Recently-released movie-making game The Movies seems like a great way to make home-made "machinima" (movies made using a computer game). A political machinima movie called "The French Democracy" circulating around the internet caught the attention of popular weblog Boing Boing, which noted that "Most machinima is silly, or porny, or violent -- but this is real political stuff, the kind of thing the First Amendment was invented for. It's a real milestone in machinima history." You might think so, if you hadn't read the the End-User License Agreement (EULA) users automatically agree to by using The Movies.

Contrary to what The Movies seems to have been made for, it appears that Activision (the game's publisher) maintains ownership over pretty much all user-created films. The EULA states that while users retain ownership of movies they create, Activision exclusively owns "any and all content within [users'] Game Movies that was either supplied with the Program or otherwise made available to [users] by Activision or its licensors..." This means that any movie containing anything less than 100% user-created content (an impossible feat as far as I can tell) is under Activision's control. Even Lionhead Studios, the creator of the game, gets grabby with movies users submit to its web site.

"The French Democracy" might be a milestone in machinima history, but since Activision owns the content of the movie (the character models, environments and other material), the publisher could order the movie removed from internet sites. First Amendment rights don't seem to stand up very well to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.