Are Etsy Lawyers Bullying Jayne Hat Makers?

(If you're familiar with the Jayne hat controversy, skip the introduction and get right to the good stuff.)

The Jayne hat. Oh, the Jayne hat.

If you're a fan of the short-lived show Firefly, you already know what I'm talking about. If not, the shortest coherent explanation I can give is this: In one episode, Jayne Cobb, the big thug character (who secretly has a good heart) receives a hand-knitted laplander-style hat from his mother. It is brightly colored, with a pom-pom, and is fairly silly-looking and entirely inappropriate to his general demeanor -- which is what makes it perfect. Jayne loves the hat, and wears it in a climactic scene involving guns and threats of violence.

In the intervening years, the Jayne hat has become iconic for Firefly fans. "Browncoats" (Firefly fans) have been knitting the tricolor hats for about a decade. I actually own one, made for me personally as a birthday gift. You see them all over conventions; they're an instant symbol for the fanbase.

You can see where this is going. Recently, Fox, which owns the rights to Firefly, licensed a manufacturer to start selling official Jayne hats. I actually applaud that move -- why should only fans who know knitters get to show off the accessory? But, of course, it didn't stop there, and Fox (not having learned from, oh, any other decision they ever made involving the Firefly franchise) started sending cease & desist letters to online sellers of handmade Jayne hats.

Unlike most people commenting on the situation (and even most Jayne hat knitters talking about it), I actually think Fox is on pretty shaky legal ground. Despite what they would have people think, it's not at all clear that Fox has any legal right to stop people from knitting red, orange, and yellow laplanders and calling them "Jayne hats" -- and, if they can, that should give us pause. (That may be the subject of a future post, but it would take a fair bit of research to cover the topic adequately.) But let's, for the moment, suppose that they do.

There's someone in this controversy who is cutting a path even closer to the line, and even more dangerous, than Fox. It's Etsy. And it all relies on something we were never supposed to see.

Take This DRM. It's Dangerous to Distribute Games Alone.

(I am back after a couple of weeks of intense thesis immersion.  So let's talk about The Legend of Zelda.)

Let's be honest: If you never wanted to erase Navi, link's fairy companion in The Ocarina of Time, then you never played The Ocarina of Time.  If I had to make a list of the top modifications I wanted to otherwise great games, deleting Navi would top the list, and it wouldn't even be close.  If I had the time, energy, and technical skill, I would go back and erase Navi from the game myself, just to be able to go back and play the game without her.

Entrepreneur, gamer, and candidate for Dad of the Year Mike Hoye recently modded his own copy of The Wind Waker, Link's first adventure on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda series.  He didn't remove the fairy companion; to the best of my knowledge (I don't own a GameCube), there is no fairy companion in The Wind Waker.  Instead, he painstakingly changed the dialogue to change protagonist Link's gender from male to female.

Hoye enjoys playing video games with his daughter, but was frustrated by the lack of positive female role models in games.  So he did the sensible thing, and built one.  He didn't change the plot or the function of the game, just a few words here and there to make the game more accessible to his daughter.  He also made his modifications available to the public for other concerned parents.

But this isn't a post about gender in video games.  Everyone knows that video games have done a terrible job of handling gender in any sensible way, with very few and limited exceptions.  No, I want to talk about copyright.  Mike Hoye's labor of love is demonstrative of why our copyright system isn't just broken; it's insanely broken.

Why?  Hoye's brilliant Zelda hack is probably illegal.