Ruby and I were discussing our views on copyright and DRM. These are the views that OddCo will stick to, because we believe in them.

DRM will not be used for anything, if at all. The reason being that no matter what protections we could put in, people will get around it. The tougher the challenge, the more the geek, like myself, is intrigued. So, instead of making it harder, we want to make it plain easy to share our stuff, to copy it to your iPod v20.0, to backup, to show on a TV, large theatre screen, whatever. If we make it easy, why would people go to all the effort of pirating and distributing our stuff?

We would insist, however, that whatever content is accessible from the member’s only section, should not be spread everywhere. We will probably institute watermarking, so we can identify the exact member that shared our stuff.

Copyright is also a thorny issue, in that some people protect it aggresively and litigiously, and some have more liberal views of it. In our view, if you make something new from our copyright material, be it characters, video, music, parody comics, whatever that bears our copyright, you should attribute a credit to us. Most fan artists do so, in nearly every instance I can think of. So, if you take scenes from our blockbuster video, thats 3 hours long, and make a very cool and entertaining AMV, then by all means! Just so long as you attribute the copyright over the scenes and the music to the proper owners.

If however, you are making money from our copyright works, then we will not be so very happy and easygoing. In fact, you may even find us willing to sue for financial damages. However, we would not go insane on the damages, unlike certain parties in the recent media(*cough cough* $15,000 loss per song on a copied CD is not very fair or accurate…)

Another small thing is as long as no one takes our material and makes very violent, or sexual content with our material, that features real people, we would not be very pleased. However, if you make adult content only featuring fictional characters, so long as credit is attributed, then fine.

As Ruby said:

We promise that we will have QUALITY, free content, always available. It will be full and free. There will not be shitty demos, 30 second samples, or 2 page samples. That should be enough for everyone.

There you have it, a near-official, quasi-statement about or stand on copyright and drm.