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a multi-million dollar terrorist web monitoring project, but the bad Arab sounding music and entire tracks of dialogue ripped from the South Park creators film seem to be a dead giveaway that it wasn't made by terrorists. The Pentagon though is sticking to its story, even after the creator came forward and said it's a Team America spoof.

To date the hundreds of thousands of stories told through the machinima medium haven't been overtly political. Another incident does stand out. Last fall after racism and police brutality in France sparked wide spread urban rioting, a French activist, Alex Chan, used machinima made with Lionhead Studios The Movies to tell the story from the perspective of a French youth of color. After getting millions of downloads in Europe, the video, The French Democracy, was translated to English. It was recently screened at The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France - a milestone for machinima artists everywhere, establishing machinima as an accepted high art form.

Online Games Evolve into the Creative Commons

The revolution whispered about in those Quake dungeons has begun. Hugh Hancock explains that machinima "is one of the first Viridian technologies; recycled, founded on shifting sands, and playfully experimental." Hancock is referring to the Viridian Manifesto written by popular science fiction author Bruce Sterling at the turn of the millennium. It was a call to cultural arms by geeks to derail among other things the creation of "a spy-heavy, commercial Internet."

"Intellectual Property Rights as we know them, or indeed at all, are doomed. Count on it," states Hancock as a matter of historical fact. "Why? Because they're not 'rights' at all. They're aberrations created by the primitive nature of the distribution media we've had, up to now, available to us." Broadcasters would agree, the old culture industries are worried, they have lost control to Youtube.com and other upstarts like QuantumShift.tv.

Machinima represents what is being called "emergent gameplay" by the online gaming industry. Gamers are using the virtual worlds and their characters in ways not originally intended by the makers. Machinima makers use software that they don't have a license to use. EULA (all that text you click 'accept' to without reading when you install video game software) provisions in most games also provide ammunition for copyright holders to claim infringement. Machinima appeals to the pirate in all of us, obeying no master but adhering to open source

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