Rockstar Games Promises To Use Copyright To Delete Spoiler Cutscene Videos
from the spoiler-free dept
Rockstar Games has always struck me as sort of wishy-washy when it comes to how the company protects (or imagines it's protecting) its games. On the one hand, it comes up with fun little strategies to combat cheating, by placing all the cheaters in one place to cheat against other cheaters. On the other hand, the company has embraced DRM in the past, which is the kind of strategy you employ when you want to accomplish exactly nothing beyond pissing off your actual customers. But, hey, nobody's perfect. What's most frustrating when it comes to some of this over-protectionism stuff is when it is done with some truly pure intentions, but isn't thought through. And, the folks behind the newly-released Grand Theft Auto 5 have struck that exact chord with their legal policy on posting game videos.Posting video showing the ending of the game, pure cutscenes or any other big reveal in the story. It's ok to show cutscenes as part of a larger play-through (or in a narrated ‘Let’s Play’ type video) but isolated videos of the game's cinematics will be removed. If you are unsure if what you want to post is considered a spoiler, please contact copyright@take2games.com and describe exactly what scene you are wondering about and in what context the scene would appear.On the one hand, it isn't a terribly aggressive policy on posting game videos. There's clearly an embrace of the "Let's Play" style of vids that spread through YouTube and other sites and do so much to help promote the game itself to prospective customers. In a game like GTA, with its open world and insane amount of freedom, watching a video of the game being played by someone else almost certainly causes zero harm to sales, and likely spurs them forward. It's great to see a company embrace that kind of thing, especially when there have been examples of takedowns over those sort of videos.
On the other hand... why is Rockstar designating itself as the spoiler police? Because that's all this really is. The company is designating story-mission cutscene videos that don't do anything else for aggressive takedowns. What's the point of that? As I mentioned above, a game like GTA doesn't live only on its story. In fact, it probably doesn't even live primarily on its story. It's hard to see how many customers will be lost because, oh, now I know the lead character is going to kill some people and probably do some outrageous stuff. Nevermind that watchers could always... you know... just not watch the spoiler videos.
I guess Rockstar can handle its IP however it wants, but this seems both misguided and counter to the purpose of copyright to begin with.
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Filed Under: abuse, copyright, cutscenes, dmca, grand theft auto 5, spoilers, video games
Companies: rockstar games
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On the other hand, I also hate over-reaching copyright, especially when its misused. That's what Rockstar are promising to do here.
Part of the problem is that they're enforcing their own morality on to people, which is something I try not to do. Sure, *I* hate spoilers, but some TV magazines in the UK have entire sections devoted to outlining what will happen in the week's upcoming soaps. I'll never understand the mentality of watching soaps, let alone ones where you know all the storyline beforehand, but I'd never try blocking or banning others from doing it.
It should be up to the player whether they wish to know the story before they play or not, and it should also be up to the player to use their brain to work out whether or not they see them (and up to the community as a whole to warn of spoilers beforehand). It should *not* be up to Rockstar to enforce their own opinion on to others.
It doesn't increase the value of the game, may actually *decrease* the value for some (e.g. some players *want* to see the ending of the game, especially if they tire of getting stuck, quit playing the story missions and just want to see what they missed), and Rockstar are going to essentially be spending a lot of time and money to police their own customers.
It's their right as copyright holders, of course, but I don't see what the real benefit is.
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my wife thinks i'm crazy because i hate seeing trailers...
(well, she thinks i'm crazy for a lot of reasons; on the other paw, she thinks *everyone* is crazy for liking shrimp and wings...)
*besides* the fact that i didn't go to the movies to see a half hour of ads for other movies (not to mention tee vee ads), IF i'm interested in seeing some upcoming movie (which is about 1 out of a hundred), THEN i do NOT want to see ANYTHING about the movie until i -you know- actually go to see the damn movie...
now, get off my screen ! !!
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Um, sure... if by "enforced" you mean "requested" and by "morality" you mean "desire to be entertained".
"The fact of the matter is 'no spoilers' is censorship just as much as copyright is."
Yes, they are censoring. (Unless you believe that censorship can only be done by government, but let's not go there.) So what? They don't appear to be doing anything wrong here - they aren't touching the Let's Play videos that incidentally contain spoilers, they're only going after the ones that ONLY show the spoilers.
