On Fighting.

So, the big news is that Hasbro has sent a Cease & Desist to Mane Six, effectively stopping development and production of the indie game “My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic.”

Now, one could easily think that Big Bad Hasbro is squashing the creativity of the little guy just because they won't get money from it, but you're probably wrong. Maybe Hasbro isn't comfortable with having characters from a girl's show that promotes Friendship beating the crap out of each other. Just a thought.

But what I feel is more likely is that this is not a mandate from the MLP Team or even Hasbro Creative themselves. This is more likely a mandate from Hasbro's Legal Department because they see a POTENTIAL profit rip-off. Now, we all know that Fighting is Magic was meant to be completely free, but Hasbro's a Big Giant Company, and Big Giant Companies don't typically take these kinds of chances.

BGCs have the mindset that anybody who would put that much time and effort into a project is, sooner or later, going to want to make some money off of it. You could argue that this is a s*itty way to think, but more often than not, it's true. It might not be true in this case, but again, no company that wants to protect their intellectual property will take that chance.

So now what? Well, I say, leave that to Mane Six. There’s a lot of things that can happen from this. Lauren Faust made a Twitter comment about them with Original Characters for a revamped project. If they indeed come to an agreement there, that could be good. Perhaps some discussions with Hasbro themselves will clear matters up and allow the project to move forward as is.

But don’t let this one incident squash any creative output you may have. Keep writing, keep drawing, keep customizing, carving, sewing, whatever you enjoy doing, keep doing it! And whatever you do, if you are a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, don’t let this cloud your image of the show! The show is still fun. It’s still entertaining, the animation is still good, and we still like watching and discussing it. Keep that going.

Feel free to share/tweet/re-blog/whatever. Let’s keep sanity going here.

Comments

[UseFistNotMouth]

It's already been explained that due to copyright law, if a company does not actively prevent copyright infringement it can lose it's copyright. In other words if Hasbro does not tell unauthorized FiM content producers to stop, they could lose ownership of FiM entirely.