A lot of explaining certainly needs to be done by Sony on the modding of the LittleBigPlanet levels. Senior Community Manager does exactly that over at the LittleBigWorkshop.

He reiterated the given explanation earlier that those levels moderated contained either obscenities or copyrighted materials. He also revealed that so far, less than 200 levels have been moderated, roughly translating to about less than 0.5% of all the levels published.

Simply put, the modding is not as rampant as other people would have been made to believe. Furthermore,

No level is moderated unless it has been reported using the Good Grief tool, at which point, it will only be blocked from online play if it is in violation of the EULA. Secondly, even if a level is moderated you will still be able to access it offline on your moon, and make changes if you know where the problem was, before republishing.

If you still don't quite get how this copyright issue modding comes about, he throws in an analogy for good measure to make the scenario more picture perfect:

Oasis is the name both of a band and of a soft drink (at least in Europe), however any level using the title "Oasis" would be absolutely fine right now unless it included music by Oasis the band, or the likeness of the drinks bottle.

And finally, he advised users not to sweat it out so much. You will be receiving a message informing you if and when your level has been moderated. If not, then that simply means it hasn't been touched. If you want to check if any of your levels have been modded, just search for your PSN ID to find all the levels you've published thus far.

In closing, he said,

There is work to be done on improving the communication of why levels have been moderated, and this is underway, however this is not as widespread as you may have been led to believe, and it does not affect levels you have locally.

It does suck to have our creativity stifled, especially after we were promised that we will have the freedom to create our own levels. But of course, with this freedom comes great responsibility. Cliché, we know, but it's fact.

We're hoping this kink will be sorted out soon. From the looks of it, a lot of users are getting turned off by this development. Then again, I guess this should just compel us to think even more out of the box to create a truly original level on LBP.

---

Related LittleBigPlanet Articles:

• LittleBigPlanet: levels being deleted over copyright issues
• Alex Evans: Ideal scenario is to stay creatively happy in LBP world