With the launch of LittleBigPlanet, I’d like to offer a suggestion to all the budding creators out there who are now or will soon be using the game’s easy-to-use tools to create their own levels and publishing them for the community to play: please consider turning off the copy protection. When you publish a level in this game, one of the settings you can tweak is whether or not you’ll let people copy your level onto their game. I am afraid a lot of people won’t do this, because popular levels from the beta have already been copied and republished exactly under a different name with no attribution to the original creator. That sucks, and the people trying to bask in the reflected glory of the hard work done by someone else should be tarred and feathered. But the nascent LBP community has already identified the offenders, and one only has to peruse the various forum threads devoted to the game to see who the plagiarists are.
Turning off the copy protection might result in your level being bootlegged, which would be a shame. On the other hand, letting the community at large take a close look at how you put your level together is the best way to share your good ideas. In the beta, nothing could be copy-prohibited, and I learned a lot by copying levels into my game and checking out exactly what they did to achieve the different cool gameplay mechanics or special effects in their levels. When I make my next level, I will be doing it with that knowledge, building on what has come before. My hope is that someone else will copy my level, see what I’ve done, and further build on that. I might someday play a level ten or fifteen times removed from what I’ve done, and see in there the evolution of an idea I had. That’s cool.
My dream for LBP is for it to be collaborative beyond just multiplayer level-editing. To have hundreds of gamers building on each other’s work can only make the community levels more fun for everyone. The first step in getting there is for everyone to share their work. I hope you’ll consider doing just that.
This is an incredibly important message for anyone playing LBP. Thank you, Levi.
Welcome to Open Source.
The ideal solution might be a limited-lock option: people could download and pick apart your level, but they couldn’t directly copy any objects or items into their own levels (or re-publish the completed levels as their own).
Dj, your solution is a great compromise, but it wouldn’t allow for derivative works. I’d love to see a more talented creator take my level and put their own spin on it.
Another solution might be to have an element in the map which stated “Original map by ME” forced to be left in there.
Or additional map info which stated the author and which could only be appended to if you republish a level.
Yeah, even just a little “based on a level by FOO” that automatically shows up at the bottom of the notes for a re-published level would be cool. Sure, you could get around it by copying and re-pasting every element into a new level, but that’d be so much work hardly anyone would do it. I bet they could even implement something like that in a patch.
(Heh, I can’t name my arbitrary example author multiple X’s, or the spam filter bites me.)