This afternoon, I was sending a mail about the Game Content Usage Rules and realized I didn't have a link to them. So I did a LiveSearch for them. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22game+content+usage+rules%22&first=1&FORM=PERE

Wow. It appears that I got some people's attention. It also appears many of them hate me. Comes with the territory I guess... Anyway, it occurred to me that although I can't address all of their points (some don't deserve addressing, some deserve more attention than I can give here), I can speak to some of them. Many of them arise from the need to keep the Rules page simple and easy to understand. So with no further ado, and in no particular order:

1. "Why is the list so small? Why isn't game BLAH on the list?" The list itself isn't limitative. It doesn't contain the full universe of games for which the Rules give permission to develop content. The issue is that we need a static page that will contain the Rules over time and to which we can link from more game sites. I don't know what games will use the Rules in 2009. So we'll be developing community sites and pointing to the Rules from them. Incidentally, those sites may expand on the Rules as they work with a specific game. More on that below. But for games like Gears of War where Microsoft doesn't own the IP, we're not allowed to tell you that you can create machinima including them - that's up to Epic, not us.
2. "What's up with the music/audio rights?" This is another issue with having a general page. Back in April I put up a pretty long post about music rights: http://donkeyxote.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!239CCA3F6918F4C1!264.entry. The problem is that music is a really complex thing. Musicians don't always (often) sell all rights, instead they sell the rights to do a specific thing in a specific market. So where Microsoft licenses music from a third party, we often only get the rights to make a video game. Machinima isn't a video game. So we may not have the rights to grant the music to a particular game. So what you see in the Rules is an artifact of its being a general document. When we go to the community site for a particular game and post our page linking to the Rules, we may be able to indicate broader rights for that particular game than the general Rules page describes.
3. "Why did you shut down Site X/Project Y just because they were making money?" If you want to make money from a Microsoft game, you ask permission and we decide whether we'll give it to you. There have been sites that have said "we're shutting down because of these Rules". The Rules aren't meant to stop fans, they're meant to facilitate fans. But if you take one of our games and use it to make a business out of, that's a totally different thing. If someone stopped their project without contacting us and asking for a commercial license, that's their own decision.
4. "Why can't we reverse engineer your games?" Um... You couldn't do that before. In order to reverse engineer a game you have to get the art assets out of the DVD, and that requires you to do something the DMCA prohibits. I'm not opening the debate about whether the DMCA is good or bad law, just pointing out that it's not like we changed the world here. Anyway, people who put a creation into the world have the right (subject to law) to restrict its usage. I look at this similar to the GPL and its copylefting rules. The GPL says "if you don't want to distribute source, then you don't have my permission to distribute binaries". The Rules say "if you don't want to use the editors and game features we gave you and would prefer to hack the builds, then you don't have our permission to distribute machinima". It seems like the exact same thing to me.
5. "Why the restrictions on back story and expanding the universe?" That's a seriously good question and is one of the ones difficult to answer here because it's really complex. I can certainly give one of the reasons though. I've seen some of the "spoiler" threads and can tell you that no one has guessed the story of Halo 3. But imagine that someone did develop a machinima that by pure luck is really close to the story? This is America, and unfortunately the machinima developer will very likely sue us for "stealing" "their" story. Unless we're really careful in what we permit, we risk leaving ourselves open to copyright litigation. This is actually one of the reasons that traditional entertainment comes down so hard against fan fiction developers - risk of copyright litigation. That said, I think people are more scared by this than I intended them to be. I'd imagine that's part of what my call with the EFF and Machinima for Dummies people will be about, and I'm looking forward to hearing their thoughts. I may not change anything, but it'll be interesting.

One thing I can't understand is why people haven't realized the incredibly broad power they have with The Movies game. This game, developed by Lionhead Studios (a part of Microsoft) and published by Activision, is basically a huge machinima creation engine. Go to www.themoviesgame.com and take a look at what you can do with this. I think this is a huge untapped wealth of content development tools. I'm amazed this game wasn't more popular for that reason alone.

Anyway, this has been an interesting ride. I sometimes forget that Microsoft is under such scrutiny all the time and am surprised when it manifests itself. More from me when I have more to tell.