[MUD-Dev] Picketing in Sims Online

[John Robert Arras]

Derek Licciardi <kressilac at insightBB.com> wrote:
> From: Koster, Raph

>> When EA incorporated McDonald's kiosks in The Sims Online, they
>> opened the doors to a massively-multiplayer adbusting
>> campaign. Tony Walsh WANTS YOU to join the fight.

> The liability of this is interesting.  Could it exist?  I don't
> think the law addresses it but since I am not a lawyer...  Could
> this be yet another case where the law wants to hold the hosting
> provider responsible for what happens on its network?  The whole
> idea of picketing sounds like yet another messy situation where
> the government laws do not understand how to cope with it.  What
> about international laws?

I'm not a lawyer either, but this can only be bad. I predict that
the following will happen:

  1. People will mock the advertisers and EA will tell them to stop.
  They will suspend/delete accounts for people who break this
  rule. EA will have to enforce this because they could get slapped
  down with DMCA/trademark violations just as a web-board owner can
  get slapped down if people mock corporations on those
  boards. McDintel also probably has clauses in the contract where
  EA gets money that forces EA to do this.

  2. The companies that are advertising probably own partial
  copyright over the game objects related to their businesses, and
  they certainly own the trademarks used in the game. The
  advertisers will use digital copyright law and trademark law to
  take real legal action against the unamerican terrorists who will
  disrupt the natural God-given flow of commerce within the game.

I expect them to use trademark law against anyone who uses the
McDintel name in vain, and copyright law against anyone who uses any
of the playing pieces in an "inappropriate" ways.  They will stop
the inapproprate behavior by saying that they own copyright over the
items and they have only granted a license to use those objects in
"nice" ways. So, if you use them inappropriately, then you're
creating derivative works without permission and performing them
publicly, which means you've violated copyright law.

Regardless of whether the players have the "right" to do these
things, they can still get sued because McDintel has more money than
the individual players do.

I hope this does happen and people wake up and cancel their accounts
the first time someone gets real legal action taken against them.
And, I hope that after this first incident, people will not play
games that have in-game advertising after they see what can happen.

Also, I figured out years ago that games would have advertising in
them like this. I am sure most people here did. What I wish is that
I had patented the idea of having in-game objects related to real
corporations so that if you work at or buy from Corp in the game,
you get real-world credit toward Corp products, or you get in-game
credit for buying real-world Corp products. Or you can have Corps
that are affiliates and pool the credits across Corps.  At least I
could have stopped this evil idea from happening when people get
around to implementing it.

John


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