Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => General Non-RP EVE Discussion => Topic started by: Elsebeth Rhiannon on 08 Jan 2011, 11:06
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What do people think of this?
Roughly: "You are Jesmine Kyriel?"
Oh! You meant about the logs! :lol:
I'd say do not post logs between someone and you without their explicit consent or where you really need to clear your name or something such, which I don't think you do here.
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Eh, he's been given a mail on the matter. If he didn't want it, he could have gone 'nope'.
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Eh, he's been given a mail on the matter. If he didn't want it, he could have gone 'nope'.
Legally, it doesn't work that way.
It is technically against the law to record or monitor conversations and share them with others unless you have permission from contributing parties. It is "opt in" not "opt out". This is why communications and surveillance in law enforcement requires affidavits to be filed and a judge's ruling to supersede the privacy rights of those to be monitored (in U.S. law, anyways).
If it were a conversation that took place in a "public" channel with others around, that would be one thing, but private chats and mails are "privileged" communications (I know there's no legal precedent for online games and such, but I think that two-party communications should be respected).
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Legally? You log into Eve, knowing that the other party is most likely logging all channels you're in. That's opting in.
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Legally? You log into Eve, knowing that the other party is most likely logging all channels you're in. That's opting in.
Just because other parties are "most likely" doing something doesn't mean they should be or have a right to. Argumentum ad Populum. The EULA can only authorize CCP to monitor and record, not other players. The law provides you recourse for damages. However, I will agree that it doesn't mean you shouldn't obey the first rule of life: "cover you own ass!" :9.
Ultimately, I just don't see any purpose that would come of revealing a private chat, we've already seen some of them, most everyone who cares at all has basically formed their opinion at this point. What more will result from this than more leering and jeering at someone's expense?
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Syylara: are you sure about this?
I did a couple minutes' research; it looks like the main legal issue with republishing Email is copyright violation, and even that is a gray area, remaining undecided in American courts. What's more, it also appears that we gave CCP a perpetual, exclusive license to everything we send over Evemail, courtesy of EULA section 11(b, c). If anyone can sue for copyright violation, it's likely CCP-- and CCP can likely invoke its EULA-protected right to assign its rights (give the players the right to republish) in order to protect its players.
From the looks of things, it would be a novel claim (the courts haven't really dealt with this), the amount in dispute would be tiny, it probably wouldn't be a wiretap case (Email leaves a copy by its nature, so there's no expectation that it won't be recorded by its recipient), the judge would look very closely at common practice, and the overall result is highly in question....
Much potentially EXTREMELY disruptive ado about what would likely be nominal damages ($1). It's likely that a judge would look for the means to get rid of the case. Choosing to enforce the EULA would make that easy.
Mind you, republishing Email seems to be considered, at best, bad netiquette.
[Lawyer's disclaimer: I spent all of ten minutes on this and it is not my area of specialization; the content is not meant to constitute legal advice, and should not be relied upon in any way that might put you in line for a lawsuit.]
Edit - Solid discussion of legal issues in republishing Email:
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/10/02/republishing-email-the-great-debate/
Please note that CCP's license to intellectual property we use its tools to communicate likely renders the whole issue moot.
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Regardless of the law, I think it is not polite to publish logs between yourself and someone else without their explicit consent. :)
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Yep-- bad netiquette. Though it happens around here often enough (it's common practice for pirates to share particularly choice hatemail, for instance) that we might be considered to have different expectations when it comes to manners.
Maybe Eve's players are frequently the rough-and-tumble of the Internet?
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Starting to drift off-topic, but no, I do not think that at least in my own case people being morons around me justifies me being a moron too.
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The EULA gives CCP permissions, not other players. I readily admit that net/online game law in this area is a largely unexplored area. I also readily admit that there's not a great deal of "damage" to be claimed in this particular instance, it is the basic issue of decency and privacy that are my concerns. In that regard, I can only reach for analogous existing case law and precedents. If you record a conversation, you must give notice of such. If you release a record of a conversation considered "privileged" (the ins and outs here get fairly exhaustive) without the permission of participants, this is generally considered a breach of privacy. From here, I'm basically opining that mails, private chats, and conversations held in an agreed upon space (effort made to create an atmosphere of discretion and privacy) should be respected.
