Idami Raptor
Gallente
E.A.D Alliance
Omega Vector
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Posted - 2011.06.22 04:42:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Soldarius
Haven't read the whole threadnought rage so apologies if this has already been pointed out.
With this change, won't CCP now have legal grounds to sue those who do not comply with the commercial licensing requirement, such as RMT sites?
It would help a lot with claiming trademark violations. You can actually lose a trademark if you don't try to protect it from unauthorized use, which is why you'll see companies running ad campaigns to stop people using it in a generic way ('Xerox' and 'Band-aid' being two well known examples). They don't want to lose their trademark because it's become the common term for whatever.
This whole thing is kinda skeezy, still. The way I read it, you can only get a noncommercial license if you lose money on the site (you can't even collect money just to pay for the costs of running it the way it's written up, which would doom anything of any size to death and basically require all developers to go commercial).
And honestly, the legal ground here is pretty shaky. I don't know about all countries, but in the US it's actually legal to use someone else's IP *without* a license under certain circumstances, and the fan sites and apps would mostly fall into them. Meaning that the non-commercial license is a pointless load of red tape, especially if it's required for ANY use of EvE IP.
Unless the basic core idea is drastically altered, this is going to lead to nothing but bad things. It's going to be almost impossible to enforce, there's no way CCP can track down every site using EvE IP, not even if they paid someone specifically to do it, which they'd basically have to (this is what the $99 pays for!). And they would HAVE to go after each and every violator they found, or lose all force behind it.
A better idea would be to make the 'non commercial license' automatic: making people apply for it is a waste of CCP's time and money, and ours as well. Even being free, If I were running a corp website, I'd prefer to take it down rather than deal with licensing of any sort.
End result: a lot of players who are personally angry at CCP for some legalistic nonsense and red tape they feel they shouldn't have to deal with, and they're flat on right. Letting people sell apps and charging them a fee for it is fine. Not letting people provide free services without having to pay for them completely out of pocket isn't. Making every tom, ****, and harry register for a license isn't. And those last two are hard to get to legally as well: they'd have to put provisions in the EULA to make it enforceable.
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