[ad_1]
A curious new page in the history of Magic: The Gathering was written earlier this year when Dr. Robert Hovden, an academic and legal provocateur, copyrighted his personal card game. First reported by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow on Sunday, the successful filing with the United States Copyright Office raises several curious questions about the future of the original collectible card game.
The biggest Magic community – everyone from casual gamers to professional world champions – all create their own decks. That is literally the point of the game. They even give them personalities, with names related to their strategies, basic mechanics, dominant colors of mana, or sometimes just the characters found within. But apparently no one has been bold enough to protect these decks until now.
Enter Hovden, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan. You may remember a shot he made in 2014 when he printed MC Escher’s works using nanoscale lithography on tiny discs of silicon. Extract from Doctorow’s article, published on Medium:
the last of Hovden [attempt at baiting an IP holder] deposits – and receives – a copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck he calls “Angels and Demons”. This game – a collection of cards made by a company under work-for-rental arrangements with creators – is now claimed as Hovden’s exclusive IP.
Hovden’s public communications around this tease that he can ban others from using this deck in tournament play, and says it’s about “owning culture and people’s participation in culture through the game. copyright bias ”.
Magic was designed by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Over the years, the company has been aggressive in protecting its intellectual property. some of Wizards’ most valuable intellectual property assets. In fact, the Wizards legal team is one of the main reasons that no other sane game developer will ever tell players to “tap” cards into their deck. You can “tip” your cards, you can “run out” your cards, but the gods forbid you to tap them even once by accident.
But, as Doctorow points out, competition Magic is about creating the perfect deck to dominate the tournament circuit. If someone can get a copyright for their collection of cards – cards that Wizards bought, paid for, and owns the rights to in all other respects – then what does that mean for players?
The implication is that this could trigger a rush for copyright registration in M: TG decks – which are painstakingly put together for home games and tournaments, sometimes with big cash payouts – and pull out the best decks in the game.
This is indeed a thorny question on the ethics, mechanics and practicalities of US copyright law.
Doctorow leaves this thorny question open, before highlighting an amazing collection of freely available legal texts that you can use to learn more about the subject. The truth is we’ll have to wait and see how Magic players respond – and how Wizards respond in kind.
So what happens to the value of a copyrighted deck, a deck that not only contains rare and powerful individual cards, but also cards specifically designed to win? And what kind of legal gymnastics will be required of the owner of these cards to protect his investment?
[ad_2]
Source link