FCC Rules In Favor of Buffy and Against PTC Complaint

Parents Television Council — the group last seen paying WWE $3.5 million after the PTC lied about the WWE’s role in a number of child deaths — filed a complaint about an episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. The episode in question featured simulated sex between Buffy and Spike, which the PTC claimed was indecent. The FCC’s reply is below,

Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, S.W.
Washington, D. C. 20554

This is an unofficial announcement of Commission action. Release of the full text of a Commission order constitutes official action.

See MCI v. FCC. 515 F 2d 385 (D.C. Circ 1974).

FCC DENIES COMPLAINTS FILED AGAINST NOVEMBER 20, 2001, EPISODE OF
“BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NEWS MEDIA CONTACT:

Janice Wise: (202) 418-8165

August 9, 2004

Washington, D.C.: Today, the Federal Communications Commission issued a Memorandum
Opinion and Order denying a complaint by Parents Television Council alleging that various
television station licensees airing UPN programming, including the licensee of Station
WDCA(TV), Washington, DC, aired indecent material during the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
program on November 20, 2001. The complainants alleged that the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
episode at issue included a scene in which the characters Buffy and Spike engage in sexual
intercourse.

The Commission concluded that the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” program at issue, as described
by the complainants, was not sufficiently explicit or graphic to be indecent. The Commission
noted that there was no nudity, and there was no evidence that the activity depicted was dwelled
upon, or was used to pander, titillate or shock the audience.

By the Commission: Chairman Powell, Commissioners Abernathy, Copps, Martin and
Adelstein, FCC 04-196, August 9, 2004.

Enforcement Bureau Contacts: Janice Wise or Elizabeth Valinoti (202) 418-7450

The Sims 2 Fans: We Want Our DRM

On September 17, Electronic Arts will finally release The Sims 2. I’m going to buy a new desktop later this month specifically so I can run it when it comes out (my laptop doesn’t have the requisite 3D hardware needed to run the game).

One of the things that made The Sims such a great game was all of the custom content that users made and uploaded to fan sites. Getting the custom content to work could be tricky in some cases, though, so Maxis really overhauled the in-game method for downloading and managing custom content. EA itself will host a Showcase area where users can upload and download custom content for the game. In the opinion of some custom content creators, however, Maxis and EA have gone too far and made it too easy to get content in and out of The Sims 2.

This thread at The Sims Resource is one long rant by those who want to create custom content for the game that boils down to this — Maxis didn’t build any sort of digital rights management into the game, so anybody can steal or take credit for someone else’s creation rather easily. Just as with any other moddable game out there.

The funniest examples are those who are upset at the idea that people might take credit for their rip-off of copyrighted characters. One person, for examples, offers up the horrific example of someone stealing a popular Gollum character skin and falsely taking credit for it. The poster downloads the skin and uploads it to show just how easy such “theft” is using EA’s Showcase (and no one in the thread mentions the obvious hypocrisy in that particular worry.)

Others propose the sort of bizarre DRM schemes that only the RIAA could love. So, for example, a couple of people float copyright flag suggestions where each uploaded file would have a flag that creators could set that would allow the creation to be downloaded but not uploaded again. Right, because the same folks who will have cracks for the game CD the day The Sims 2 is released will find writing utilities to reset those flags completely beyond their ability. Such a system would be hacked and cracked by the end of the first week of release.

There are a number of variants and alternatives to that system that all involve programs checking and storing copyright metadata, all of which would be hacked ridiculously quickly and simply interfere with legitimate uses of the program.

The change has real world financial consequences. One of the reasons that there is so much carping is that a number of fan sites planned to pay for bandwidth charges, etc., by charging visitors for access to exclusive content for The Sims 2 that could only be downloaded from that site. There are a number of excellent sites like Sim Freaks that use this model for The Sims.

But with the Showcase area and now DRM for custom content files, someone could simply download files from sites like that and instantaneously upload them to the EA Showcase area. I doubt EA is going to want to do any serious policing of the Showcase and, if it is smart, will included an EULA that basically grants the company at the least nonexclusive rights to all custom content to avoid having to worry about this.

