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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?"
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.