What me worry? Copyright issues with Spore

Creating in Spore will leave you with limitless possibilities.  From your own original idea to characters of your favorite games, you can create just about anything.  However, this brings up an important factor.  While we come up with our own creatures from our imaginations, what about those which are copyrighted?

Pixar creatures, characters from video games and television, these are all based from someone elses creation outside of Spore.  Personally, I believe what we create to be fan-made art, but the original artist could look at it the other way.  Luckily, there hasn’t been any complaints that I’m aware of so far.  Let’s just hope it stays that way!

I could imagine Mr Lasseter and his Pixar animators using the Creators to prototype future animation characters, such is the sophistication of the tools and the flexibility they allow.

In fact, as we flicked through Sporepedia, Mr Vu pointed out a very passable imitation of Pixar’s Wall-E character in the library, created by a player.

I wondered if Mr Lasseter would approve of this as adding extra buzz for his movie or be more inclined to reach for the phone and call his lawyer.

The possibilities in Spore for making realistic imitations have not been seen in video games before and the user-generated content it will create is going to launch it into the realm of YouTube in risking copyright complaints from intellectual-property owners.

FT Tech Blog: Spore creatures could challenge copyright holders