Of course the EULA for the building tools is quite clear that they are offered for producing non-commercial mods, so these sites don’t really have much to complain about. Frankly, though, don’t think they have much to worry about. If I’m serious enough about the game to be willing to track down sites like Sim Freaks, I’m going to be willing to pay to have all of that excellent content in one place — there is, after all, a huge opportunity cost to wading through the large numbers of repetitive and uninteresting materials that will inevitably be posted by newbies and others in EA’s official Showcase area.

One thing that the thread didn’t mention but is closely related is how EA is going to react to copyright-infringing materials being posted on the Showcase. I have on my hard drive, for example, dozens of skins for The Sims that are various characters from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Want a Season 3 Willow and a Season 7 Anya? I’ve got ’em. Is EA going to look the other way at posting those sorts of skins and custom content (especially since some companies, especially comic book companies, have of late been cracking down on unlicensed custom content for computer games, apparently out of ridiculous fears that it dilutes the value of their licensed games). With 17,000+ Sims uploaded to the Showcase area a full two months before the game’s scheduled release, they’re going to have a nice headache on their hands with these sorts of issues.

Why Buffy Kicked Ass

Reason has finally gotten around to adding to its web site Virginia Postrel’s excellent article that appeared in the print edition, Why Buffy Kicked Ass.

Buffy assumes and enacts the consensus moral understanding of contemporary American culture, the moral understanding that the wise men ignored or forgot. This understanding depends on no particular religious tradition. ItÂ’s informed not by revelation but by experience. It is inclusive and humane, without denying distinctions or the tough facts of life. There are lots of jokes in Buffy — humor itself is a moral imperative — but no psychobabble and no excuses. Here are some of the showÂ’s precepts, a sample of what Americans believe:

. . .

Evil must be fought — sometimes literally, with lives and weapons. Most evildoers are beyond redemption. They are certainly beyond persuasion. War is stupid and wasteful and cruel and necessary. “People die,” says Buffy. “You lead them into battle, theyÂ’re going to die. It doesnÂ’t matter how ready you are or how smart you are. War is about death. Needless, stupid death.” The next day, she goes to war. And good people die.

. . .

We donÂ’t get to choose our reality. LifeÂ’s not fair. ThereÂ’s no point in whining. “I hate this,” Buffy tells her small band before their final battle. “I hate being here. I hate that you have to be here. I hate that thereÂ’s evil and that I was chosen to fight it….I know a lot of you wish that I hadnÂ’t been either. This isnÂ’t about wishes. This is about choices.”

Yes, yes, a million times yes.

Thoughts on TV Season Finale’s (and My Favorite TV Shows)

I’m a pop culture junkie, so in America that means lots of television. The real problem with television these days is the same problem with pretty much everything else — there’s just so much good television out there, that it’s difficult to decide which shows not to watch.

My favorite television phenomenon is the season finale (and, in one case this year, a series finale). A series finale, of course, generally must have some sort of finality, whereas a normal season finale usually throws everything up in the air to make sure you’ll tune in next season. I only seriously followed three shows this year.

The following contains spoilers:

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I never watched an episode of this show at all until last October. Now, it’s on almost constantly at my house on DVD (and thanks to FX I managed to catch up on the previous six years over a few months of viewing). The series finale wasn’t anything special, but it did what a series finale should do — but a nice bookend to the series, resolve one of the major conflicts, but at the same time leave plenty of room for any future spinoffs, movies, what have you. Joss Whedon’s brilliant, this is the best TV show ever, etc., etc., and I can’t wait to watch it over and over on DVD.

Smallville: Easily the best genre show on television — an excellent retelling of the Superman mythology especially now that they’ve recast Kal El’s trip to Earth as an alien invasion. I’ll be tuning in to find if Lex survives and how Clark handles tripping out on red kryponite next season. Tres cool. (I almost feel sorry that Star Trek: Enterprise’s ratings are going to drop even more one it has to go head-to-head with Smallville . . . wait a minute, no I don’t!)

The Shield: I keep tuning into The Shield hoping that it will finally start to suck so I can stop watching it, but damn if they don’t keep churning out the best cop show I can remember watching. And I liked the finale’s decision to not try to sucker the viewer in for next season but rather resolving one of the plot points and giving the characters a few moments of screen time to favor their achievement (which admittedly was the theft of millions of dollars, but still . . .) Michael Chickliss and his corrupt anti-hero get all of the attention, but it is the way that the writers balance Chickliss’ escapades with the stories of cops who run the gamut from honest and effective to dishonst and incompetent that keeps the whole corrupt cop gig from turning into a parody.