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The EULA gives CCP permissions, not other players.
It doesn't look like that matters, Syylara. EULA section 11(b) covers, seemingly, what happens in-game:
You hereby irrevocably and without additional consideration beyond the rights granted to you herein, assign to CCP any and all right, title and interest you have, including copyrights, in or to any and all information you exchange, transmit or upload to the System or while playing the Game, including without limitation all files, data and information comprising or manifesting corporations, groups, titles, characters and other attributes of your Account, together with all objects and items acquired or developed by, or delivered by or to characters, in your Account.
In other words, whatever you make of your account belongs to CCP. You probably can't sue on it because you no longer have any stake in it. That likely includes bios, corp descriptions, and Evemail. If (b) fails to cover any one of these, there's (c)....
You hereby grant CCP an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, assignable, royalty-free license, fully sublicensable through multiple tiers, to exercise all intellectual property and other rights, in and to all or any part of your User Content, in any medium now known or hereafter developed.
User Content is defined as basically anything communicated by Users through the System. EULA s. 11(c), paragraph 1.
Note the front-loaded "exclusive": there's a good likelihood that the "exclusivity" erases your own rights. CCP gets ALL rights to your work; you are left with none. In effect, the content is owned by CCP. CCP exclusively.
Mind you, the "perpetual" bit is generally against the nature of a "license" (inherently revocable), and might or might not be enforceable; I'd have to look into that.
Basically?
By the EULA, which is a "shrink wrap" contract considered valid in the United States probably primarily for the sake of efficiency, CCP owns whatever you use its system to build or send. That almost certainly includes Evemail.
Because it doesn't need its players suing each other over publication of private comms (Crime and Punishment would be a massive ball of lawsuits waiting to happen), my guess is that CCP would use its exclusive ownership of that material to deny the plaintiff standing to sue: one who does not own rights in a piece of property cannot generally sue to defend those rights.
That's in the United States. Icelandic law (which is the "choice of law" in the EULA) might look on it differently; how differently, I'd need to research and find out, and frankly neither you nor Milo is paying me for that kind of grief.
Courtesy is one thing. The law is another. The former usually demands more than the latter.
If I wrote it, this would be CCP arming itself, not only against players (in case someone wants to make a movie about their character), but also to crush lawsuits based on game-related matters between players. Allowing such suits would be colossally bad for business, and CCP didn't hire lawyers to fine-tune that EULA (as they inevitably did) for nothing.
[Lawyer's disclaimer: again, this is NOT intended as legal advice; this is an internet debate I'm engaged in, and however sure I am of my position I'm not prepared to bet my career on it. Rely on this analysis at your own risk.]
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I got a headache reading all that. ._.'
But it does sound to me like evemail is included in the "we own everything everywhere forever" style wording of the contract, which doesn't surprise me, because it would cause way more problems to deny access to evemail contents than to deny it and give players reason to basically sue one another over copypasta'd mail and logs and such.
So, if there wasn't enough evidence to eliminate sympathy for the guy, he also has no legal grounds.
So again, cannon, cannonball, cannonball wounds, all that stuff.
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"Don't say dumb shit"?
I think that could solve many of humanity's problems, in character and out of character :D
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Yeah, I guess I was forgetting that because a corporation is involved, everyone can basically just bend over.
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Bend over?
Eh-- sort of.
CCP is basically saying, "This is our play-dough. You're all welcome to come over and have fun making whatever you like with our play-dough, but no matter what you make of it, it's still our play-dough, and we get to keep whatever you make out of it. So don't worry about who owns what or that you're going to get sued; come and have fun!"
It creates a sort of non-litigation zone where there's neither a way nor a reason to sue over creative rights or game-related actions. People mostly get "bent over" trying to make money off something made of CCP's play-dough (and that's easily recast as people trying to steal play-dough-- that is, bend CCP over).
There are far worse examples of corporate evil (if this even qualifies), Syylara. Ask me about mandatory arbitration clauses some time. You'll probably find one of those in your credit card agreement; CCP, to its credit, seems not to have included one.
