New Software Causes Copyright Concerns

Shane Tanning liked to capture the flag in Tribes 2. He had the capping routes down. He even had video recordings of the routes. But he was tired of sharing and emailing the video files to everyone in his tribe. Then he had an idea. And so Capster was born.

"I was like, 'Hey man, why not have a client-side peer-to-peer program that would let my tribesmates trade the video files they wanted?'," recalled Tanning. "Kind of like ICQ, but without the chat and need for attended file transfers."

Capster, named after Tanning's Tribes ability, allowed players to freely download and trade ".mpB" files. Once Tanning released Capster, it quickly spread among the player community. And as the trading software spread, so did the video files.

The trouble was, Tanning didn't own the video files. Many had been created by a tribe called Meatallikka, who felt they were being cheated out of what was rightfully (and technically) theirs. Meatallikka and GRIAA (Game Recording Industry Association of America) stepped forward and sued Tanning for copyright infringement.

The move didn't go over very well in the community. "Why should I buy a whole CD of cap videos when I just wanna see Dessicator?" asked one anonymous gamer. "Most of these cappers today record a lot of crap. I only wanna watch the hits." The popularity of Capster only seems to support that position. A recent weeknight showed several terabytes of mpBs changing hands through the Capster network.

However, legal experts don't see a positive outcome for Tanning and Capster. "It's copyrighted, protected work," said a GRIAA lawyer. "Yeah," continued Mars, team captain of Meatallikka, "Tapster, bad! Pheer me, good!"