My source is a game (that was currently funded) called Mighty No. 9. The game is a classic Japanese style, side-scrolling game. The main character of the game resembles a familiar character, Mega-Man. And by all rights the game should remind people of Mega-Man, considering that the director of the game is Keiji Inafune with a team of artists who have all worked on a Mega-Man game together.
Not only that, but the character resemblance is fairly close.
So, what immediately comes to mind is the connection of the videos on remixing and copyright, David Parry's talk about intellectual property, as well as Chapter 1 & 7 of Gleick. That seems like a lot of things to connect, but hear me out.
Gleick's Chapter 1 talks about the whole concept of expressing ideas so that other people can understand and experience them. So on the most basic level of understanding, ideas can be used in a way that everyone can understand.Most people recognize Mega-Man, so seeing Mighty No. 9 may bring a sense of nostalgia and instant recognition in what type of game the audience will get.
Chapter 7 discusses the information theory and how to get from A to B, bits and pieces are taken to express an idea and thus ideas cannot be (to some extent) copyright-ed.
Which leads to the remix video and David Parry discussing intellectual property as a whole. Inafune created Mega-Man and is using a team (that worked on Mega-Man) to put together Mighty No. 9. Now, Nintendo owns the copyright of the franchise of Mega-Man, but Mighty No. 9 is supposed to be it's own thing. What the gaming community recognizes though is that Inafune loves his creation of Mega-Man so much that he needs to create a new game that will have that same impact that the franchise first had.
The game has been funded, far past it's initial goals thanks to the people who recognized a man trying to bring life back to his creation. Nintendo, owning the copyright to Mega-Man has every right to call "bullshit" or "foul" since money is moving away from their company and to Inafune. However, there as been no legal action, and as much as it scares Inafune that he could be taken to court, his love for his original creation has more meaning for him than being bullied by a "triple A" company.
Your post is really interesting and i like how you incoperated the copyright information that we learned in class as well as the remix video. I think a good thing to bring up also would be when we learned about authors and how they aren't paid per book but rather the publishers are as in the game companies in this case reap the profits as the programers and animators see nothing other than a salary.
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