[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Eli Stevens]

From: "Caliban Tiresias Darklock" <caliban at darklock.com>
> From: <amanda at alfar.com>

>> Mythic sells you a ticket to their amusement park.  One of the
>> conditions of that sale is that you abide by the posted
>> regulations of that park, and that they may remove you from the
>> park at any time if they do not like your behavior.  This is
>> completely legal.

> But they *cannot* come out of the park and disrupt my personal
> life, like cancelling my auctions on eBay. If the amusement park
> sent people to my house to make sure I was abiding by the rules
> there, it would be harassment.

But they can cancel "your" eBay auction if that auction is for Space
Mountain.  They may have given you the ability to ride Space
Mountain all you want, but that grants you no ownership of the ride.
They may say "Welcome, sir, here is your car," as you enter the
ride, but you still do not own the ride.  If you tried to auction
off the ability to ride Space Mountain all you want to someone else,
and they told you that you were not allowed to do that, they can
kick you out (and it would also be a good thing if they canceled the
auction, since it is highly likely that the winner would never get
what they paid for).  At this point, the analogy starts to break
down, and so I won't take it any further.

It seems to me that Mythic owns all the toys in DAoC.  They hired
the artists, designers and programmers that created the toys, and
those creators did it for Mythic.  They store the information on the
toys, and provide the service where the toys are useful.  At no
point in playing with the toys (or gaining access to new ones) does
Mythic transfer _ownership_ of the toys to the person playing with
them.  Just because you can play with them doesn't mean they are
yours.

For a fee, you can play with Mythic's toys.  If Mythic likes you
(for whatever arbitrary reason), Mythic will let you play with the
totally cool toys (and by totally cool, I mean sweet).

If Mythic wants (for whatever arbitrary reason), they can make you
stop playing with their toys.  In the end, Mythic still owns the
toys.  And they decide who gets to play.  So long as the reason is
not "you are a college age caucasian male," Mythic can deny you for
_any_ reason.  One of the arbitrary reasons is you getting access to
the sweet toys and then charging other people to play with them.
Another might be that you like pasta.  Doesn't matter that it's
stupid, they still _can_.

>From my point of view, Mythic owns the toys, and the rest follows
naturally from that.  If we disagree on the ownership part of the
equation, it seems THAT is what we should be talking about.  And
from what I can tell, we _do_ disagree on that point, which I find
hard to understand.

Please enlighten.  :)

Eli

--
Give a man some mud, and he plays for a day.
Teach a man to mud, and he plays for a lifetime.




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