Today let’s talk about copyright and the public domain.
I swear to god this has a point related to VA-11 Hall-A.
Like anyone in a creative field, discussions about copyright and ownership are things that strike close to home for me. In particular the arguments about elements like the public domain and such.
For example, you might notice how in VA-11 Hall-A the BTC is the “British Trademark Company”, the joke being that it’s literally a british conglomerate that just… owns the copyright and patents of a lot of things and profits off them. And with this you might come to the conclusion that I’m all in for the opposite, for the public domain and the like.
If you’ve read all these posts, however, it might paint you the clearer image that I deeply dislike taking absolute stances on anything just because I don’t like my thoughts to be limited by imposed self-exclusivity or aesthetics, and this is no exception.
Because man do I hate copyright bullshit. I hate DMCA, I hate petty patents, and I hate region locking! They drive me to drink!!!
Confound them!
Con-…!
…-found them!!
Not only that but as someone constantly on the consumer side of things still, I’ve felt the way that “copyright protection” has only made consumer experiences more and more miserable as time goes on.
However, I dislike this one stance I’ve seen parroted of “well, what if creators have the rights of their thing for like 5 years and then they go public domain?” or something along those lines. Because I’m also a creator that takes pride on his creations and I want them to be ours. We’re happy to share them as you might notice with how lenient and supportive we are with fan works and how we’ve never tried something silly like patenting “a game with bartender mechanics”.
Many defenders of the public domain I’ve seen bring up Lovecraft as an example, and how the things he created have been iterated over the years in so many different ways unrestrained… but the flipside is that it also doesn’t stop most people from just making big scary squidman and calling it a day.
Because the truth of the matter is that just like how copyright enforcement can be abused, the public domain can also be abused by inflating concepts and ideas attaching them to existing, well-respected characters or figures in order for that pre-established concept to do the heavy lifting.
You know what else is in the public domain? The Dover Boys at Pimento University; or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall. So why aren’t any of you cowards copying Dan Backslide wholesale huh? You can steal him, and no one will ever know!
The point is that I despise the petty gating of ideas through law enforcement in order to stifle competition as much as anyone… However, there needs to be certain deterrents that prevent creators from just grabbing a copy of Alice in Wonderland and replacing the word “cheshire” with “cheddar” and selling it as “The Tale of Alice and the Cheddar Cat”.
And that brings me to the point I wanna talk about today finally. Both sides of it even.
So for starters: Did you know the word “Droid” is copyrighted because of Star Wars?
When I was making the first drafts of VA-11 Hall-A I just called Deal and Dorothy “‘droids” because “androids” was a bit of a mouthful that I figured people would eventually shorten.
Then the copyright was pointed to me (no legal action was taken mind you, a friend just pointed it out) and aside from feeding into a deep hate for Star Wars that grows every year (this year growing faster because I decided to read Dune), it forced us to think of a new name.
So we started thinking about names, and being really fresh at that point in a Shin Megami Tensei binge, the idea of naming them Lilim came to be. I already played in the prototype with ideas like how the artificial humans of the setting were more similar to fragments of a bigger AI. It was a concept that had been cooking in my head for a while, the idea that instead of having individual sentient humanoids, there would be a massive “mother” AI of sorts called Lilith that they all come from and that they all also feed back into constantly with their experiences.
Nowadays with the rise of (and controversy with) things like AI Art, concepts like “Machine Learning” are more commonplace but I remember in 2014 I thought of it as “a massive beefed up chatbot” specifically. The rationale being that if the experiences of each individual Lilim fed back into the collective source everyone else comes from then said source could use it to evolve, making the Lilim more human-like at a fast rate.
Not only that but because Glitch City was meant to be the Guinea Pig of the world (a concept I shamelessly took from teenage years reading way too much To Aru Majutsu no Index and liking the idea of Academy City a lot) it would let me play against this idea I hated of “oh the AI are gonna look down on humans and be able to squish your fleshy head” by creating an environment where said AI entities ate and slept and such not because they had to but because it was a social experience they derived enjoyment out of.
[Bunch of paragraphs edited out because we’re derailing the focus of the post, maybe another day]
And that led to other things. If they’re fragments of a bigger entity, then maybe they’re just individualized data that inhabits a shell, maybe their bodies are something of a convenience but not something they’re attached to out of self preservation. This led to me writing Lilim as deliberately seemingly reckless. Dorothy modding herself with military-grade things for the sake of improving in her craft, or Kira Miki treating trespassers and stalkers as just really intense guests.
But then that extended into other details, for example the thought that the only thing to make Dorothy actually hot and bothered would be talking about infosec because in the end she IS a data entity inhabiting a shell.
Hopefully this story can illustrate my point. On one hand The fact that the word “droid” is copyrighted feels like the most petty thing ever, but at the same time giving our iteration of the concept of artificial intelligence a name of its own helped it become its own identifiable concept.
If you’re playing along today should be the 12th day of the main game.
Tomorrow: The nerdery doesn’t really stop.
Today’s the day of the infamous YIIK reference! You’d think that would make it age poorly, but considering it’s ironic resurgence, maybe there are people who would cosplay it’s characters after all