Game Theory: The HORROR That Threatens SCP

Be careful, this could be one of the most dangerous elements we have faced so far. More dangerous than the invincible reptile? More dangerous than that... More dangerous than the plague doctor who cures people by turning them into zombies!? More dangerous than the plague doctor who cures people by turning them into 𝘻𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘪𝘦𝘴!? More...dangerous...than...that!!! More dangerous than a malevolent star, headed towards Earth to destroy our planet and everything on it? Even more dangerous than that!! What could be more dangerous than that?!! Lawyers......Screaming!!!! *glitched spoon noises* Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that usually starts with a 'cheesy

game

theory

joke' (trademark), but today we skip all that and get straight to MatPat's serious moment (trademark) to talk about what exactly a registered trademark. and why it is threatening a lot of

game

rs and, worse, a lot of game developers and, worse, the entire Internet and, like our own James Bond mystery, this

theory

is taking us to the frost depths of the Soviet Union.

Russia. Sorry, it's not the 70s anymore. It just takes us to the current Russian Federation. Now, if you haven't heard the story properly yet, it means you don't see Markiplier considering he's been one of the only important voices to draw attention to the issue, which is a shame because it's a story that needs to get out. public light for a long time. for the benefit of hundreds of creators and people who love what they do. So my goal today is to catch you up on what's going on, give you a deeper dive into all the legal stuff Mark left out in his video, and ultimately spread the word about a

horror

story that's much more. real, much scarier and much more dangerous. than most of the SCP library and fictional monsters.

If you're unfamiliar, the SCP Foundation is a massively collaborative, community-driven creative writing project found on SCP-wiki.net. It may not look flashy on the outside, but it's a place for writers of all stripes to catalog the fantastical and sometimes terrifying entities that are captured by the fictional SCP foundation. The letters SCP stand for Secure Contain and Protect and are the mission of this fake organization. It's like a group of people are collectively writing the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but instead of cute fantasy creatures, they're all nightmarish

horror

monsters that embody our deepest fears and insecurities.

It's like Tim Burton created Pokémon. The collection of stories on SCP-wiki.net has also served as the basis for tons of indie horror games that you may know SCP's containment breach is a favorite among gamers. SCP blackout is a virtual reality horror game. I mean, we just spent three weeks covering bone jobs and duck season, right? Well, do you know all the symbols that were used in the mysterious messages on the walls in those games? Those are all SCP field codes in a game that has a decidedly different field and many other indie horror titles out there, heck, their influence has even seeped into the mainstream, for example Control a game that passed the end of the last year in the rain. with Game of the Year awards in an interview with Kotaku The game's director confirmed that "the similarities to SCP were not just a coincidence" and that the SCP Foundation was an influence on that game.

SCP has even become as mainstream as Netflix, where filmmaker Max Landis was apparently so enthralled by SCP's story that he himself contributed an entry to the SCP 2137 wiki, in fact. In short, if you are a fan of indie Creepypasta games or horror stories as I know many who watch this channel are. Chances are you've seen or played something that was directly influenced by what happens on the SCP wiki. Clearly, the SCP community has inspired many media outlets, some of which are making a lot of money, and yet you don't hear about SCP story writers harassing online game creators, accusing them of stealing art or stories or something like that.

This is 2020. Where is all the internet fury (trademark)? Is the SCP community really nice? Well, yes, actually that's it. All SCP content cataloged on the wiki is under what is known as the Creative Commons license. What is this and why haven't you heard of it? Don't worry. None of the music studios on YouTube have heard of it either *rimshot* SCP's Creative Commons license essentially says this: one is free to create and sell any work they have created based on SCP, which is how many developers and artists of games can do it. create derivative works. You will never have to pay a license fee.

You can simply choose a character or a story and create something new with it in order to use the SCP material, although you also need to: Give proper attribution to the SCP wiki and the author of the entry or entries on which it is based. So credit the original artist and finally: One (I mean, technically it's three, but according to my script it's one because the panels being out of place means I just have to read) (What's in the script? Right? ) I can't fix the bullet points or something. Like the SCP wiki, you add the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license or CC-BY-SA for short to your own work.

This essentially means that you are giving other people the ability to copy your work or create derivative works, as long as they do so. give you proper attribution and distribute your work under the same license. Basically, this all amounts to a creative reward mindset. Hey, you're inspired by my stuff and that's totally cool. Heck, you might have even made some money from it. But now just make sure to let the next person be inspired by your work. It may not be the perfect system for all cases, but it has worked for SCP since 2008, which is like a century on the Internet.

