Throw around all the convoluted legal mumbojumbo and semantics you want; a short, simple and factual Steamworks DRM Q&A is sufficiently damning for me to have made up my mind on the issue.


Further to this, being advised of Steam's "offline mode" is an insult to my intelligence. If someone's shining lights into my eyes, "sunglasses mode" is not half so appealing to me as "get that damn light out of my eyes" mode.

/No longer purchasing Skyrim.

I bought The Settlers: Heritage of Kings Gold Edition from a retail store in a "bin" 2-3 years ago. Nowhere on the package did it mention any contractual terms. As such, I only agreed on the onerous agreement to give some of my cash for the copy. Same thing for Oblivion and Oblivion GOTY. After that:

http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=208100

25j §, subsection 1 & 5. I'd acquired a legal copy with no other contractual terms that would limit my use of the game. As such, any DRM or EULAs may as well be non-existent as I can legally bypass them.

So in Finland, we win in retail. Possibly in DD, too. If not then that can change with time.

If the EULA isn't applicable in your country, then you don't have to change anything.

That's not the point.

The point is: I don't even have to agree to one to have the right to use the software.

Now, using online services like Steam or World of Warcraft's servers - that's another matter. But that's also why I'm refusing to use Steam. It imposes unreasonable restrictions on my consumer's rights.

If it's an invalid contract, by your laws, then what's the big deal?

Some people here don't even know their rights. Time to educate.

Oh ho ho! *ZING!*

Oh, wait, no, sorry. Nice try though. GFWL is not worse.



I so wish our laws here worked as clearly as that.

But the intended use of the program is to run with DRM. Because it was shipped with DRM. I fail to see where it says you can bypass DRM and ignore EULAs.

EDIT: Besides, if the EULA says that you can't "make such alterations to the program as are necessary for the use of the program for the intended purpose. This shall also apply to the correction of errors.", which I'm fairly sure the EULA for Oblivion/most games says, then there's nothing that says that contract is without effect, because "(5) Any contractual provision limiting use in accordance with subsections 2?4 shall be without effect." quite clearly only applies to sections 2 - 4.

That's only true for programs which have DRM on their feature list. For example, programs to add DRM to software, music or films.

The intended purpose of the game is for it to be played. Unless you want to label it as something else other than a game.

EDIT:

Read it again. I'd already acquired the copy legally in an onerous agreement that didn't have any contractual provisions limiting my use of the program.

But the intended purpose of the service you have paid for, is for it to be run as it comes to you, complete with DRM. There is nothing that says the game is intended to be played without DRM, and in fact there are often no guarantees the game will even work, and if it buggers your system then the publisher/developer will take no responsibility.

Games are not a service as they're not intangible. A few examples of services: Healthcare, plumbing, car repair, customer service.

I bought the copy without any limiting contractual provisions in the onerous agreement. Unless they put the entire EULA and DRM agreement on the package prior to the purchase, then they won't matter.

The EULA might say that. German law says I can do whatever it takes to make the program work, and no licence can ever forbid me from doing it. Not even if Todd himself would come over with a bunch of strippers and made me sign up such a clause; it would be simply not binding.

I would personally say games are intangible. And depending on where you are and who your lawyer is, it might.



Where does it say that?? Besides, your understanding of "work" may be different from the publishers understanding of work.

Good luck trying that one in front of a judge should someone sue. Implied warranty of merchantability. Product liability. I could go on all day.

I'd be inclined to say that services are, for the lack of better words, also an act of on-going work that ends when the work is finished. Seeing as when I buy a game, I buy a finished work, therefore not a service. I mean, if I buy a painting, is it a service to look at it?

Why hasn't anyone sued before then??




Whilst I'd tend to agree with you, I was under the understanding that games were legally classed as services??

Are books are service? The paper (disc) is just a storage medium, so the contained words (data) could be held under a different set of provisions than what you purchased the book (game) under.

If you want to look up US copyright history, you might find something interesting. Book publishers would literally put EULAs in the opening pages of their books and claim that readers were bound to those terms because they implicitly agreed to them. One of the more popular conditions was that you couldn't resell the book. Any of this sound suspiciously familiar to what's going on today?

Courts knocked that down quite fast, saying you couldn't add terms after the initial sale like that. What we got out of it was the First-Sale Doctrine, which is an important piece of property rights.


