Posts with tag LicensingAgreement

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?

Thanksgiving is here and, as a citizen of the United States of America, I must do my legal (I think?) duty and eat a ton of food and bake a pie. The pie baking happened last night, actually. Delicious, delicious pumpkin pie. You seriously have no idea how hungry I am ...

Anyway, as it is time to celebrate and be joyous and thankful and all that jazz, The Lawbringer this week is light and fun. I've assembled two little anecdotes from the past week to share with you guys, provide a little food for thought (since the holiday is about eating ... right? Get it? Whatever ...) and give you something fun to read while you're in the car back from whatever embarrassing family gathering you're currently heading far away from.

The relationship Blizzard has cultivated and presented to the machinima community is, in a word, rare. Not unexpected, but rare. Companies such as Blizzard that hold such a hot property like the Warcraft series usually are tight with licensing. Blizzard is also ridiculous-smart -- you don't get the amount of success it has without being something ridiculous. At an early stage, the company realized that giving a fair amount of leniency to machinima would reap some awesome benefits. That theory has paid off, not only for Blizzard but for the community as well, in spades.

This week, Lawbringer delves into the fairly broad Blizzard-machinima artist relationship. The seeds of this quick look at the rules of machinima came from Myndflame's own look at Blizzard's policies back in 2009. Like I said before, this relationship is unique in its openness. In fact, Blizzard openly courts machinima artists in sponsored contests as well as through its official policies on the art form.