According to kotaku, a moderator at Electronic Arts has declared that when users are banned from the EA forums, they will also be locked out of (presumably the online component of) their purchased video games.
This is another great example of software companies taking advantage of being able to license their games rather than transferring ownership. Coincidentally, my law review article argues that license agreements in certain videogames should be considered unconscionable.
This is a topic that really drives me insane. I’m not sure why software companies think that they have some special right to limit the user in any way they want, even if it’s completely unrelated to the good (as here).
In copyrights yesterday, our professor pointed out that there are a few cases where courts have held that software licenses are akin to ownership insofar as copyright is concerned. I’ll have to check that out for my comment.
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(Note: I’m an activist but not a true law-geek as I have no legal training save wikipedia. Ignore my ideas/comments if they are out of line.)
Generally, game lisences seem to me to be designed for one purpose, removing the rights of the gamer in favor of the rights of the corperation releasing it.
Most noticibly, in the wake of the whole “hot coffee” fiasco, new lisences (example: Mercenaries 2) now have language against “Reverse engeneering” the product. This means in addition to the traditional meaning of using such language in a lisence (so that a party could not recreate the product for profit) players can’t make user-created content unless the company explicitly lisences an editor. This seems extreme at first but consider that there is a thriving community of PC game hackers who have for years modified games without editors using what would be termed as “Reverse engeneering”.
I’d like to point out that some games such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines were released in a practically unplayable state and lost technical support from their developers HOWEVER fan-made patches have allowed the product to turn an unexpected profit, it seems that this precedence as well as expanded usability of the product for zero budget and zero involvement (legally, technically or otherwise) of the releasing corperation would encourage leaving this language out of the lisence especially considering that the propagator of the entire anti-gaming crusade (A now disbarred attorney named Jack Thompson) has now been disbarred after repeated uses of such tactics unbecoming of a lawyer such as intimidation, harassment, false accusation, lieing, and refusal to follow through on a bet(see footnote).
All in all, I think that lisences should be phased out and a transfer of ownership be the new norm for games.
Footnote: All of these tactics were used during his “A modest video game proposal” and subsequent dealings with Penny Arcade.
@Ari, I think that you are 1,000,000% right about everything you just said. Interestingly enough, reverse engineering is acceptable in copyright law generally (if certain requirements are met) so the software companies throw those kinds of the restrictions into EULAs and they’re generally binding.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with law review journals, but I’m on the Penn State Law Review, and I have a semi-decent shot of getting an article published that is entirely based on arguing that these kinds of licensing agreements shouldn’t be enforceable. I’ll make sure to post a link on the blog once it’s finished — you may be interested.
Cheers.
@Ari, Oh and by the way, I write for http://www.gameslaw.net who Jack Thompson actually named in one of his court motions. We have quite a few recent posts about him.