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Bioware Release Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset
Zed Pobre writes "Careful review of the EULA of the Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset reveals the following clause:
Section 4(b):
"By distributing or permitting the distribution of any of your Modules, you hereby grant back to INFOGRAMES and BIOWARE an irrevocable royalty-free right to use and distribute them by any means. Infogrames or BIOWARE may at any time and in its sole discretion revoke your right to make your Modules publicly available."
This is more or less the same as if a company producing a compiler wrote into the EULA that by distributing any program compiled with that compiler, the company would permanently get the rights to do whatever they wanted with that program, including reselling it for profit and then forbidding you to publish it yourself.
Derek French, the Assistant Producer for Bioware, confirmed that this section of the EULA is not going to change for the final release. Although he noted in the same message that similar clauses have been used by other companies providing tools for users to create their own content, NWN has a much greater scope than any of them by far, and it's now a profoundly bad idea for someone who wants to keep control of their writing, characters, or game ideas , or use those elements elsewhere, to make a NWN module using those elements publically available.
This kind of clause falls just short of "Bioware Owns Anything You Make", since if they want to sell a module you created themselves, the clause even allows them to forbid you from distributing your original version for any reason. The sole comfort in this is that the clause apparantly does not allow them to make a derivative work of your module, so it would have to be distributed "as is" -- but if the module contained enough "objectionable" material that they wouldn't want to take it for themselves, they could still forbid the owner from distributing it.
Once again, it seems that companies are only against piracy as long as it's their material being pirated. If they can pirate some individual's material by throwing an unreadable EULA up for a second at install time, it's perfectly fine.
The full forum thread discussing this can be found here."
OMG. This is a new low. I thought slashdot stories could not sink this low.
It seems I was wrong.
Yeah, take my karma.
Why does the slashdot crew, who ostensibly are anti-microsoft, always tout the latest windows only games. or they announce on the front page that the x-box is now $200. See, if they truly went along with what they say, none of this would ever be posted.
I wouldn't say Slashdot is necessarily anti-Microsoft, it is more a case of Slashdot scrutinising Microsoft and their practices. Don't forget that Slashdot readership is a mixed bunch, some of which hate Microsoft, some love and some are neutral on the matter.
aus.music.scrapbook
Great Teacher Largo will be pleased with visible Progress
(Score:0, Interesting)
someone explain how that comment is troll?
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