[MUD-Dev] Re: Black Snow Revisited

[Norman Short]

I just came across this thread, since I've been too busy to read
everything the list has been sending lately. But frankly I'm amazed.
I think you game company people have your head in the clouds
ignoring reality.  For some reason you guys think you can put
anything you want into a EULA and it automatically gives you those
rights.  If the law in fact doesn't give you those rights it's just
meaningless words.

You've also put yourselves as game company employees on the same
level as the justice system.  You want to measure intent?  That is a
job for the courts, and I suppose you could make a separate court
case on every single transaction so you could try to discover intent
of the parties on each and every sale.  Good luck.

Ebay succumbed to pressure and accepted your evaluation of your own
rights, but those rights aren't clear under law.  You haven't tested
them.

Intuitively these policies sound downright anti-American, and anti
business.  Not sure the government is going to be overly
sympathetic.

You absolutely don't have the right to tell players who they can
talk to and what they can do when they are not connected to the
service.  Implying you can just gives you extra-legal powers that
you can claim but don't have.  Yes, if you don't want someone you
can cancel their account.  That seems to be the extent of your
powers.

I could go into all the legal niceties, but lets just live in the
real world for a bit, shall we?  The internet is unpoliceable.  You
have zero ability to stop people from contacting each other and
trading items either for cash or other items, and making a
transaction in game which anyone else can make.  Again, you fall
back on intent, but have no legal rights to determine such.  I
suggest you start 1000 court proceedings immediately instead.

I don't buy the "they'd have stayed longer if you didn't sell them
an item" line.  Just as likely, and again would need to be
determined in court, they would have quit earlier because they
despaired of spending the time to acquire it.  You're like the
studio industry when the VCR came about; trying to close legal
loopholes and stop people from doing what they want and claiming the
practice costs you money.  In fact the studios, despite themselves,
found the Holy Grail of income from the home video market.  Matt
Mihaly has already shown you the Grail in that you can make more
money by selling the items yourself instead of just letting players
fill the vacuum in providing a service they want and you wont
provide.  Bad business on your part.

In the end, even if you guys were 100% right about your legal rights
and your ability to tell people what they can do 24/7 outside your
service, you're still losers.  Plug a hole here, a dozen spout up
somewhere else.  You're just trying to prevent players from doing
something they can easily do and want to do.  Lets not forget you've
never tried to assert these rights in court.  My guess is you're
afraid to; afraid that the results might give players a right or two
you'd like to deny them.

The longer I see you guys trying to artificially stunt the players,
try to make their advancement a slow creep in search of dollars, the
less interested I get in playing these games.  And no, I've never
been a seller or buyer of the online stuff.  I just think you folks
are way too full of yourselves.

Norman Short



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