Presentation
Within the Reddit platform, the /r/Place subreddit hosted, for the second year running, an extraordinary collaborative art experience that mobilized a considerable number of users and viewers: Pixel War.
For several days, tens of thousands of internet users participated day and night in the creation of an ephemeral artwork followed by hundreds of thousands of people.
See all the creations
This event provides an opportunity to revisit the legal issues associated with this unique experience.
Indeed, the creation of a collective artwork, orchestrated in particular by communities of influencers from different nationalities, raises numerous questions regarding digital law and intellectual property.
R/Place: An Ephemeral and Collaborative Online Artwork
Conceived as a social experiment by the developer of the game Wordle, Place is a collaborative project that emerged in 2017, allowing any registered internet user to place a single pixel on a virtual canvas every 5 to 20 minutes using a color palette.
After an initial period characterized by random pixel placement, the project gradually saw the coordination of groups of internet users, enabling the creation of flags, historical figures, works of art, and a variety of audiovisual, video game, and cultural references.
By the end of the experiment on April 3, 2017, the canvas had been created by more than one million users, legally producing a collaborative work potentially eligible for copyright protection.
Governed by Article L113-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code, a collaborative work is a work created by several people based on a shared project. A unique feature of intellectual property law is that a collaborative work is the joint property of all co-authors, who must exercise their rights by mutual agreement for its exploitation.
However, the project suffers from a particular characteristic that violates copyright law: the ability for an internet user to replace a pixel already placed.
Such a capacity to continuously destroy all or part of the work would infringe upon the authors’ moral rights, particularly the right to respect for the work.
Indeed, the author enjoys the right to respect for their work, protecting them against any form of distortion through addition, removal, mutilation, or alteration. French court decisions frequently recognize the protection of authors in cases where their work has been altered by third parties:
Cutting a work into several panels: Cass. 1st Civ. July 6, 1965,
Defacing a sculpture in a hospital: TGI Paris, March 13, 2015, No. 13/07193
It is precisely this ability for internet users to modify the canvas at any time that brought a competitive dimension to its second edition in April 2022.
Pixel War: a war of influencers and streamers
Five years later, the second edition was marked by a new level of competition.
Rebranded as the “Pixel War,” the project saw particularly strong engagement from several online communities, coordinated via the Twitch and Discord platforms by influencers of all nationalities. Among the French streamers most involved were Kameto, Antoine Daniel, Squeezie, Domingo, Etoiles, Zerator, and Locklear.
Pitting groups of streamers, notably French, Spanish, and American, against each other, the creations on the virtual web transformed into a turf war, with the creation and reconstruction of existing works constantly evolving. On social media, a military jargon emerged, referring to annexations, truces, alliances, offensives, strategies, and so on, surprisingly mobilizing internet users.
French communities, in particular, created numerous works, including reproductions of the French flag, Zinedine Zidane, Thomas Pesquet, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Pyramid, Daft Punk, Jinx from the animated series Arcane (based on the game League of Legends), the mouse from the animated film “Ratatouille,” the Arte television channel, the Ariane rocket, and a croissant.
R/Place 2022 was a massively entertaining event, presented and leveraged by various YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and influencers in general.
Whether professional or amateur, these individuals, who share content on social media, are likely to reach particularly large online communities.
The Pixel War thus represents several hundred cumulative hours of audiovisual content broadcast live or streamed on different platforms, which can represent significant revenue for influencers.
Pixel War: Software Repurposed as a Video Game?
The French success of this project has raised criticism and questions regarding the official rules governing the experience, particularly the use of computer scripts to facilitate certain creations.
The playful and competitive nature of this second experiment, along with its attempt to regulate the rules of use, could lead to R/Place being reclassified not as a work of art, but perhaps as a competitive video game—just a few pixels away from being classified as an esports title.
Such a classification would then raise the question of ownership of creations within a video game. Widely debated for many years, these issues were brought to the forefront by the famous Dota case, involving a map created by players within a map editor for Warcraft III, for which the publisher Blizzard was unable to obtain exclusive rights.
Built into the very development of video games, publishers are increasingly strictly regulating the use and exploitation of player-generated content within their titles.
Pixel War: Terms and Conditions and Intellectual Property
It is therefore common to find in the Terms of Service (EULA) a number of provisions providing for general, even discretionary, control over content generated by the player community. These provisions prohibit, for example, the use of pre-existing copyrighted content, the integration of illegal, inappropriate, or offensive elements, etc.
Recently, clauses have also appeared that automatically and immediately transfer all rights associated with a creation made by players, or failing that, grant a license to exploit the content under the broadest possible conditions.
The question remains: to whom would the video game “Pixel War” belong?