Why Not Just Make a Buffy Movie?

Apparently Seth Green is joining the cast of Scooby Doo 2. WTF? Okay, it is inconceivable to me given how bad the first Scooby film was that anyone would greenlight a sequel. Second, since Sarah Michelle Gellar’s career is going to last about as long as her hubbie’s one BTVS is finished, why not just replace the entire cast with Buffy regulars and make a film people might actually show up to see instead of this pointless sequel?

The Mod Culture: Game Mods, Fan Fiction, and Chaucer

Slashdot.Org linked to a Popular Science story about people who mod computer games. Frankly, the article itself is rather boring if you already know about modding, but what did strike me as interesting was the questions that were left unasked and unanswered in the closing paragraph of the article,

Not all game companies are open-minded about mods. Console manufacturers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, which rely on game-disc sales and fear knockoffs, have yet to create a means for gamers to get under the hood of their titles, though that doesn’t stop them from trying. Microsoft’s PC-code-based Xbox, in particular, has the hackers salivating.

In fact there are also PC computer games who actively work to prevent people from modding their software. Roller Coaster Tycoon is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, where patches to that game were intentionally designed to prevent modding. Somebody would write a nice utility or mod and a new patch would be released that would break the mod.

Modding exemplifies the ongoing and ever-intensifying clash over who will control popular culture. What (most) game companies have discovered is that people who buy computer games do not simply want to play those games, but they also want to use games as a platform for their own self-expression.

In the past, companies have used intellectual property laws to keep people from telling their own sorts of tales this way. Fox and Paramount, for example, have both been activity involved in threatening and occasionally suing people who created web sites based on intellectual property they owned such as Star Trek or The Simpsons. For awhile, TSR — the original publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game — tried actively to prevent the publication of third party material on the Internet.

From there it is just a short jump to some of the media reaction to the Internet. Surprisingly, “deep linking” (a completely redundant term) is still controversial. Organizations from National Public Radio to The Dallas Morning News and others have used both technical and legal means to try to assert control over how, when and by whom their content is viewed and/or commented on.

One of the interesting things that Popular Science misses in its almost-exclusive focus on mods for first person shooters such as Quake and Half-Life is that many people use computer mods as a sort of high-tech fan fiction.

My favorite computer game of the moment, for example, is Freedom Force — a squad-level superhero game that is highly moddable. The actual game featured a set of completely new superheroes, but user-created mods have tended to focus on well-known characters. There is, for example, an excellent 6-mission mod featuring the Fantastic Four and another featuring the Justice League of America. And, inevitably, somebody even created a Buffy mod.

The same thing goes for The Sims where not a few people used skins and other add-ons freely available on the Internet to simply use the game as a backdrop for telling stories they posted on the Internet.

The problem for companies that are in the popular culture business and want to stop this sort of thing is that it is becoming easier every day for computer users to create original content that is derivative of copyrighted material.

On the computer game mod front, for example, many companies are devoting a significant amount of the game development time to making it easy to create mods (so easy, in fact, that even I can do it). But across the board, it is becoming easier every year for someone to buy a CD or DVD or book and to use that as a starting point for new and unauthorized tales.

The response from companies, of course, is to try to slap a lid on that either legally or through technological changes to computers that would make try to make them locked boxes when it comes to copyrighted materials.

I don’t think any of that will work because I those companies underestimate just how powerful a pull this sort of thing is. I have a friend who is a very successful newspaper columnist who has a couple books under her belt a gig at a national newspaper. Several months ago she sent me a link to her new web site, and lo and behold next to links to all of her serious writings was a section devoted to story after story of Xena fan fiction.

It is just human nature to both want to listen to stories and tell, re-tell, and rewrite stories. In fact some of the greatest works of art involve such copying and adding, except if it happened today I get the feeling that Boccaccio and Petrarch would have hired lawyers to send cease and desist letters to Chaucer. Our culture would have certainly been the worse had they had to deal with the sort of rigid intellectual property laws that are now commonplace. Hopefully we will yet prevent companies from eviscerating that sort of borrowing and experimentation.