, especially when it comes to us sole proprietor artists who are defending our egos in this age of genAI. as a moral act, not a legal one, i think "stealing" from international media conglomerates and companies is basically not real. they sold their characters and worlds for mass enjoyment, and far more hands are involved now than just their original creators'. the fact that it's termed as if it's a natural right is a corruption of how art is a collaborative, not individual, effort. the dynamic exercised by someone making a sonic fan game (for profit or not) is just fundamentally different than someone's work or expression being stripped of context or authorship, and re-presented to a different audience who are misinformed about its origin; it's punching up the class contradiction, rather than down or laterally.
as we gawked at the game, i talked to my girlfriend during the A Plumber For All Seasons speedrun about how properties like mario, pokemon, zelda, final fantasy, sonic, and many others are absolutely foundational to many people's childhoods around the world, which coupled with their monstrous international success, and subsequent sequels, and reiterations and Lore Expansions, makes them cultural phenomenon more than any one individual's work of art. the public domain should work as an acknowledgement of this simple fact: art is an exchange of ideas and how to express them, whether a moral or a disaffected hedgehog with trauma, and after a certain period of time or (imo) at a certain point of cultural saturation, they are part of our collective heritage. especially these giant properties - they were literally given to the masses, and are loved by the masses, but our ability to actually act on the truth of their existence as a part of our common artistic language by iterating and making them our own, is in a vice grip. even though it feels like sometimes, we love them more than their actual owners, enough to lovingly translate photographs of the german countryside into pixel art masterpieces as backdrops for a Super Mario World romhack. video games in particular are so captured by this relationship, as a very recent medium that came up in the age of an international capitalism reaching its grasp into the entertainment sphere in an unprecedented way; video games have always been so brand-occupied in a way that i don't think other forms of art have been. look at the rich history of sampling and remixing in various hip-hop scenes, and the echoes of that across modern EDM and rap today. this technique was crucial to the development of this medium, and has only enriched it. how much better would games be, if we could steal pokemon and make it good? only the real questions, at cerberus dot blog.
(i am not a lawyer or even particularly knowledgeable about IP/copyright, if it wasn't obvious! but i just wanted to speak as a gaming enjoyer; i am constantly at odds with the severe monopolization entrenched in the medium and the ways that this can lure people into defending the richest corporations on this planet, which always grinds my gears a little bit.)
footnotes
a specific tradition of game design in romhacking circles that started as trolling and went on to establish a refined philosophy over time with a dedicated community. the general approach is to push the game's mechanics to its absolute extremes, sometimes turning bugs into intended play (e.g. wall jumping in SMW), with an emphasis on a very specific playstyle with tight input timings and harsh and arbitrary punishment. it's kindof soulslike in the sense that repetitive failure is embraced as an inevitable part of the learning process. it started with SMW but the philosophy has been adapted to other contexts, such as metroid and sonic.↩
source - you will not believe how big the difference is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises↩
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1gmgks1/details_of_pokemons_patent_lawsuit_against/↩
(t’oyxasut ‘nüün for reading! leave a comment directly on the post if you like 🧡)