In November Do We All Go to Work for Sony?

Sony's LittleBigPlanet is being heralded as the first 'killer app' to hit the PS3, a hybrid platform game and social networking system that will not only earn Sony heaps of cash but may just completely democratize game design in the process. But what is the price of that democracy?

As IHaveThePrincess discovered recently, the PlayStation Network's new terms of service agreement lets Sony use player-created content however it likes:

You authorize and license SCEA a royalty free and perpetual right to use, distribute, copy, modify, display, and publish your User Material for any reason without any restrictions or payments to you or any third parties.

So in three weeks, we could all be working for Sony, crafting and sharing levels that Sony owns outright. Perhaps some of those levels will end up being packaged as downloadable content, much the same way that fruit of some of LittleBigPlanet's best beta players is being packaged with the official release.

Of course, there's nothing untoward about any of that. After all, the LittleBigPlanet model encourages users to share their levels for free. The revenue we generate for Sony by building their content for them is just part of the genius of their business model. Crowdsourcing for teh win.

But how does the equation change as user-generated content becomes less a matter of remixing existing intellectual property by 'modding' a game and starts to look more like the creation of original work? What happens when the systems game developers build for us are less games than platforms for the creation of new games?

This issue has already cropped up in the first-person-shooter community, where sophisticated world-building tools have shipped with games almost from the outset. But as imaginative and robust as the FPS mod community has become, it absolutely pales in comparison to the future that LittleBigPlanet and its successors portend. That future will likely further beg the question — are games more like movies or movie cameras?

It's an interesting question and one that lies at the heart of debate over who owns culture. And it's an ethical question, far more than a legal one, since the law is squarely on the side of developers, at least for now. On one hand, developers certainly should be entitled to protect their intellectual property and profit from it as they see fit. On the other hand, shouldn't users also be entitled to profit from their original creations, or at least have some control over how their work is used?

When all the world are game designers, who owns the stage? For now, it would appear to be Sony.