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if the whole thing makes sense is another question...
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Not much (assuming that the cutscene is also 5 mins long) - they're both short portions of the whole game/movie that can conceivably be used to trigger debate, discussion and criticism in the comments and provide something other people may be looking for. You can even argue that a cutscene is less relevant to the videogame as a whole since not only are they usually skippable but the video content isn't the primary content of the game (whereas it's the primary content for a movie).
Legally, the question becomes whether it falls under fair use and logically the question becomes whether removing the clips actually does anything positive. Both are debatable, but I'm sure Rockstar will be using tactics that don't consider the latter while ignoring the former.
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Naturally the usual idiots won't see any problem with this.
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I highly recommend spending some time on techdirt to get a primer on such things before you start commenting.
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But people keep giving their approval by buying the games. So why should they change?
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Can suck it.
Nothing personal I love the new GTA well worth my money. It's just the point in general of what they're doing is completely pointless and extremely easy to circumvent using their own rules.
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Re: Can suck it.
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Re: Can suck it.
What I'm saying is you need to communicate better.
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I mean, nobody here likes it, but there is a system in place to take down alleged-infringing videos on notification, yadda-yadda-yadda and fair enough, I don't like it being there either.
In this instance, though, all Rockstar are saying is that if you just dump spoiler videos to a video service and you're not commenting on the plot or whatever they feel needs to take place to create a transformative work, they're just going to slap you down with a tool they have at their disposal, because, hey, spoiling stuff makes you a trolling asshole, and they have a (shitty, unpopular) weapon at their disposal which works really great for anti-troll purposes.
It's a good use of a bad tool, is what I'm saying. Sure, the tool exists to be DMCA compliant but I'm sure YouTube would still be running some form of it if there were no DMCA. Under such a circumstance, Rockstar could say to YouTube "hey, here are all the spoilers for GTA5, any videos showing them are spoiler videos, please take them down out of the goodness of your hearts, because spoilers suck" and YouTube would probably do that.
Eeeh. I'm rambling.
Before I stop, I'd like to point out that people who post spoilers don't say they're posting spoilers, they say "Hey, look, a video of KITTENS!" and post a link to a video that shows a cutscene from the game. Saying not to watch spoiler videos is disingenuous as hell and I don't care for that kind of bullshit.
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Jeez. Writing as you do for a site that aggressively pumps videos out at the user whether they want them or not you really REALLY should know better.
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Hell, with games it's even more impossible! How am I going to rewatch a scene in GTA when there's no library of cutscenes... and even if there was. Why would I spend all that time loading up a damn game to watch a quick cutscene?
How will I show my friend "Hey, see these awesome scene?? It's so much better when you get all the background on it! Play/watch this!"
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As a side note, I am writing this on a Windows machine. "Playstation" comes up as misspelled, while "Xbox" does not.
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You'll probably find that these companies are rather kinder to places that give them 100% of the revenue generated than one that lets the player take a cut.
"As a side note, I am writing this on a Windows machine. "Playstation" comes up as misspelled, while "Xbox" does not."
You did "misspell" Playstation. The brand name is "PlayStation" (which you'll probably get suggested if you right click on it). Type it as "PlayStation" and it works fine - at least me on Firefox on a Windows 7 machine.
Stupid I know, but that's branding for you, not a Microsoft thing.
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In my book, that actually makes RockStar one of the good guys.
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That's a stretch, but we'll wait and see how they actually implement the process. If they're working with YouTube and other providers to make sure that the scenes they object to are flagged and removed or blocked as with music videos then they're better than the **AAs. Still not "good" (they're still removing content some people want to see) but they're not being as obnoxious about it as some others.
If, on the other hand, they send off scattershot automated DMCA notices against random sites and blogs against content that contains their cutscenes even if they're presented in a valid fair use context then they're just as bad.
Either way, "not as bad as the other guys" does not mean "good guy". Plus you have to remember - they have some room to look "good" because no shareholder's going to whine about the upcoming payday on GTAV. Their tune could soon change.
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Whac-A-Mole will not stand for this kind of theft of their intellectual property.
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Monetization
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