[Lawyer's (more paranoid than usual, but you never know) disclaimer: just my present opinion, not legal advice, if that wasn't obvious, yadda yadda.]
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Bend over?
Eh-- sort of.
CCP is basically saying, "This is our play-dough. You're all welcome to come over and have fun making whatever you like with our play-dough, but no matter what you make of it, it's still our play-dough, and we get to keep whatever you make out of it. So don't worry about who owns what or that you're going to get sued; come and have fun!"
It creates a sort of non-litigation zone where there's neither a way nor a reason to sue over creative rights or game-related actions. People mostly get "bent over" trying to make money off something made of CCP's play-dough (and that's easily recast as people trying to steal play-dough-- that is, bend CCP over).
There are far worse examples of corporate evil (if this even qualifies), Syylara. Ask me about mandatory arbitration clauses some time. You'll probably find one of those in your credit card agreement; CCP, to its credit, seems not to have included one.
[Lawyer's (more paranoid than usual, but you never know) disclaimer: just my present opinion, not legal advice, if that wasn't obvious, yadda yadda.]
I consider having to surrender so much just to play a video game any more getting bent over, but that's taking us even further off the point :9. There are also downsides to the "litigation free zone", namely that it creates an atmosphere where people can act like douches to each other because they know nothing will come of it.
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[mod]Split this topic from http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=1561.0[/mod]
Carry on, interesting discussion. :)
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You hereby grant CCP an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, assignable, royalty-free license, fully sublicensable through multiple tiers, to exercise all intellectual property and other rights, in and to all or any part of your User Content, in any medium now known or hereafter developed.
So, I have not granted them rights to exercise intellectual property and other rights over my characters or User Content... in space!
I consider having to surrender so much just to play a video game any more getting bent over, ... There are also downsides to the "litigation free zone", namely that it creates an atmosphere where people can act like douches to each other because they know nothing will come of it.
If all you are interested in is creating a story about someone in a sci-fi setting and retain the creative rights, you do not need to play Eve.
From an IP standpoint, I do not own Dex Nederland or Lai Dai Infinity Systems in any form. Even the website built for LDIS could arguably be CCP's property - the site is based on their IP.
In the case of In-Game material and action; they literally own everything. The servers holding the 1s and 0s containing the very existence of our characters are owned by CCP.
And here is the real-life non-game reason that is important - lose of the data due to unforeseen circumstances (natural or otherwise). The company is protecting itself from having a horde of angry customers coming and suing them should the servers (CCP's physical property) be lost.
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I consider having to surrender so much just to play a video game any more getting bent over ...
I assure you, the alternative is worse.
Imagine if, say, Stitcher had actual, honest-to-goodness rights to his character. Imagine that his wealth, position, and reputation resulted in the character having a substantial dollar value. Imagine, then, that I (in character as Aria) say something nasty and untrue about Stitcher, which goes viral, substantially reducing that dollar value.
Stitcher's player, under the laws of my home state, could very likely sue me for libel-- knowingly making untrue defamatory statements that do in fact defame him.
That's just one example. "It's just a game" is an argument with some teeth, admittedly, but it stops looking like "just" a game when you start to bring substantial dollar amounts into play.
And then there's the pirates. Ouch....
Can you imagine what could happen to poor Istvaan? We'd be talking criminal charges-- taking another's property by deception, etc. He's most clearly protected, as are pirates, by the fact that nothing, in the legal sense, is changing hands.
... but that's taking us even further off the point :9.
Not anymore! :D
There are also downsides to the "litigation free zone", namely that it creates an atmosphere where people can act like douches to each other because they know nothing will come of it.
That's Eve's nature: it's a cutthroat, vicious game. You gained access to its protections when you signed the EULA-- as did we.
One man's "douch" -dom is another's (admittedly vicious, but that's Eve) fair play. I don't care to see the sandbox turn pure and powdery under the force of common law; I'd rather have it dark and gritty under the EULA. I'd rather save the nice-ness for real life.
