I agree that Star Wars is so big that it lends itself to fan spinoffs, but there has to be some degree of intellectual property. If you “invent” the material, you should be able to reap most of the rewards from selling it. There would be a semblance of checks and balances in the idea that most fans would gravitate towards the real producers…
Anyway, I’m kind of iffy about it. I’m willing to listen to both arguments.
you can’t “own” a concept. Unless you don’t release it from your head. But even then saying “I own my thoughts” seems bizarre and quite redundant actually. Have you read Kinsella’s “Against IP”? All answers about “owning a concept” should have been answered in that book. If you didn’t read, I highly suggest. Short book, easy to read. http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
I’ll take a look at it. As I stated, I’m not familiar with most IP/anti-IP arguments, so I’ll give it a go sometime in the future.
There seems to be a demand for people to give the actual owner the benefits of his labor, so on a totally free market they would gravitate towards the actual artist. Like a musician ripping off another musician is often met with a lot of scorn. But what if in my scenario another gaming compnay rips off Halo’s code structure line-by-line and makes profit off of it? Obviously the service they are rendering is allowing more people to play Halo at a lower price, but what is the incentive structure going to be for a company like Bungie to produce Halo if they can’t reap all the benefits from it?
I guess you could say that rip-off artists could bring the product’s price down lower because it puts a strain on the monopoly, but there just seems something inherently unfair about reaping the benefits when none of the creative capacity was employed to actually create the concept.
I used to think this too, until I became familiar with Kinsella’s arguments. It now seems to me that there is something inherently unfair about the creator using violence against anyone who wants to copy his creation and get it into the hands of more people.
As for your fears about incentives and whether creativity will decline without IP, this is an empirical argument. Against Intellectual Monopoly is a book that examines the evidence for this claim. The authors conclude that, on balance, IP probably inhibits creativity and technological development. Prominent historical examples include the steam engine and the airplane; patents on these inventions prevented their use from becoming widespread quicker, and inhibited improvements to their design for decades. This is also true of copyright. Consider the Mises Store: do you think they would sell more, or less, books if they did not publish them all online for free?
Those who would sacrifice liberty to gain efficiency deserve neither, and will lose both.
Ubisoft has a longer history of screwing over their pc gaming audience.
“Libertarians who dislike intellectual property, answer the following questions to yourselves. Which games, on average, will be better: ones privately produced for profit where benefits can be internalized or ones produced voluntarily and distributed freely? Which alternative will create a more flourishing market of games, providing games more directly suited to consumer preferences?”
that depends on what you mean by a game being ‘good’. modern warfare 2 is a lackluster but financially successful game. is it good? I would say no.
most games today suck. they are only made playable with massive amounts of input from modders (check out tesnexus, falloutnexus, the unofficial patches for bloodlines, etc.) who work voluntarily and distribute their work freely. your question is a bit more complicated than it appears.
but what does this have to do with IP? intelligent businesses will model themselves to avoid the impact of piracy. take a gander at diablo 2 (which is still popular) and titan quest. titan quest, which was somewhat decent, chose not to support online gaming like diablo 2 did with battle.net. the developers made that concious decision and it ended up hurting them as the online element in grind games like d2 or tq is what gives them longevity. d2 made players go through battle.net, which created a central hub for gamers in the ladder / hc ladder system. tq figured doing something similar would be too expensive or too much work and left it out. as such, a decent game rotted by bad management decisions, not because of piracy.
you also see a push towards mmo’s because it is a great way to ensure your large projects keep cash coming in and mitigates the effects of piracy. but there are some interesting ideas floating around in the mmo world, one of which is by offering the game up for free and allowing microtransactions (to alter cosmetics, for instance) or withholding a small percentage of premium content for people who opt to buy a subscription or pay for the level or upgrade through a one time fee (take a look at dungeon and dragons online’s model, it’s quite interesting and has apparently made them a bit of money).
you gotta keep in mind that the larger companies aren’t broken by one game flopping. what I wouldn’t be surprised to see is if mmo’s became the cash cow for larger gaming developers and single player games were used more or less as advertisement for that game’s story, the gameplay, or that company’s ability to create a good game in hopes of eventually turning a single player franchise’s fanbase towards a multiplayer, subscription based game.
“Donations? No way. I don’t believe that would produce such a diverse amount of high-quality games.”
…so I take it you’ve never heard of ut3 or hl/hl2 mods. nor have you heard of projects like this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/nehrim-at-fates-edge
they don’t even require donations to put out total conversions that are vastly superior to the original games, they do it as a hobby.
you’re arguing well outside of your elements and you should probably stop.