Clickable Culture pointed me this morning to the freshly-posted Xbox Game Content Usage Rules. An interesting read.

I have to give points to Microsoft for translating this from the original legalese – which I suppose they sort of had to do – and some of it is quite reasonable. Other bits are more problematic for prospective machinima authors. This will become particularly relevant when Halo 3 ships, as it purportedly contains a fairly nifty game-capture/machinima editing tool.

So here’s the list of what MS says you definitely cannot do. You are limited to the following Microsoft-owned (IP) games:

• Age of Empires (all versions)
• Flight Simulator (all versions)*
• Forza Motorsport (all versions)*
• Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 (when released)
• Kameo
• Perfect Dark Zero
• Project Gotham Racing (all versions)*
• Rise of Nations (all versions)
• Shadowrun
• Viva Piñata

* Use of individual vehicles may require permission from their manufacturer.

They obviously can’t grant permission to screw with someone else’s IP. That’s totally fair of course. You can only derive stuff from those Xbox titles. Kind of throws the racing/flying games to hell since there’s no way you’ll get permission from the original vehicle manufacturers, but whatever. Not much talking-plane machinima out there.

Here’s where it gets tricky…

What can’t I do?
It’s tough to predict everything people will do, but there are some things that you can be sure will get our attention.

• You can’t reverse engineer our games to access the assets or otherwise do things that the games don’t normally permit in order to create your Items.
  

[That's kind of... broad, isn't it? Is this supposed to be some kind of insurance against a Hot Coffee type thing? This means I have to stay firmly in whatever "edit mode" they grant me?]

• You can’t use Game Content to create pornographic or obscene Items, or anything that contains vulgar, racist, hateful, or otherwise objectionable content.

[Oh, no this is the Hot Coffee insurance. Gotcha. Does this include the usual teabagging I see in Halo multiplayer matches?]

• You can’t sell or otherwise earn anything from your Items. We will let you have advertising on the page with the Item on it, but that’s it. That means you can’t sell it, post it on a site that requires subscription or other fees, solicit donations of any kind (even by PayPal), use it to enter a contest or sweepstakes, or post it on a page you use to sell other items (even if those other items have nothing to do with Game Content or Microsoft).

[You know, this is actually quite generous of them. I'm surprised that they let you make money off of advertising your mod. Perhaps this is so they don't lose the likes of Red vs. Blue, who are already doing this? And, what's with the "other items" proviso? Some blogs have a PayPal tip jar. If you have one, no posting the machinima. Seems strange.]

• You can’t use the soundtracks or audio effects from the original game. We often license those from third parties and don’t have the rights to pass them on to you.

[Um, what? How the hell do we manage that if the game replay mode keeps the sound intact? You have to come up with all your own sound fx and music? Yikes. Not for the faint of heart. They could have licensed the sounds for this use if they had wanted to. Boo.]

• You can’t infringe anyone’s IP rights in your Item, even if the IP rights being infringed don’t belong to Microsoft. Among other things that means you can’t use any of Microsoft’s trademarked logos or names except in the ways described in the pages linked from www.microsoft.com/trademarks.

["You cannot use Halo to make fun of Halo. Or Microsoft. Or Windows. Or... us. We got enough of that in high school."]

• You can’t add to the game universe or expand on the story told in the game with “lost chapters” or back story or anything like that.

[Ouch. All fan fic, out the window. All alternate-history machinima, out the window. This means you cannot do *anything* that is actually set in the Halo universe. Or the Viva Pinata universe, or the Kameo universe. Nothing that has a story. You can run around and make jokes though, or drive a Warthog off a cliff and laugh. That's a-OK.]

• You can’t grant anyone the right to build on your creations. We don’t mind if other people help you out, but you have to be clear with them that it’s not you giving permission, it’s us. (That’s how we make sure everyone plays by the same rules.)

[Non-transferable license. That's expected.]

So the big items are: no sound effects/music from the games, and no ‘game world’ plotlines. Too bad; as I said Halo 3 was sort of poised to become a great new machinima tool, but the vast majority of prospective casual users wouldn’t bother re-scoring and re-foley’ing the whole thing with their own sounds. We’re not all Ben Burtt. And no one is going to infringe on those Halo backstory novels without running afoul of the lawbots. Again, it looks like it was written to support a Red vs. Blue-type adaptation of Halo replays, and not much else.

I mean, who’s really going to do a Perfect Dark Zero or Rise of Nations machinima?