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Copyrights, Videogames, and LAN Parties?
mse61 writes "I'm currently the sole organizer for what will hopefully be a large gamer club/LAN party on the campus of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. While booking the room for our next event (March 4th 2004) I was casually informed that I had to secure permission from the copyright holders for the games we would be playing. I was quite confused as to why they needed this, and their only answer was that it would be considered a 'public showing of copyrighted work', and therefore I must secure permission. I asked a lawyer about the policy and his best advice was to get a hard copy of their policy and then comply to the bare minimum. The University was unable to provide much hardcopy, but largely referred me to the University rule that all State and Federal laws were in effect. Have any Slashdotters ever run into this problem, and would they have any advice for a gamer lost in the mire of copyright laws?"
Seriously. Think about it this way. Ever been to a public lab? A public high school? A library? They all have computers, all running copies of Windows. Is that a "public performance"? No. As long as you have one license for each computer, you're in the clear. Whoever told you that must have been thinking of movies or music...that's what the legal catch phrase "public showing" comes from. A lan party is no more a public performance than twenty people standing in the same room, listening to the same song on individual cd players with headphones.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Unfortunately your LAN parties violated at least the UT2003 EULA. The UT2003 EULA specifies that it can only be installed on one hard drive and only played on the system with that hard drive. It further goes onto say that you cannot sublicense the game. In a long winded sentence with a bunch of other things you can't do, public display is listed. I am guessing you didn't provide all the EULAs to the ethics advisor or lawyer since your contract is not clearly not a legal way to play at least UT2003. By the way all of those licenses were void when sublicensed.
Um...if you can "install and use it" on one system, you can install it as many times sas you want and as long as you don't use it on any of them you're not satisfying the conditional. As long as you're using it on one system at a time, the game is only "installed and used" on one PC. I think you mean "install or use" which is not what the EULA said at all.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
For your lan party only use games from software companies with reasonable requirements.
Personally I don't think copyright law is such a great idea in the first place. And worse are _software_licenses_ (yes I am aware of the GPL).
Are there any limits on what you can put on a license? Or limits on the limits you can put on a customer/user so that s/he can _use_ the product s/he legally obtained/paid for (usage usually involves making copies of the software - coz it has to be copied somewhere - RAM etc)?
Maybe someone should come up with a software license that involves users being required to hop on one foot and while screaming "Foobarlicious".
Or a software license that involves users agreeing to ignore all (other?) software licenses in order to use the software legally.
Last weekend I invited five friends to my home for a LAN party.
Though we had other games, we spent a large amount of time playing the UT 2004 demo.
IMHO, it is a very good game. it is also free, and does not have any annoying copy protection to worry about.
I think that everyone there decided it was a good game and worth buying. Likewise, if you host many games of UT 2004 at your LAN, then Epic will probably thank you for all the converts you will create.
As it is freely downloadable and redistributable, you can reasonably claim you have permission to use it.
I have held over 30 Lan parties and we never got permission. Most of the people that come anyways all have stolen copies and such which is why we could never do the events online. Just mention the word LAN Party in public and 3/4 of the people don't even know what you are talking about. My advise is to just make the college feel happy but if they don't request for permission then don't bother!
Unfortunately, for your argument anyway, it comes down to the exact wording of the eula. The and of the English language is both a mathematical or and a mathematical and. Final meaning must be interpreted. In the particular case sited, the and is inclusive, not exclusional. This makes it a mathematical or, not a mathematical and. If it had said "installed on one, and only one computer, and played on that same computer" then there would be no doubt of the intention; however, human languages are ambiguous and as stated previously, it can be interpreted as a mathematical or rather than a mathematical and. This is why contracts used to be in multiple languages, to counter the ambiguities of one language with the strengths of another.
true||false = true
Now, you may attempt to counter my statements by saying that if that was their intention, they would have used an or. The or of the English language is, however, a mathematical xor. This would create a purchase that would result in no playing because if you install, you no longer have the option to play. If you don't install, you have the option to play but how are you going to play if you don't install?
Always remember, mathematics and language don't always match. Just because you think you can prove language with mathematics doesn't mean you're correct. Languages are not logical.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Thank you for all the responses! It confirmed some of the thoughts i had and help me set an idea of what needed to be done. More info on the orgnization and LAN party can be found here: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~randlem/xngc/
++mse61--