DISCLAIMER: Let me start by saying this is NOT to become a political thread. I don't want to hear anything about government policies or economic policies or religious ideologies or the like.

I am curious how many talented modders (read: indie video game designers) out there might be hesitant to pour their intellectual property into an otherwise promising medium like Skyrim, due to not wanting to give up exclusive ownership of their material?

I personally LOVE the Elder Scrolls series and feel the Skyrim engine specifically has GREAT potential for epic storytelling and fantasy interaction type game mods. Being a writer and a thinker I have many great ideas for such projects, yet I have hesitated to release them as it just feels like a betrayal of my own potential in a way.

Having spent the last ten years working full time in the tech industry, and now between jobs rapidly approaching homelessness, I find it difficult to justify giving up for free what ideas I might otherwise incorporate into some for-profit work of fiction to earn myself a living, or perhaps the healthcare I so desperately require.

At other times in my life when money was not such an overwhelming issue I would have gladly contributed to the wealth of the community experience. Looking at the statistics of up to 1/3 of Americans in many states living in or near poverty, I have to wonder if there is a similar mindset among artists and writers who might otherwise be producing epic stories to enrich the virtual environments we all enjoy.

That we WANT to contribute, to see our ideas enjoyed and flourish and grow into something greater, but we simply cannot justify doing for free what is essentially one of our final barriers against being left homeless and abandoned by modern conglomerate monopoly and the greed of post-modern desperation.

I wrote about this on my website, in the article "The Death of Open Source." Basically the idea being that in an intellectual property economy, it is in the interest of the corporations as much as the people to establish a minimal baseline, so that no one ever faces the threat of homelessness and deprivation in modern society.

That this would enable people to realize their potential without holding back, giving freely of their talents in the public domain because what they NEED was already secured, increasing the net value of the "internet" and thus improving our intellectual property economy.

As they cleverly address it in Disney's Monsters Inc., laughter is more powerful than scream.