Strange Company`s Director, Hugh Hancock, died in 2018. Strange Company is no longer a registered Company. This site is part of his body of work, and as such it is hosted and maintained by a group of volunteers and as an archive of his work. A comprehensive list of the works being archived can be found here. If you have any problems with the site, please report them using this form.

Is Gaming Culture Short-Changed By Current Intellectual Property Law?

One of the things that really hurt Machinima as a medium back when it first bloomed, around the early to mid 2000s, was its status - or lack therof - in intellectual property law. And it’s not the only offshoot of gaming culture that suffered that way.

Dr Gaetano Dimita at Queen Mary University, London, was kind enough to invite me to speak on this topic last week. Unfortunately, I contracted a particularly energy-sapping virus two days earlier, and so wasn’t able to make it down - but instead, I recorded my talk as a video.

And here it is! In it, I explore several instances of genuine, significant artistic achievement being rendered “illegal art” by current IP law, and ask what we should be doing to change that: