[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Fred Clift]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> From: "Marian Griffith" <gryphon at iaehv.nl> 

> You can't forbid people to do
> things that you can't control.

Uh, since this seems to be the crux of your argument, how about
giving some details on your reasonsing here.  This statement is not
self-evident, and appears, on it's surface, to be wrong, at least to
me.

Are you really saying that just because I personally can't control
wether a customer complies or not that I can't enter a legal
agreement with someone impossible-to-control requirement?

Back to the right-handed game requirement example -- in my game
"Right World", say that I dont allow left-handed people to play.  I
make them print out an agreement, sign it and fax it back to me,
along with credi-card info so I can bill them for access to my
world.  Would I have a right to hire a private investigator to go
and watch the person and see if he is right or left handed or
ambidexterous?  I dont know.

However, what if I find in public record of some court case a client
making a statment under oath that she is left handed?  It is a
public record.  Is it immoral or illegal to then, once I see this
information cancel her account?  Would it be illegal for me to have
an employee in each court-house in the country who notes any
reference to handedness and then tries to correlate that with my
playerbase?  It seems that using publicly available information
(like court records, or say, ebay auction listings) as a means of
finding people who are violating their contract with me to be
perfectly ok.

(As an aside I found out a few months ago that all county tax
records for the county I live in are available online - want to see
what my neighbor just sold his house for?)

I dont have a right to see every aspect of my customer's life, but I
do have a right to see publicly available information and correlate
that to license-compliance.

Just because the other 3 people in Right World who are secretly
left-handed are more careful than the one in the previous example
doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to enforce my contract with
the one I know about.

Fred

--
Fred Clift - fred at clift.org -- Remember: If brute
force doesn't work, you're just not using enough.

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