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Thanks for being a lawyer, fair Aria
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I can't believe we've gotten this far without a 'What do you call 500 lawyers on the bottom of the sea?' joke.
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Syylara, I speak with significant personal experience here when I say that I do not believe that the ECPA or CFAA (US laws to which you refer) reflect on this situation. However, that's not to say that publishing the communications would be a good idea for other reasons. I'd think it's rude, personally, at a bare minimum.
ObDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and I'm definitely not your lawyer. I am, however, a licensed investigator with years of experience in computer crime. And this is definitely not a statement on Backstage policy, either.
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Wait, do CCP have access to all my chat logs? Like, dig it out of a hat?
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Yes.
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I don't even have to mention why I'm personally uncomfortable with that, given the behaviour of one of my characters...
:|
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Eh. Do you think CCP goes trolling through chat logs to find personally embarrassing material?
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Eh. Do you think CCP goes trolling through chat logs to find personally embarrassing material?
What reason do they have not to when both drunk and deranged with power.
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Imagine how I feel :p
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Brings up an alternative thought. Perhaps CCP sought to make my connection to the devs in the whole player/dev interaction thing with his fiancee specifically because of his womanizing...
The same way they provide Soter with leaked intelligence because he's "information" based.
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I think you may be way overanalyzing this, my friend. :)
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Perhaps CCP sought...
Didn't Seri post in an IGS thread asking about her? That's not really CCP seeking anything.
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He sent a mail to Omune, but I was wondering about a degree of exploring that CCP does on Backstage and/or Chatsubo (Dropbear did link a tongue-in-cheek post from Backstage on EVE Fiction about me wanting to die happily regarding getting into PF somehow).
Completely different topic, anyway, that I might bring up elsewhere.
Sidetrack over yo
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A couple of quick responses,
Criminal and civil issues are entirely different and I've mostly meant to keep to the civil suits side of things, poor use of the word "illegal" on my part. I'm in no way trying to say that posting some chat logs constitutes criminal activity described in the CFAA and ECPA. Furthermore, doesn't libel require you to prove not only false/misleading statements, but damages deriving from such?
I actually have no problem with our having zero claim to "virtual assets" but that comes from a general dislike for the idea of tying real dollar values to in-game assets and the implications for taxing and trading that brings with it. So without valuation of assets, we would be left trying to quantify "I was not able to have as much fun after he blew up my ship." I'm very much aware the EVE allows far more flexibility in behavior than a typical MMO, but I also think that the abuses that do spill over into real-world criminal behavior get glossed over sometimes and so the implications (lax rules breed malicious behavior) are often missed. Circumventing security systems, DDoS attacks, and other abuses/violations (outside the game itself) have occurred in the name of "cut-throat fair play", but this discussion would (and has) taken years of study to just scratch the surface of.
However, I do see a fair point about how activities of "uber-spais!" and the turmoil and turbulence they bring to the game (which I'm quite welcome to see) would be hugely suppressed. But then again, laws always have trouble with ambiguity and separating the "spirit" from the "letter". As the saying goes, you can't legislate morality.
Finally, I'm not arguing from one extreme or the other. There is no "the" alternative and if there were, I wouldn't be proposing it. There is a continuum between the extremes with a long gradient of opinions (and furthermore, along multiple axes), mine just falls "elsewhere" not on the "other" side :9.
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Just to throw this out there:
In my state recording any conversation and subsequent use of said recording requires only the permission of ONE party in the conversation. Therefore, I can record any conversation I'm a part of and do whatever I like with it because I am consenting to it.
As has been mentioned, it might be considered unethical, but it is not illegal.
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... doesn't libel require you to prove not only false/misleading statements, but damages deriving from such?
Yep. Loss of dollar value = "damages." That's covered by the "is actually defamed"-- that is, actually suffers damage to value of reputation-- requirement of libel.
If I remember, there have been cases of people whose reputation was SO bad that no amount of libel could actually do further damage, resulting in zero recovery.
I actually have no problem with our having zero claim to "virtual assets" but that comes from a general dislike for the idea of tying real dollar values to in-game assets and the implications for taxing and trading that brings with it.
