Play Machinima Law - Day 2

While day one focused on Machinima creation and limitations and how the laws apply to the creators, the second day brought another important topic: Preservation of virtual worlds.

In a hundred years will historians pull our movies from an archive and see our virtual performances, analyzing the effect it had on the evolution of Machinima or looking into the sociological impact it had? Curators and librarians think so.

This data includes much more than Machinima, but the preservation of online events, lifestyles, people and places in virtual worlds - much which is largely undocumented but has a significant impact on society. There's concerns that we're already losing huge amounts of information and the fix is a complicated one. Not only is this data all over the place, some of it is dissapearing. Even if you can get it, will you obtain permission from the author, game developer, or other copyright holders to archive it? What if those people or businesses don't exist anymore? The unanimous thought between panelists is that there needs to be a way to bypass or append some of the laws to allow archiving this stuff so that it's not lost.

As far as the late afternoon discussion, I can't really tell you anything! It was like being part of a modern day Knights of the Round Table. We discussed documents, non-commercial and commercialized machinima, preservation, and law. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, you'll see the results soon enough because I'm going to link to them when they're ready to enter the public domain.

So here are my final thoughts after several days and many panels and conversations!

As a guy who's tried to attend every opportunity i've been invited to that involves Machinima, this weekend was a historical point. It was an honor to see so many great people contributing their time and to know that my ideas and suggestions will be part of the solution. This is all going to take time, but I have a feeling that great things will come of this. In fact I know so because I'm not telling you a lot of stuff!

How far you take it is always going to be up to you, and remember that even if the law is on your side it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be any easier, but it can make you safer.