Funny, my receipts didn't say I purchased "1 Coaster". Are you saying they gave me something different than what they said I was buying?

Forced Steamworks isn't the answer, I don't know how many times I have to repeat it. I want to own the game and play it with my rules not with a 3rd party whose EULA I will never agree too because it's a bad contract.

Thanks for helping me clarify my point.

Now, what were we talking about? Geez, these threads run fast. Oh, EULAs: don't know what are the rules in your countries, but here in Italy no EULAs are completely legally valid or invalid in themselves, whether they are wrapped inside the box, printed on the back of the box or presented on screen during installation. Whether an EULA is valid or not depends only on the presence of a condition that unbalance the customer rights compared to his obligations. This is the case of http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/, where Valve reserves the right to cancel the Steam account at any time [see point 13 - "term and termination"], which is fine, as they should have a legal way to protect themselves from illegal account usage, but it's also completely wrong because it doesn't simply prevent users to log on to Steam, it prevent users to play properly bought games which also have their own EULAs which users never have to agree to play the game, because they are not asked to. So, basically users are NOT agreeing to the game's EULA but to Valve's only, which unbalance users rights and obligations because of its flawed account system. Valve's EULA could be valid only if Steam would allow users to gain access to their games even without being logged on the authentication servers.

I believe it comes down to gamers being either too young and poor to afford lawyers capable of taking on the Valve/Steam legal team or the gamers are to old and actually have more important things to do. Plus if you do find a lawyer who is ready willing and able to go to court against a video game company they most likely want to make the case for banning a game or set of games.




Not really. The laws that define a good were not written with software in mind, at least not in the US. But games have been treated as goods for years and this is the view of them in court cases that have looked at this issue which sets the legal precedent of games being considered a good rather than a service. Gabe Newell has declared on his own that games are a service and he has the technology to treat them as such, but that doesn't make it so. Steam is a service but the games they sell my still be legally defined as goods.

This circles back to the whole EULA issue. Yes there have been EULAs for games for decades, but they were never really enforceable. When a software publisher takes legal action against an end user they usually skip over the EULA and go straight to the actual laws that the end user violated, the EULA doesn't matter at that point. In the cases where the publisher only has the EULA to present then the case turns to whether or not the EULA is even valid, in most cases the EULA has been struck down. There was a time when the EULA was presented as a weblink the the user had to open to read it but they could still hit the OK/Accept button with out actually ever seeing the EULA and this type of notification was deemed invalid. Now we have the EULAs that you actually have to scroll to the bottom before the OK/Accept button becomes functional, is this a valid delivery system? Only a judge can decide. Now that the technology exists to enforce the EULA without having to go through the court system it's hard to know which EULAs are legally binding and which are not. With Steam the EULA means even less as their setup allows the TOS to supersede the EULA. Steam does not revoke your game license they end your service agreement.

Because the majority of people don't know or don't care. A lot of people don't care about DRM as long as it works, and are passive when it doesn't. A lot of people actually believe that software-is-a-service and don't think they can do anything. On top of that, how easy do you think it is for a person to sue (successfully) a multi-million, if not multi-billion, possibly multi-national corporation? The legal system is not infallible. If they have more money to throw at expensive lawyers, the chance of success goes down drastically.

Additionally, you need to pick your targets. You don't want to attempt it when there's a good chance of you losing because that will just strengthen their position. If you don't know how the legal system works, if you underestimate just how much time and money you have to invest in it (hint: a lot), if they have exceptionally sleezy lawyers that will try to get you on an irrelevant technicality, there is a good chance that you'll lose, and not becuase the other side is "right". Then consider that, even if you're ultimately successful, things like that can drag on for years, and go through appeal after appeal.

Then when you win, you get to turn around and do it all over again because inevitably some company (usually the richer ones) will try to be clever and think they have a way around the ruling.

It's not that easy.

So we're in a situation that the EULA may or may not be legally binding, depending on where you live and how it's written and presented, and larger companies enough money and resources to pretty much make any challenges against the EULA impossible. Which leaves us in a position where some people accept all of the EULA, some accept the bits they agree with and others just ignore it.

We do have the numbers on our side, though. But then again, can we trust the politicians to handle this?

I don't see how you would know, since you've only played FO3.