If there was ever an example of why gatekeepers are a big deal it was this last stretch of confederate flag hysteria where Apple was going so far as to take down historically accurate civil war games. It probably won't happen often, but it made it painfully clear just exactly how much control a few companies have over the availability of things we want just by controlling the distribution platform. On the flip side though, I do have to admit that in the middle of that my curiosity and Amazon made it possible to find and order about a dozen books about the civil war to start my new hobby (crazy interesting stuff by the way).
To do that, I decided to start with a book that made the southern case since I had no understanding of it at all. Most of the books were by southern authors and seemed emotionally invested until I came across "When In the Course of Human Events: The Case for Southern Secession" by Charles Adams.
This is the book that kick started everything for me because he's not southern and he's a professor who is an expert on global tax history. The book is extremely well cited (about 250 cites in 180 pages) and the cites annotate the paragraphs themselves. This is a huge help because thanks to the online Library of Congress and Google's effort to digitize books, every time you come across a "there's no way that's real" moment...of which there will be many...you can look up the cite and say "holy crap...that happened"
The official tome of the civil war that's a longer read is Battlecry of Freedom by McPherson.
There's a ton of material out there and as things get your attention you'll find lots of rabbit holes to dive down. The real trick of it is once you understand you'll notice so much oversimplification in internet conversations around it, even semi-official looking videos.
A couple of things that will get your attention:
- Each state had different reasons for seceding - Haiti played a HUGE part in secession - The causes of secession and the cause of war are 2 different things - Nobody died at Fort Sumter, the fort just ran out of ammo and the soldiers were saluted as they were returned to their ship. - The part that the media played in the war is extreme
For a single link that can really put you in place of what was going on at that time, the Cherokee Declaration of Causes from 6 months into the war:
http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/History/Events/Cherok...
Once you get into it you'll find a lot more. The economic side of things really got my attention. There's a lot of interesting European history around it too. In depth on slavery is The Half That's Never Been Told (not an easy read). Most of the Southern accounts are very emotional in the writing style, which may or may not appeal to you. Even with citations that negatively impacts some of the credibility for me, but still interesting to see.
There are also many collections of letters from the time period out there.
The single biggest thing that I took away from is this: every action has an equal and opposite reaction applies to history as well. If you read about something that seems like an extreme response to something small, that's because there is a piece you haven't found out about yet.
But with current decisions that game companies own your play-trough (they were able to shutdown streams on copyright grounds - it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting) - and with emulator servers moving more and more into the illegal - we could enter a digital history dark age. A lot of the cultural phenomenon that was WoW is lost and unexperiancable for the future generations.
This sort of thing has implications for game design as well. If you care about your game being experienced half a century from now (which, to be fair, you probably don't), then you should attempt to provide an "offline mode"--even for games with online multiplayer--that makes a best-effort attempt to convey the spirit of the game. Dark Souls does an excellent job at this: even though much of the fun of the game is in playing online (seeing the hints that others have left on the ground, summoning allies for boss battles, fighting off invading players, seeing the ghosts of other players running around the level and the bloodstains they leave when they die), it also goes to great lengths to cater to offline players: there exists a spell that will cause developer-written messages to appear, there are summonable NPC allies and NPC invaders, all PVP reward items can technically (and laboriously) be farmed from enemy drops, etc.
I think that video games are a different enough medium that normal intuition doesn't apply, and that this example is not applicable. I think most people would be unsurprised if a live-stream reading of a novel was found to infringe copyright, but how far would you have to change things to not? Would an interpretive dance adaptation of a novel infringe copyright? Almost certainly not. What about a real-time translation into Tolkien's Elvish? That probably wouldn't either, but translations are generally considered to fall under the same copyright, so maybe.
A sufficient portion of some video games is enough like a movie that I entirely understand the logic behind not allowing live streaming of play-throughs, while others (Minecraft) are clearly centered on user content enough that they would fall on the other side of that line.
I think it's unrealistic to try and describe the situation as clearly fair use or clearly infringement.
That said, I do feel that the extension of copyright length is doing damage to the growth of culture, not least in the area of video games that will be lost to time.
This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies.
A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work.
What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether.
All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server?
I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.
Yes. But I paid $40 USD and I am entitled to the profits of the art I create with it is sensible stuff. MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create. But Bethesda can claim that video of my speed play trough of Doom II infringes their copyright (the case was with Nintendo and some of their games I think). Blizzard can claim that modifying a bits in my RAM memory infringes their copyright and so on.
Which, for other forms (Music, stage plays/musicals, etc.) usually requires royalties paid to the creator of the thing being performed if you perform it for profit.
I think it wouldn't be difficult to argue that the different mediums -- character on a screen vs. character on a stage -- don't really change that aspect significantly. The legal evolution around the birth and maturation of machinima is kinda interesting to dig into.
Hypothetically, could Microsoft legally do that if it wanted to? I'm guessing something like that could be part of EULA.
As I see it, there's a very compelling argument for restricting streaming of narrative heavy/gameplay light games. Walking sims and the like. I have no trouble believing that views of lets plays impact sales (although, not as much as that one blog post by the creator of That Dragon, Cancer claimed -- that seems more due to subject matter than anything else).
And FWIW most game publishers allow streaming. The right exists to limit it but few take advantage of it other than nintendo.
For context: I'm an ex-game programmer (admittedly, I mostly worked on strategy games, so this never really effected me or my employers) who watches a more streams and lets plays than I'd like to admit.