Legally and otherwise, there is much debate as to how much of what you think and imagine is yours to own. I think in general we live in extraordinary times whereby one can actually own the product of one’s imagining. It gets sorta murky in the details as evidenced by all the lawsuits flying hither and non about IP, OP, DP, TP, or whatever it is called.
This has come up recently in two areas. With the recent completion (or near) of the NPC Almanac (link), fans contributed their favorite characters to a graveyard. Now we ‘own’ that creative content. In a way? Two things we should note. First, we would never use anyone’s creative content outside its agreed upon provisions (to with no NPCs contributed will appear anywhere but in that book, and second, being men of our word, we would never do it in general or specific without permission.
It should be noted however, that several companies are moving away from this and toward control and ownership of creative content uploaded to their servers. Consider Instagram for a minute. They never claim ownership of any pictures etc. but...
”you're providing Instagram with a global non-exclusive license to host your content. You're also providing Instagram with a non-exclusive license to use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content.“ link
Is this the way The Game will go? Will you lose actual rights to your works once uploaded? Who knows? Is it really important? In a quick survey amongst friends, 99% said no, they could care less. I suppose I am a little different. I think everyone should jealously guard their works. It would be difficult. Troll Lord Games has its own server now. It is nicely tucked away in a corner of a basement beneath a leaky pipe. We own our stuff and are the only one’s with access to it (sans some hacker). Everything seems a tad more difficult these days. Maybe I am just getting old.
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