Authorship/Ownership: From Plato to EQ2

There have been a few recent debates over at Terra Nova concerning the topic of authorship and ownership of content in video games. With the recent Marvel/CoH case, one has to ask how much does one company own an idea when what they market are tangible items. In the case of the Marvel/CoH lawsuit, the issue is not direct replicas of a trademarked or copyrighted image but the 'likeness' to that image and item. So, the question isnt that the player is intentionally trying to pass off their CoH creation as the real deal (the Marvel character) - just that their character bears resemblance to theirs. I find this mentality scarry since we live in a world that is so bombarded by imagery and ideas, that it is difficult to pin point any one idea as a truely original one. I think of the example I encoutered in my Contemporary Social Theory course last year. French philosopher Michel Foucault is attributed with being one of the first (if not the first if my memory serves me correctly) to theorize about the insanity plea as a viable defence in the criminal system. Yet, when this was introduced to me, my mind was jogged back to a course on political theory i had taken the semester before that where we spent 4 months looking at Plato's "Laws". Within his laws - book 9 (again, working by memory) Plato works through the idea that when a man commits a range of particular crimes (which he lists and describes throughout the text) can only be explained by mental defect, therefore the punishment should be handed with this in mind...

Getting far off track with that one, but the point is that no matter how original we may claim to be, the influences are there that affect our creative perception.
So where is the line between influenced work and lawsuit material? (plagiarism, copyright infringement etc.?) If Marvel can sue over a strong resemblance of something they own, then how different must these representations be? I think of Manga animation where it is at times difficult to distinguish characters from such a strong animation method, if someone creates a character that resembles another in this form of animation, it is difficult for it to be a stand alone original.

Taking this idea towards another direction, is the issue of EQ2 and their newly supported out of game sites - such as guild management sites, screenshots databases and other useful tools (this is also the topic of a thread over at Terra Nova). But in giving the players these tools, they also claim ownership over the players' authored material created out of game.
As a longstanding guild member in EQ1, I am not sure how I would feel about Sony owning the storyline of our guild... the dynamics and content that were created outside the game, that carried over into real life friendships and multiple MMO's belonged - imo - to us... to those who had the experiences. It is our story to tell, not theirs. I think of this new content ownership and the fact that EQ has released a series of books. The first one I looked at was based on a player's experience in the game. (He played a rogue)

So, is this where Sony will harvest storylines for their new books? I might be wrong, but the possibility is there - and sadly, the profits will be theirs to make.