Yeah, but keeping the value of "virtual assets" at zero would probably require some fast legislating. Otherwise, "things," real or not, have whatever value people agree to assign to them. That is, if you can sell a certain item to any of a large number of people for X amount of money, "X" is probably pretty close to the item's value.
(Edit: Also, in the United States, declaring the value of your intellectual property to be zero might constitute a legislative "taking," meaning that the gov't would have to pay you for your loss.)
So without valuation of assets, we would be left trying to quantify "I was not able to have as much fun after he blew up my ship."
Strictly speaking, we have that anyway-- at least for extreme cases. It's hard to prove and the courts are skeptical, but intentional infliction of emotional distress, a.k.a. "outrage," is a cause of action.
(Mind you, it has to be REALLY extreme; the old standard is that it must be the kind of conduct that causes a listener, upon hearing of it, to exclaim, "Outrageous!")
Circumventing security systems, DDoS attacks, and other abuses/violations (outside the game itself) have occurred in the name of "cut-throat fair play", but this discussion would (and has) taken years of study to just scratch the surface of.
Yes-- and many of those actions are both against the EULA and illegal. They're cutthroat, but not fair play, pretty much by definition.
I'll assume for the moment that you're not saying we should tone down the competitive nature of the game because it motivates people to cheat.
As the saying goes, you can't legislate morality.
A very important thing to remember.
Finally, I'm not arguing from one extreme or the other. There is no "the" alternative and if there were, I wouldn't be proposing it. There is a continuum between the extremes with a long gradient of opinions (and furthermore, along multiple axes), mine just falls "elsewhere" not on the "other" side :9.
Oh, I'm aware that what you're arguing isn't all that extreme, politically. The problem is the practical effects of acting on your objections.
Let's say we got to keep rights to our characters-- our creative work on "the System," but Iceland passes a law saying that virtual objects have no value. Leaving aside the difficulty of legislatively devaluing intellectual property, the EULA's choice of law is Iceland, so-- all good, right?
Well, except that, as you said before, the EULA deals with your rights relative to CCP, not to other players. Now, since Abel (who lives in Oklahoma), Baker (who lives in New York), and Charlie (who lives in England) don't live in Iceland, and are in possession of intellectual property rights that might have considerable value under the laws of anyplace BUT Iceland ...
Let the lawsuits commence!
... However, take a guess what area of law is pretty consistent internationally (mostly for practical reasons, that is, so that commerce can go forward without massive legal battles)?
Yep. Contracts.
CCP probably cannot make you contractually agree that your IP shall have no value, since that is like asking you to agree that the sky where you live will always be gray: you have little direct control. It can, however, ensure that all that value belongs to it, thus disarming any fights over the area.
Is it perfect? No. Is it 100% fair to you, the creator? Maybe not. Is it a workable, effective legal means to achieve what CCP set out to do?
Yeah, pretty much that.
It doesn't take an extremist to object to certain of CCP's terms, but the results of eliminating those terms is, nevertheless, extreme-- and I'm hard-pressed to think of another way they could have done it.
A contract is "do it yourself" law. Literally. CCP crafted an EULA that would establish a legal framework in which Eve would work. It's something I have difficulty faulting them for, especially since I'm hard-pressed to come up with a coherent alternative.
[Lawyer's disclaimer: the contents of this post are meant for casual argumentative and/or educational purposes, and should NOT be taken as legal advice. Rely on them at your own risk!]
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It's bad manners to share EVEMail and chatlogs without permission, but that doesn't necessarily make it illegal. As has been mentioned before, there's no 'opt-out' in EVE. You agree to the EULA to opt-in and go on about your business.
As the disclaimer says "we own your pixellated ass, bwahahahahahahahahaha."
Unless we all went around copyrighting our IC personas and names, there is nothing we can do about others using logs. But only then would it be a libel case as CCP owns everything ingame.
If it were possible to sue over what's been said/done ingame, I'd be bankrupt and in jail because of the people I've given verbal and pixellated beatings to. Not to mention stolen assets and embezzled funds. Oh, and scam alts.
[Mandatory disclaimer[?]:I'm not a lawyer, just a bitch.]