Thus far, Sony’s approach to moderation has been opaque – both after the fact and in properly communicating to users the legality of certain kinds of content from the outset. The misplaced outrage at the removal of copyrighted content underscores the process of education which is needed and, while LBP’s end-user licence agreement is clear about the dangers of copyright infringement, the smallprint has done little to affect an understanding of why this should be so.

“There’s a slight tendency among internet users to think that because they can do something they should be allowed to do it,” says Tom Lingard, a specialist in intellectual property at corporate law firm Stevens & Bolton LLP. “It’s so easy to copy and paste bits of other people’s trademarks or copyrighted material. People assume that if something’s out there in the public domain then it’s fine to reproduce it but, from a legal point of view, that’s not the case. Ultimately it’s a question of whether the copyright owners get upset about it and try to prevent it happening or accept it as further publicity for their products and services.”

Van Tilburgh’s experience corroborates this, as do the internet databases of PC mods and levels for nearly any game you can think of. “When you give people the opportunity to be creative, they are going to use the things they know and love,” he says. “We saw a lot of movie makers who based their films on existing films, TV series or famous people they like – you name it and there’s been at least one movie based on it that was uploaded to The Movies Online. Everybody seems to be going on and on about user-created content being the next big thing, while in actual fact it’s always been around, without giving the actual process of moderation any thought at all.”

Though content creators have found themselves butting up against copyright law in the past, there has been an important shift. With websites like The Movies Online and games like LittleBigPlanet offering enclosed platforms on which to create and share content, it is now the developers of these games who are at risk of legal action for the breaches of copyright made by their users.

The exemplar for this comes from outside the videogame industry, however: the legal feud between media conglomerate Viacom and YouTube. Although the decision to upload illegal content to YouTube lies with the individual users, Viacom’s complaint is that such huge numbers of its programmes have been purloined that the company is suffering a significant revenue hit from its legitimate means of distribution while YouTube profits from the advertising revenue.

Prior to the filing of the lawsuit in March 2007, Viacom had served over 100,000 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to the Google-owned video-sharing site (although a tiny fraction of these were found to be erroneous). “It’s hard to put a pecuniary value on it,” says Lingard. “The incremental benefit to YouTube’s advertising revenue of a particular episode of Frasier on the site is almost incalculably small, I’m sure, but the cumulative effect of making the site and services – or, in Sony’s case, a game – attractive to people by putting in familiar trademarks or copyrighted material can be very significant.”