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Copyrighted characters dominate ModNation Racers' top creations

by Andrew Yoon on Jun 9th 2010 1:15PM

Give gamers creation tools, and they'll immediately recreate icons from other famous franchises. Like LittleBigPlanet before it, ModNation Racers' extensive character and car editor has been used to pay homage to a number of high-profile games and films -- and these creations are the most beloved by the MNR community.

In addition to Peto-Mad's Mario (above), the top downloaded creations include Iron Man, Spider-Man, and a Transformer to boot. The accuracy of these creations have us wondering: will Sony take these user-submitted Mods down before another company threatens a lawsuit?

Source

Tags: iron-man, mario, modnation-racers, spider-man, transformers, United-Front-Games

Reader Comments (31)

hope so they have originality

no originality

Down voted? For speaking the truth? I guess I'll fade away with you and get down voted too.

I feel the same. You get a great game with great intuitive creation tools and all anyone does is copy and then everyone else downloads it. Some more of the same please! Baaa! Baaaa!

We abhor originality! Baaaa! Baaaa!

Popular culture makes me puke.

I'm surprised sony hasn't already.......

Hell I seem to recall LBP yanking levels that related to God of War when it was fresh out of launch ..... ignoring the fact they gave you GOW skins and GOW style items to put in your levels .......

They removed them because of the human sacrifice, and blood.

all of them are great creators...I like the mystery machine, looks awesome !

yea they uhm yea there great uhm what was i saying

First time I hit the + without reading anything.

Why does copyright always ruin cool stuff?

Exactly, if it's anything it would be a free advertising for those franchises. Those Mods were created and downloaded from and by fans who love those series. It's not like Nintendo is losing money over people playing Mario on MNR anyway.

So should I unpublished my Power Rangers Mods then? I don't wanna be sued either.

You can play as the Masterchief on UT3, on PS3. What's the difference?

Of course they are top downloaded, they've been on the podium since release. I wish they would change it up every now and then.

I wonder if this would fall under the rules of "parody" since fans are creating these characters as an homage. Then again, the likeness of characters cannot be reproduced without the copyright holders' consent. Lame.

But doesn't someone have to profit? Or else tons of people could get sued for fan art....

these are not parodies. parodies tend to make fun of the origional work...

like the songs that weird al does, those are parodies

these characters are blatent copies...

if someone were to make a character that looks like mario but include a hilarious detail that makes fun of the mario character that would be a parody...

Parody doesn't necessarily mean that it is making fun of the original, but it needs to be making some sort of social or critical commentary. Just straight up copying something and using it for your own purposes is not parody.

That's true, it's just stupid that they'll probably be taken down even though these recreations do not affect sales or the companies' images in the least.

I love how you've spelt Avatar wrong lol
"AvararOD"...

Why'd I get downvoted? They spelt Avatar wrong idiots...

It's not like they're making money off of those characters on these games, why do copyright holders get so mad about this? This type of thing should be considered Fair Use.

Copyright law in the US needs a serious overhaul, it's getting more and more ridiculous each year.

There aren't going to be any lawsuits, don't worry. Joystiq just needs something to report on.

It's not that somebody else is not making money off of them, it's that the copyright holders aren't making the money off of them that they could be. If you owned the copyright to something, wouldn't you want to be able to make money off of it any time it was publicly displayed?

I think of it as free advertisement, so why bring up a lawsuit?

No you are missing the point of protecting copyrighted work. The owners of the intellectual property are trying to protect their brand from dillution. If everyone were allowed to reproduce everyone elses IP then it would dillute the power of the character or brand thus costing the IP owner potential revenue from future installments and releases. Basically by creating Mario characters and karts, you are essentially making a Mario Kart game for the PS3 which Nintendo wouldn't be very happy about.

No they aren't diluting the brand names. You could recreate the entire Mario kart cast and it would still feel nothing like Mario Kart. The graphics engines are completely different so the characters don't look the same and the games play so differently. Nintendo and the other IP holders have nothing to lose but they'll probably ask them to be removed simply because they can.

Great! love when you give the people the power and they stick it to the man.

Brad
http://ps3mediaservers.com

That's honestly a pretty impressive rendition! Those pre-rendered messes from the later Game Boy Advance games should be ashamed of themselves.

@golfs4panzys

oh yea there could be lawsuits... for one thing it has happened in the past with ncsoft...

marvel sued ncsoft over the fact that CoH subscribers were making characters that was too simular to the marvel characters like spiderman, hulk etc.... in the end ncsoft were forced to remove the offending characters off the service...

Marvel initially sued because people COULD make the ripoffs, not because people were making the ripoffs. But people on CoH would make fun of people using characters they didn't create.

The Mystery Machine is a great kart, but frankly... I'm a little bored of the rip off artists. I like to see cool original creations. I've been working on at least interesting takes of things, different kinds of zombies and things, but no outright ripoffs. And it annoys me that because I'm trying something new, I basically get no createxp.

I wish I had this game, but I just bought rdr and peace walker :/

Breaking News

Copyrighted characters dominate ModNation Racers' top creations

Reader Comments (31)

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:20PM bgardner said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:51PM bgardner said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 7:21PM khaos100 said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:23PM Scuffles said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 4:04PM mywhitenoise said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:32PM Jacksy said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:57PM Frank the tank said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 4:02PM Canefan said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:34PM Im No Hero said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 5:54PM Korwyn said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:36PM dabamf said

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Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:38PM NIck PSN ID Rattlehead91 said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 6:16PM yamugushi said

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Posted: Jun 9th 2010 4:17PM gettinmoney662 said

Posted: Jun 10th 2010 12:17AM NIck PSN ID Rattlehead91 said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:41PM den69 said

Posted: Jun 10th 2010 4:31AM den69 said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 1:44PM War Machine said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 3:06PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 3:08PM BlingOnMyWrist said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 4:00PM Canefan said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 8:07PM NuImage said

Posted: Jun 10th 2010 12:19AM NIck PSN ID Rattlehead91 said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 2:28PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 9th 2010 3:16PM maxchain said

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Posted: Jun 11th 2010 2:18AM Falcon said

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