John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney, loves playing with the Spore Creature Creator according to Maxis, Pixar’s Bay Area neighbour.

But should he show alarm at what is being invented and uploaded online by others or welcome in a whole new generation of animators?

Spore is Maxis’s long-awaited follow-up to The Sims, launching on September 5, and the Creature Creator is an appetiser that allows players to build life forms that can be placed in the game later and used to evolve civilisations and take part in interplanetary expansion.

In the meantime, they can be uploaded to Sporepedia, a vast shareable online database of user creations. Electronic Arts, Maxis’s parent, said this week 2.5m copies of the Creator had either been downloaded for free or bought as a boxed version, while more than 2m creatures have been created so far.

I received a full demo of the game from Thomas Vu, a Maxis producer, this week. He showed me the flexibility of the Creature Creator in shaping backbones and bodies and attaching all manner of limbs and appendages. This was only one of eight Creators in the game as well, with others available to make objects such as vehicles and buildings.

I could imagine Mr Lasseter and his Pixar animators using the Creators to prototype future animation characters, such is the sophistication of the tools and the flexibility they allow.

In fact, as we flicked through Sporepedia, Mr Vu pointed out a very passable imitation of Pixar’s Wall-E character in the library, created by a player.

I wondered if Mr Lasseter would approve of this as adding extra buzz for his movie or be more inclined to reach for the phone and call his lawyer.

The possibilities in Spore for making realistic imitations have not been seen in video games before and the user-generated content it will create is going to launch it into the realm of YouTube in risking copyright complaints from intellectual-property owners.

It also means questionable content of another kind can be created, such as the flying genitalia that has struck the Second Life virtual world.

Maxis says there will be parental controls and the Spore community has been very good at policing itself and flagging such content for removal so far.

On the opportunity to reproduce accurately characters, buildings, cars and other trademarked products, the studio says it will adopt YouTube’s stance of taking objects down on requests from the copyright owners.

They could be kept very busy, Spore users have already created more species than exist on Earth with the Creature Creator, just imagine what they can do when they get more tools.

With its push into international markets heating up, Facebook appears to be setting its sights on a handful of popular ‘copycat’ social networks whose web sites bear an uncanny resemblance to its own.

StudiVZ, the German social network that the company filed suit against on Friday (Click here for a copy of the complaint), claims to have 10m users scattered across Germany, Austria, and a handful of other countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people, the most active of which ostensibly aren’t using Facebook’s German-language site.

From the looks of it, StudiVZ should be an interesting test case for Facebook’s intellectual property claims. The site, it’s fair to say, looks almost exactly like Facebook - except that it’s red, not blue. It has groups, a section for photos, and even its own version of the Facebook “wall” where friends can leave each other messages. Many of the page layouts look identical to those on Facebook.

Ten million users is nothing to sneeze at (StudiVZ recent sold to a big German publisher for a suspected 100m euros). But a bigger challenge to Facebook could come from clones elsewhere, especially in China, where Xiaonei, another site that bears striking resemblance to Facebook, boasts more than 15m registred users and has raised $435m in venture funding.

Various tallies around the web have identified at least nine other major alleged Facebook clones. It’s not clear whether Facebook intends to pursue other alleged copycats. But with its lawsuit Friday, Facebook has put them on notice.

Update: StudiVZ responds

It took almost 48 hours (thanks in part to Facebook’s decision to file its suit late in the afternoon on a Friday, long after Germany closed down for the weekend) - but StudiVZ has finally issued a response to the Facebook suit. The money quote, from Marcus Riecke, chief executive:

“There are numerous social networks. Facebook was not the first and certainly isn’t the only one. By attempting to harm studiVZ through a meritless California lawsuit, Facebook is arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly over social networking sites that the facts show it does not deserve.”

Full statement after the jump. (more…)

It took a long time, but Hasbro, the owner of the rights to Scrabble in the US, has teamed up with Electronic Arts to finally launch an online version of the popular crossword game. The game is available at Pogo.com today, and is scheduled to make its debut on Facebook later this month. So what does this mean for Scrabulous, Scrabble’s ersatz competitior, which took Facebook world by storm when it launched last year?

The prognosis isn’t good.  Scrabulous has been under a cloud since January when Hasbro and Mattel, which owns the international rights to the game, sent letters to Facebook asking it to remove the game, citing copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, an online version of Scrabble created by Mattel and Real Networks has been struggling to gain traction since it launched in April for audiences outside the US and Canada. To date, the game has managed to attract fewer than 6,000 daily users on Facebook - less than two per cent of Scrabulous’s daily audience of 450,000.

Hasbro and EA may do better with the launch of Scrabble in the US and Canada. But even if the North American version attracts five times the interest of its international counterpart, it will barely make a dent in Scrabulous’s audience numbers.

In January, Scrabulous’s creators claimed to be making more than $25,000 a week in advertising revenues. With the launch of a US version of online Scrabble imminent, the door is now open for Scrabble’s owners to go after their fair share of that revenue by pursuing legal action.

Forcing Scrabulous to shut down would no doubt alienate tens of thousands of loyal Scrabulous fans. But with thousands of new users joining Facebook daily, it might make sense for Scrabble’s owners to risk some user backlash now in hopes of a bigger payoff later. Besides, if the game is addictive enough, even the most disgruntled former Scrabulous users may not be able to stay away for too long.

SeeqPod, the music search engine that we wrote about in September, has finally incurred the wrath of the record companies.

The Bay Area start-up is considering its legal position after Warner Music Group filed a suit in a Los Angeles court alleging copyright infringement.

SeeqPod users type in the name of a song or artist and the search engine compiles a list of instances that can be played with the click of a mouse.

SeeqPod told us at the time that they did not host any of the music and therefore felt they were acting legally, which seemed a little hopeful and perhaps naive.

Warner’s complaint, a copy of which has been posted on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site, says that SeeqPod links to sites with illegal copies of copyrighted music and makes this “practically unlimited catalogue of unauthorised sound recordings available for on-demand streaming.”

“SeeqPod directly supplants legitimate contractual arrangements that exist for the authorised digital audio transmission and distribution of copyrighted music.”

While SeeqPod does not allow actual downloads of the music it finds, the major record companies are clearly inclined to clamp down on streaming services that do not have their approval.

In contrast, Warner, EMI, Sony BMG and Universal made a deal with CBS’s Last.FM on Wednesday that permits free streaming of their music.

The four majors earlier gave their backing to streaming from imeem, a social networking site. But that was only after Warner launched litigation last May against imeem similar to that it is now bringing against Seeqpod.

The message to the search-engine start-up therefore seems to be: Sign up or sign off.

While pirates are readying their photocopiers in India and China for the publication of the final Harry Potter book this weekend, a digital camera has already been used as a crude photocopier here in the West to publish the book illegally online.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is available on file-sharing sites and has already been downloaded thousands of times.

This digital version of the book consists of a photo being taken of it two pages at a time. The book - a US edition published by Scholastic - is lying on a carpeted floor and the pirate’s hand can be seen holding the pages open, an empty coke can lies on its side next to it.

With bit-torrent technology, the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it can take place, making the two-file 75-megabyte Harry Potter download possible in a matter of a few minutes.

However, fans would probably prefer to buy the book – the images are sometimes fuzzy and likely to cause eye-strain after a while. For the curious, the download may sate their appetite a little before Saturday’s launch and there are already plot summaries online and lists of the characters who die, if you really can’t wait to find out how the saga ends.