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[Elsebeth Rhiannon]

What do people think of this?

Roughly: "You are Jesmine Kyriel?"

Oh! You meant about the logs!  

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.

[Mizhara]

Eh, he's been given a mail on the matter. If he didn't want it, he could have gone 'nope'.

[Syylara/Yaansu]

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).

[Mizhara]

Legally? You log into Eve, knowing that the other party is most likely logging all channels you're in. That's opting in.

[Syylara/Yaansu]

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?

[Aria Jenneth]

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.

[Elsebeth Rhiannon]

Regardless of the law, I think it is not polite to publish logs between yourself and someone else without their explicit consent.

[Aria Jenneth]

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?

[Elsebeth Rhiannon]

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.

[Syylara/Yaansu]

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.

[Aria Jenneth]

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.]

[Senn Typhos]

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.

[Julianus Soter]

"Don't say dumb shit"?

I think that could solve many of humanity's problems, in character and out of character

[Syylara/Yaansu]

Yeah, I guess I was forgetting that because a corporation is involved, everyone can basically just bend over.

[Aria Jenneth]

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.]