Disclaimer

The LBP Union is a fan project and has no relationship with LittleBigPlanet, Sumo Digital, or Sony Computer Entertainment. LBP Union and Project Lighthouse are not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment or their subsidiaries. Project Lighthouse is a clean room reverse engineering project of now defunct PlayStation 3 and Vita LittleBigPlanet online features. No proprietary code is distributed. Under no circumstances will we endorse or support piracy. You must have your own copy of the game in order to use the custom features once they become available. When using these features, you release Sony Interactive Entertainment (Sony) as well as any employees or agents of Sony, from any and all liability, corporate, or personal loss caused to you or others by the use of Lighthouse custom servers for LittleBigPlanet.

On our website you may find links to Amazon products. At no extra cost to you, buying products through these links will compensate our site with a small commission which goes directly into covering costs for the site’s operation and never for profit.

What the Heck Does That Mean?

Legal jargon can be a real twist in my popit cursor! Let’s break it down a little bit in a way that’s a bit easier to understand.

We’re LBP Union, not Sony. We have nothing to do with Sony except that we both love LittleBigPlanet. Because we love LittleBigPlanet so much, we have to respect Sony’s intellectual property. How do we do that?

  • LBP Union has a unique style and design philosophy to set us apart from official LittleBigPlanet branding.
  • We will never monetize LittleBigPlanet-related projects like custom game servers.
  • We always cite our sources to make sure that owners of information are properly credited. We never copy or use anything from others without permission.
  • LBP Union has always and will continue to discourage and stand against piracy.

LBP Union Looks Different

You may have noticed we look a bit different than you might expect from a LittleBigPlanet fan website. That’s due to a combination of LBP Union’s roots, as well as our desire to look different out of respect for the LittleBigPlanet brand. We hope you like it!

How We Pay the Bills

Since we don’t monetize stuff like Project Lighthouse or Beacon LittleBigPlanet custom game servers, we have to do other stuff to keep the lights on. We’ll never monetize either of those two things because it could come into violation of Sony’s intellectual property rights.

More importantly though, we believe that everyone should be able to enjoy custom servers for those games so long as they own a legal copy. That’s why community developers created UnionPatcher, a tool that allows one to modify their own copy of the game to connect to a custom server rather than downloading files that are already patched.

So how do we keep the lights on? There are two ways:

  1. Out of pocket. LBP Union leaders pay for our services out of pocket.
  2. Affiliate commissions: For some of our blog posts, we use Amazon affiliate links. At no extra cost to you, buying products through these links will compensate our site with a small commission which goes directly into covering costs for the site’s operation and never for profit.

We only want to provide affiliate links on posts that are directly relevant to the user, and never on our Project Lighthouse or Beacon custom server pages. We believe that monetizing either of these would come into conflict with Sony’s intellectual property rights.

As of this moment, we aren’t running ads across the site. We find ads annoying, and we want users to enjoy their experience on the site without having to use an adblocker.

Attribution and Licensing

LBP Union is not licensed to distribute code made by Sony. As a result, we’ve ensured that Project Lighthouse and our other development projects contain no proprietary code from Sony. All of the code is original. Every time we reference information or use resources across our platforms, we cite the source as best as we can. If you notice that we’ve used something without permission or without citation, please contact us to let us know so we can correct the problem.

Standing Against Piracy

Out of respect for the law and Sony’s intellectual property rights, we actively discourage piracy on all our platforms. We quickly moderate our Discord server and Beacon gameserver to ensure that no one endorses or recommends pirated content.