Where videogames meet the law – in 140 characters

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Lawyers like to keep things close to their chest, and a recent IBC conference on videogames and law was no exception. We were in a subterranean chamber with no access to Twitter. So here are the key tweets I noted down during the day.

• Dragon Force (from Guitar Hero III): Song had 55k downloads before GHIII release; 624k downloads 12 months later. GHIII = v strong marketing.

• The point of user generated content is not for you wade through the shit; it’s for people have fun playing with their own faeces. Its value isn’t in the finished product but the fun the creator has in the process – Morak

• Marvel employed people to create avatars that infringed their own trademarks/copyright in City of Heroes – welcome to the murky world of online games

• City of Heroes has Ts&Cs that say that users warrant that the characters they create don’t infringe any IP and indemnify NCSoft against any costs. If they create, for example, a copy of the Incredible Hulk and Marvel sues NCsoft, the end user is liable. Ouch.

• Interesting debate over whether Sales of Goods Act applies to a virtual good. Not conclusive

• “Freemium” is a business model, not a market. Every strategy is unique

• iBeer is very successful game. iPint, a competing product from Coors, was sued for $12.5 million for being too direct a copy. That’s a big claim, and suggests iBeer was making a lot of money

• Installed base of the current generation of consoles is half what we thought it would be and costs are 2-5x more expensive. Our games are a $20-$50 million investment. #take2

• In the US, the state of Maine has different rule of privacy protection of minors from the federal rules; a number of states are the same, and many are inconsistent with each other and the federal law. <- Ouch again

• Take Two paid $30 million to outside law firms in 2007; $25 million in 2008. That’s a lot of lawyers.

• Take Two now has 17 inhouse lawyers, fighting patent trolls, regulatory issues, litigious music providers and more.

That was the morning session. It appears we have Wi-fi access, so the rest of the day may be tweeted in a more traditional way.

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