Legality Questions
General forum
Posted on Nov. 21, 2016, 7:36 p.m. by buildingadeck
As many of you might know, I make YouTube videos and have recently begun streaming on Twitch. However, I am unable to play on MTGO for a couple of reasons: 1. I'm on a Mac, and since WotC does such a great job not programming MTGO to be worth anything, it is not available on Macs 2. I cannot afford to play both paper Magic and MTGO.
I am not making any money off of Twitch or YouTube, but I am wondering if I should continue to make videos or not for fear of potential legal outlast by WotC.
erendil says... #2
This is easy to say since I don't have a "horse in the race" and any potential problems you might run into won't effect me, but if you enjoy making them, keep making them. Playing and talking about a card game cannot legally be banned. Period. They can try a thousand times and will lose every time. A TRADING card game is the epitome of a community based business. How can you ban talking about something that's entire existence is based upon people sitting around talking about it? If people stop sitting around and talking about magic (i.e. playing it) it will cease to exist and they won't make anything. This kind of legal stupidity has been tried by basically every videogame/ board game/ card game company out there when they get a little too money hungry for their own good (looking at you Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision!), but it always dies out. Fair use laws exist for a reason, and I highly doubt they'll go away any time soon. Of course as you mentioned the problem with companies as big as WotC is that if they chose to they can "pick on" anyone they want to and unless you have money to throw away on a lawyer there's not a whole lot you can do about it. That being said you can just keep making videos and basically ignore them. They won't ever succeed in getting a court order against you. I should have prefaced this by pointing out I live in America. I don't know what country you're in but in the US we're pretty well protected against this sort of thing. There was a big stink... I don't know... A year or two maybe? ago when Nintendo tried to use copyright laws to stop people from doing lp's of their games on youtube by saying that they owned the copyright on the sprites of the characters and so the images could not appear in the videos, but people are still publishing these videos. Activision tried the same thing when zombies were the big fad and people were posting a lot of videos of CoD zombies (I specifically remember NGTZombies' Spiderbite talking about the issue as he has a million+ subscriber channel devoted to zombies in which CoD zombies is a big theme). It always fails in the end though so I really wouldn't stress it too much.
November 22, 2016 7:08 a.m.