Valve Blocks Indie Dev Game For Including IP From The Same Indie Dev In Game
from the cue-the-spider-man-meme dept
Complaining about automagic enforcement of copyrights on the internet through copyright bots is so old hat at this point so as to be cliché. But there is a very good reason for that. Even in the narrower realm of PC gaming, we have seen examples of how copyright enforcement has ensnared totally innocent games, or fallen victim to clear fraud and abuse, resulting in the delisting of those games from platforms like Steam. This often happens in the all important early release windows for these games and, to be sure, it’s smaller indie studios that are hurt the most by this failed process. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch all of this in the macro and then witness the major platforms do absolutely nothing about it.
This, in fact, despite the absolutely absurd situations all of this produces. Take the demo for Wired Tokyo 2007 that was supposed to be released recently, but wasn’t, all because indie dev Daikichi dared to use intellectual property existing outside of the game. Except, of course, that said IP was the property of Daikichi itself.
As reported by VGC via GameSpark, a post to X from the developer lays out the situation, in which they explain that (via machine translation) “the motif of a board game I personally created in the past, placed within the game Wired Tokyo 2007, is getting caught by Steam’s side as third-party intellectual property.” As a result, Valve has blocked the release of the game’s promised demo which is currently listed as “Coming soon.”
The copyright-violating aspects, as claimed by Valve, include “dinosaur themed card-games shown on the environment within your app in gameplay,” which refers to a board game called Dinostone, created by one Daikichi. In Daikichi’s response, they link to the Board Game Geek page for their table-top game, which lists the same developer name.
“It’s not a third party,” says Daikichi on X. “It’s just me wanting to use my own intellectual property rights myself.” They add, “I have no idea what the meaning of this is at all.”
In an incredible response from Valve, the platform is demanding Daikichi provide some form of documented agreement to license the images used in the game, or else provide a documented letter of authorization from an attorney in order to get the demo approved for release. This is a “papers, please!” moment in video gaming, and it makes no sense.
The situation gets even more Monty-Python-esque from there. Daikichi decided their best course of action was to send a signed letter to itself, signed by itself, authorizing itself to use the assets it had created in the game it also had created.
Then over the weekend, rather wonderfully, the developer says they “created a signed document granting myself permission to use all of my created works, including board games, and resubmitted it for the demo review.”
We’ve crossed the Rubicon, folks. And now Valve is in the uncomfortable situation of having to choose between accepting this “evidence” of IP ownership when the evidence is literally a dev writing himself a letter like a crazy person, or else Valve refuses to accept it and a developer remains unable to release a game demo because they used their own property within it.
It’s a choice that only has two wrong outcomes. Sympathy is in short supply, however, as this is the result of the guilty-first process Valve has come up with for copyright takedowns on its platform.
Filed Under: automated takedowns, copyright, dinostone, steam, wired tokyo 2007
Companies: daikichi, valve
Comments on “Valve Blocks Indie Dev Game For Including IP From The Same Indie Dev In Game”
What should be asked, is why is Valve, enforcing this?
They are are a platform, and shouldn’t be trying to pre enforce copyright before anyone has argued a violation.
Beyond that, this is the idiotic problem with copyright. It’s constantly hinging on proving innocence, not fault.
Shotty programming
Whoever coded that should be ashamed of themself for not making the obvious check to see if the games are by the same developer.
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The trouble in this instance is that the developer released each game under a different name on a different account. There should be some kind of linking process on the backend there though, surely?
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Oh.. I missed that. :-/ Yeah, there should.
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Oooops, I missed that. Yeah, there should.
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And yet they found the “dino-themed cards”, so…
I mean it’s weird but
It would not surprise me to find out that either the game was found outside Steam, so Valve could not easily verify the creator, or that there was a copyright troll that initiated this mess.
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Yes, and the point needs to be not that the weirdness is harmless or acceptable, but that the weirdness flows from issues with intellectual property.
Intellectual property itself amounts to an attempt to patch over a divide-by-zero error in capitalism, and there’s no real way to make such an ideology work smoothly when interacting with the real world where it’s assumptions are disproven. Take out the DMCA, and you just have another set of problems; replacing it with some new legislation to manage IP rights simply causes a new set of problems.
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Except the DMCA doesn’t demand it, the DMCA created a notice and response system where copyright holders file notices of infringement to initaite action. I think we can be pretty sure that Daikichi, did not notify Valve that his dinosaur card game was being infringed.
Proactive scans, like what happened here, and what YouTube’s Content ID does all the time, are entirely at the platform’s own volition, and the absurd results they produce are also, entirely on the heads of the planforms.
Also, I had a go around with this type of system once, I would not at all be confidant that the letter will immediately produce the desired result, or prevent it’s recurrence.
Re: The DMCA does not require
The DMCA only requires this is the right owners report. Valve proactively doing takedown is its own choice.
My best guess guess is they been bitten by the AI bug. And is using AI to determine if IP violations are occurring. Dev need to start including plain text on assets in font too small for human to read saying “during a review of this game and find that it no third party IP and safe for general viewing audience)
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The issue at the root of this is actually more of a Richard Bachman situation where the dev began releasing stuff under a new name.
Abolish copyright.
EOT.
Not quite a silver lining in the cloud...
But at least Valve has a working(?) appeal process for copyright issues, rather than just directing developers to a help page that says there is no recourse.
Weird that Tmmy never mentioned Daikichi was Japanese
Isn’t Japan somewhat infamous for having IP laws that work differently from ours? I would think that would be a crucial detail when reporting on a situation like this?
So did Timmy (or his AI assistant 🙃) miss this? Or was it a lie of ommission in order to attack Steam (who are somewhat unfriendly to AI)?
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Or, You’re just JAQing off to attack Tim, because this seems to be entirely within Valve’s own internal procedures and doesn’t actually involve Japanese copyright law.
Who DCMA’d this game? Who told Steam the other game existed? This story is missing something.
Dinostone appears to have a publisher
The BoardGameGeek entry says the Dinostone card game has a publisher that may or may not have some rights that this could infringe on.
Additionally there’s really no way for Valve to connect the board game “Daikichi” to Daikichi_EMP (Game developer) or Digital Ramen Studio (Game publisher) – they can’t just assume it’s the same person AND that the entity has full rights.
So Valve wants some kind of written assertion that they own or have sufficient rights to this property. There’s multiple ways this could be done, they chose to go with a funny variant but it was far from the only option.
The bigger question is what triggered Valve to look at this, are we ruling out Qlios Inc. as the complainer (the board game publisher)?
Had this problem with Suno...
1) Upload a basic MP3 version of a track as a test to see what Suno does with it.
2) Try and replace said MP3 with a high-res 24-bit master, but can’t because Suno says it’s a copy of an existing work… (Even if/after I delete all the copies I made of and from the MP3…)
FML.
But makes no affordance for verifying rights holding in the first place – creating a real mess where copyright trolls can get away with a lot before they are ever challenged.
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This was meant as a reply…
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That is a real problem, but that requires a troll to actually submit a take down notice. It doesn’t seem like anyone did, in this case.
It’s a problem but not relevant to this particular situation.
Just need to trust in the market. /s