Recording Industry Association of America today closed the popular World of WarCraft site RPGFilms.net due to it's huge amount of downloadable gaming movies containing music that is unauthorized for use by copyright laws. The question that immediately rises is whether we will see more of these actions against sites offering movies for games as StarCraft and WarCraft.
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), deeply involved in the fight against illegal file sharing over the Internet, wrote an e-mail to RPGFilms.net requesting them to either close their site or permanently remove the access to their service containing gaming movies containing "recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists as KoRn."
"We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized activity. Specifically, we request that you remove the site, delete the infringing sound files or that you disable access to this site or the infringing files being offered via your system. "
RPGFilms.net is as of today closed, and many raise eyebrowses whether closure of these kind of sites will continue by the RIAA. Downloading music from the Internet and including them in a gaming movie later on released to the public is all together easy and illegal - not to mention extremly popular! Within the StarCraft scene we have seen huge dozens of these examples, even as StarCraft pure gaming movies is still quite a new fenomena. If we compare to Counter-Strike, the behavior is even more popular and this surely will strike hard against creators of movies.
Nevertheless, GosuGamers experience that obtaining a license for including copyrighted music in the movies is indeed possible, however, not always simple. There are examples, even if they are few, in which companies such as MFAVP have created movies including references to the artist and company copyrights. Regardless, the chances for a private game creator of a minor StarCraft gaming movie to buy the authorization is considered small - assuming an attempt is made at all.
What effects this will have upon the creation of gaming movies and whether more sites will be shut down in the future remains to be seen. Read the full e-mail in the link below.
Links
FragBite.se - Source
RPGFilms.net - Read the full e-mail
