EA Overlooks Social Media’s Small Infringements for Marketing Benefit

SAN FRANCISCO -- An Electronic Arts campaign against phishing to steal game “entitlements” has produced takedowns of 70 websites and 2,000 eBay auctions since December, a company lawyer said. Fake EA sites, violating copyrights, are used to con visitors out of virtual property they've bought, and then it’s sold on eBay, said Kerry Hopkins, EA senior intellectual-property director, at a forum on social media and IP. Whole teams that gamers have bought in connection with the company’s FIFA franchise have been hijacked, she said. The crimes take advantage of an industry trend toward microtransactions and entitlement sales using virtual “coins” and auctions, Hopkins said.

Social media offer videogame companies huge benefits as well as branding risks, Hopkins said at an event of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. late Wednesday: They're central to marketing but also pose big risks of copyright infringements and reputational damage by everyone from fans to thieves. Online gaming was “kind of the beginning of social media,” Hopkins said. EA released one of the first massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Ultima Online, in the mid-1990s, she said.

Now various online media are integral to every product launch, Hopkins said. EA has a YouTube page offering its newest game trailers, in addition to a separate page for each game, she said. Ads and trailers online include “a lot fun stuff we might not show on TV,” Hopkins said. “We have Twitter pages everywhere,” she said. The head of EA’s sports studio has a blog that allows direct communication to and from the gaming community, Hopkins said.

EA is flexible in responding to unauthorized use of images and trademarks from its games, Hopkins said. The company will “take a hard look” at whether a use is “abusing our IP” and perhaps its customers, she said. The biggest problem on Facebook is customer support and giveaway pages that “look like official EA” content but are fakes, Hopkins said.

"We actually promote community fansites,” notably for The Sims, and “do not heavily enforce” copyrights against them, as long as it’s clear they're not EA offerings, Hopkins said. But a Russian site was selling ads for adult content “we don’t want associated with The Sims brand,” and a genuine Polish fansite was sold to a media company that sold ads indiscriminately, including for sexually oriented material, she said. “We had to negotiate to get that site back.”

On YouTube, the company is alert to videos offering game “cheats, hacks, cracks and prerelease leaks,” along with videos that draw viewers to phishing sites that draw out account information for thefts, Hopkins said. “Hacks” are game modifications, and “cracks” defeat security technology, she said.

An unfinished version of the EA game Crysis 2 “leaked like crazy” this month, Hopkins said. The release is “superbuggy,” hurting the image of the game and the company, she said. “It really promotes piracy,” and it spoiled plot surprises central to the marketing campaign, Hopkins said. “Now the story line is out.” EA has gotten about 300 Crysis 2 videos and 50,000 online leaks taken down, she said.

Using social media also opens EA to infringement allegations, Hopkins said. Its Exchange for The Sims 3 allows users to upload virtual furniture and clothes for downloading by others, she said, and other sites are marketplaces for avatars developed for use in games. “We are having to deal with the right of publicity and copyright claims” such as when users post the images of famous athletes or Louis Vuitton handbags, Hopkins said.

But social media enable weapons to fight infringement, too, Hopkins said. They offer the “ability to offer community and interaction online” as a “carrot” for acquiring the licensed game copies that work with the Internet features instead of unlicensed ones that don’t, she said. EA is putting a major emphasis on online tools that allow players with licensed copies to interact with each other, Hopkins said. She gave Autolog for Need for Speed: Shift as a prime example.