Machina-what?

We all know what machinima is, especially with the large success of Red vs Blue, by Rooster Teeth. Well Microsoft, in all it's greatness, decided it was time to lay down the law on what fans can do with their IPs.

Microsoft released a set of rules that fans will need to follow in order to use any of their games in machinimas. They present these rules/laws on Xbox.com in a hip cool way that feels warm and inviting.

"If you do any of these things, you can expect to hear from Microsoft’s lawyers who will tell you that you have to stop distributing your Items right away."

That was friendly. How about these for some rules:

• You can’t use the soundtracks or audio effects from the original game.
• You can’t use Game Content to create pornographic or obscene Items, or anything that contains vulgar, racist, hateful, or otherwise objectionable content.

Wow, sounds like making machinimas will be tons of fun now. Leave it to Microsoft to take a fun activity that was, in a sense, illegal to begin with and apply rules to make it seem like they are working with the creators. No shit this stuff was illegal to make, but since no one made a profit from it (except Rooster Teeth) no one seemed to care.

Does this mean the end of Rooster Teeth and their famous Halo machinima series? I'm betting no. They've already had talks with Microsoft lawyers when they first started the series. That's why they are allowed to sell the movies on DVD.

Why does Microsoft care? Who knows. Why do they give a crap that me and my friends are making a crappy little movie to have laughs at? Their lawyers are going to be so overwhelmed with the amount of machinimas that hopefully they'll see it was a waste of time and did nothing but piss off the fans instead of winning them over.