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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?"
Call the companies. If there are any public performance issues they're the best ones to tell you if you need clearance. I suspect you don't, but it's always possible that if there is a audience (let's say you have a large bracket tournament for the best Halo player at BG), that the company might want you to get clearance, dictate that no cameras be present, etc...
Our LUG has a monthly LAN party. We picked a LAN game that was easy enough for everyone in the group to afford: Unreal Game Of The Year -- Retail $10.00 at our local Wal-Mart. We temporarily store it on lab computers as necessary, and remove it after the game is over.
We require everyone present to have a licensed copy to play. Most people bring in their own boxes, and each have their own copy.
I suppose it depends on whether the players are using College property or their own personal property to play the game. It is in no way infringing for a group of people to bring in their own personal computer along with their own licensed copy of the game to have a gathering.
Check the license agreement, for example you don't need a licensed "standalone" game server for Unreal Tournament. The standalone server is publicly licensed, because nobody is using it as a client.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Hi, I was in charge of LAN parties for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) at the University of Delaware. We had similar issues to the same ones you did and there's multiple ways to resolve it.
1) Some games have implied licensing. For example, say a certain game allows you only one copy of a key per internet server, but 4 copies of a given license per LAN server. Since this was done deliberately, it can be seen as an implicit contract since surely this was no accident.
2) I did multiple LAN parties. One of the things I realized reading the EULAs was that it was for one copy of the game to be "installed and played on one system". I then thought of the word "and". What I ended up doing, is making a contract (doc format sorry) through which people gave us permission to use a copy of their game for our events. Given the above "install and use" restriction, the person isn't required to attend the event, merely not be using their copy of the game at the same time. From there, I noticed I had large pools of licenses for two games and simply split each LAN party into two parts (one playing each game). I'm fairly certain the general idea is kosher. I talked to our University's computer ethics advisor and a professional IP lawyer and both thought it sounded great.
I had further ideas, but since I graduated, I never got a chance to implement them. One was to buy copies of a game that for extra licenses and then sell them (at no profit) to people who attended the parties who liked the games (I got a lot of approval for this, but no funding in time for me to implement it before graduation).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Playing games at a lan party isn't a public showing, unless you're providing both the games and the computers. If the participants are providing thier own machines and thier own copies of the game, then you need no such permission. If you want to play it on the safe side though, just call a few of the games' publishers and ask permission, or ask what you need to do to go about getting permission. My money's on the fact that not one of them will say 'no, you may not play our game at your lan party', and some might even provide cheap door prizes.
:)
I've been running a LAN party with some friends for the last few years btw, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
I guess it all depends on the nature of your LAN party. Is it commercial orientated or just some 'geeks' getting together to play some games?
For example, the product license agreement for my PS2 game Gun Grave reads:
-snip-
You Shall Not:
Exploit this Program or its parts commercially, including, but not limited to use at a cybercafe, computer gaming centre or any other location-based site. Activision may offer a seperate Site License Agreement to permit you to make this Product available for commercial use
-snip-
I'm sure PC games have similair terms in the license agreements. It seems that as long as you are not commercially exploiting the games you should be in the clear. But as usual, IANAL.
They got fined for not obtaining public performance rights. article about fines . It's best to be safe than sorry.