However, recently, a guy in Russia has been threatening the system using some strange tactics and has slowly started extorting legitimate SCP members. He successfully took down sellers of SCP merchandise in Russia; He has successfully deleted the official social media page of the Russian branch of the SCP foundation wiki; And now he's gone to the Russian section of the wiki demanding that they give him the page so he can take it apart and use it to sell his own merchandise. Oh! With sales tactics like that, even Jake Paul could learn some lessons from this "Buy the Merchandise" guy.

Now how the hell is this happening? Is he just some kind of master Internet pirate or some super hacker? Operating in secret? Turns out no, is he really just a guy who understands Russian legal loopholes? Good. Yes I know. I also wish it was something cooler. I see him hiding in some bunker somewhere with one of those hacker laptops, typing things really fast like they do in the movies, but no. He is literally just a bureaucrat, someone who is using the system for his benefit. . Last year he applied to the Eurasian Customs Union to trademark both the SCP foundation logo and its name within Russia, even though he is not affiliated with it at all and did not create either and was somehow granted registered trademarks. .

According to SCP Master Admin, John Beattie cites that these actions threaten not only the Russian wiki but all SCP writers and fans around the world. So how does this happen? How did this guy manage to copyright a massive community project he had no part in and why would you copyright something you can use for free anyway? Well, perhaps the most basic question before tackling any of them is to make sure everyone knows the difference between trademark and copyright. Copyright is the protection of intellectual works, including books, plays, music, videos, illustrations, and virtually anything you can create and create.

Legally owned Is that drawing you just posted on Twitter automatically covered by copyright? Copyrighted! That tour of what you keep in your refrigerator that you just uploaded to YouTube? Copyrighted! What is this? Copyrighted! (By the way, welcome back to pewd's and I'm glad you're back. I don't know what the current memes are. In the last episode I literally used one of the skeleton memes because it's the latest and trendiest thing I can find.) The good thing about copyright is that there is no need to go register your work at some government office. You can (if you want), but you usually only do it if someone is infringing your copyright.

You are going to go to court to report it. On the other hand, the trademark refers to the brand, not the words in the book or the songs on the album. just the name of the book on the cover or the band logo that appears on the poster. Trademarks should be specific to your brand and specific to your industry. The McDonald's logo on the golden arches is obviously a trademark of McDonald's, but it is specific to the food category. Well, then you could still be McDonald's, the record label, or you could trademark McDonald's, the book publisher, for example.

The battle between the SCP foundation and our Russian saboteur is over trademarks and not copyright, which unfortunately makes it harder to resolve, although trademarked things are usually a small logo, a slogan compared to something such as an entire book or an entire movie, in the case of copyright, most countries have agreements that respect the copyright of people in other countries, for example, as of 2006, Russia agreed to comply with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or T.R.I.P.S. for those of us who don't speak bureaucracy. It is an international agreement to respect the copyright of any person within the countries of the World Trade Organization.

That said, countries like Russia and China notoriously struggle to enforce the laws they put in place around intellectual property, which is why you see a lot of those counterfeit iPhones coming out of China and all those Dolce & Banana bags. These countries are simply huge and the officials within them do not always operate honestly. GAN, a company that specializes in investigating companies for shady dealings, published an overview report on Russian legal corruption in 2018 in its report, companies operating in Russia note that cites "public procurement sector in Russia... "You know the ones that deal with business licensing and things like trademarks. "...carry a high risk of corruption, bribes, kickbacks and other irregular payments are often exchanged to obtain public contracts and licenses.

Companies report favoritism and decisions by government officials and public funds are frequently diverted due to to corruption" end quote Wow That's like a two star review and believe it or not, the other sectors of government they report on actually rate worse. Oh really! so the SCP is already facing a fairly complicated system from the beginning. Added to this is the problem that trademarks are especially slippery when crossing borders. They are territory-specific, meaning your brand generally only works in your country or continent; For example, you won't find Burger King signs in Australia. This is because when Burger King expanded into Australia in the 1970s, they discovered that the Burger King trademark had already been registered by an Australian company.

So they had to brand their Australian restaurants as Hungry Jack's. Sure, if they can still advertise themselves as the home of awesomeness, Whopper has the trademark as their burger. They simply can't be called Burger King because someone had it first in that territory. Countries like China and Russia are the first to submit applications. Which means, basically, if you don't register your brand there first, they can legally sell your exact brand, like your logo or real name or whatever, to someone else. This appears to be what is happening in the SCP case, but it is far from the first time.

For example, in 2002, a Russian company started under the name Starbucks and was able to obtain the rights to the Starbucks brand after persuading the Russian patent agency that the name should be auctioned and yes, this Russian company also had copyrights. about the classic Starbucks mermaid logo. that they did not create What followed was a multi-year legal battle that finally came to an end in 2005 when the Seattle coffee chain finally convinced Russian courts to cancel the trademark they had registered in 1997. Reverse the sale that had allowed a The Russian company will claim its brand for three years!

This also happens all the time in countries like China. In recent yearsSeveral articles have appeared about how brand theft is increasing in China. But the best thing American lawyers can do for companies whose logos or names are ripped off is to literally tell them to try to buy back their own name and trademark from the company that stole them. It would be like Vsauce having to buy back the name Vsauce from some random person in Russia because he didn't think to preemptively register his name there or it took him too long to use it. Well, to our sensibilities, this might seem ridiculous, but in reality everything is totally legal in the countries that are the first to apply.

What is happening with SCP is not necessarily a violation of trademark laws. Selling that brand to any guy was potentially legal because, well, that's how Russian law is set up. So is that it? A really unpleasant end for this group that shares their work with the whole world? Does SCP have to somehow buy back its own brand or be forced to operate under an entirely different name in Russia? Well, maybe it's not a good thing that our Russian saboteur doesn't get caught up in trademark issues in Russia, we've also been talking about copyright all this time.

You'll remember from the beginning that the entire SCP wiki, all derivative games, pages, stories, artwork, everything is governed by the Creative Commons license which requires that anyone who uses materials, artwork or related materials from SCP Materialsgives credit to the community and also allows others to use those same works under the same license. That said, our Russian saboteur has reportedly been using his trademark as leverage to remove SCP works from other authors and block sales of merchandise containing SCP artwork. Admittedly, it's a little difficult to authenticate some of those claims because the sites themselves have been taken down, but if you're blocking the use of SCP art and related works, you're actually violating the Creative Commons license upon which the wiki was built.

SCP. Remember that he himself can sell SCP art like anyone else under the Creative Commons license, but if he blocks the sale of that product or the publication of SCP materials by other people, he is violating the Creative Commons license. So, in summary, the TLDR here is that you are not violating trademark laws. . He is violating copyright laws. You can see how this case is quite nuanced, but when you get to the bottom of it, it's clear that a violation of the legitimate SCP creators is taking place. If these reports are really accurate. So what does all this mean if the SCP Foundation loses this battle?

Well, for starters, it means that the SCP Foundation and everyone except our Russian saboteur lose the ability to use the SCP Foundation name and logo within the Russian Federation. Please note that the trademark only applies to Russia, even with a Russian SCP trademark. There is nothing I can do to threaten SCP's founding outside of Russia. It also doesn't mean that our Russian saboteur can claim the wiki itself because he has the SCP trademark but not the copyright to the content itself. At that point, SCP could create its own separate Russian branch with a different name and a different logo, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

But beyond SCP, there's actually a bigger problem going on here. This measure sets a dangerous precedent for any Creative Commons work, as long as this type can block other creators in Russia. If someone can simply take a work of art that is currently under Creative Commons and register it, then that basically means that Creative Commons does not provide protection to that work of art. As soon as something of value is created, anyone can block it using that trademark loophole. So if this case is not addressed properly, it seems to create a sort of slippery slope that others can exploit for their own benefit.

So the good news here is that you can go to court against trademark trolls and win. Yes, even in Russia. The bad news is that it's not easy. It takes time and, more importantly, money to pay legal fees to defend that trademark. That is why it is so important that SCP can raise funds to fight that legal battle. Luckily, it seems they already have the funds they need. The same community that came together to create an intricate and sprawling shared universe has also come together to defend that shared universe against Russian trolls. And I think that's the real story: it can be easy to get angry because the world is full of selfish people looking to game the system for their own good.

But it's filled with a much larger number of people who are willing to band together to fend off the few bad apples trying to mess things up. It's a shame this happened and in some ways represents the worst parts of what we see online, but it also reveals some of the best elements of being part of an online community that has brought joy and entertainment to thousands of people. In the end, even if you're not a member of SCP, this case is worth following and learning about because Creative Commons licenses govern much of what you see on the websites you use most, including this one.

Therefore, it is in our best interest to keep it as intact as possible. Fight in SCP! I regret that this time what you have to secure, contain and protect is your own right to exist. But hey, that's just a theory. A theory of games, thanks for watching.