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Valve Wins Summary Judgment Against Vivendi
ShamusMcGee writes "Valve today announced the U.S. Federal District Court in Seattle, WA granted its motion for summary judgment on the matters of Cyber Café Rights and Contractual Limitation of Liability in its copyright infringement suit with Sierra/Vivendi Universal Games." From the judgement: "...based on the undisputed facts and applicable law, Sierra/Vivendi, and their affiliates, are not authorized to distribute (directly or indirectly) Valve games through cyber-cafés to end-users for pay-for-play activities pursuant to the parties' 2001 Agreement."
the backstory can be found here. Valve was suing Sierra because they were distributing HL to cyber-cafes, seemingly w/o Valve's authorization. sounds like cyber-cafes weren't in Sierra's distribution pervue, and Valve was annoyed that their games were given away (?) to cafes.
Not sure what this means, except Valve has control over their games in cyber-cafes now. Given their community friendly stance, I don't see this as a bad thing (although if Sierra was just giving the game away previously, I don't see that as bad for the community either.)
As sebastard on Evil Avatar pointed out, cybercafes are a multi-billion dollar business overseas. Vivendi took a different approach to selling things like Counterstrike to these cybercafe owners (Valve uses Steam and a play-for-play approach).
I suspect that Vivendi will be paying Valve a fair bit of money in the near future.
It is a good thing when it comes to contracts. We have been able to keep quite a few people employed by selling rights to 3rd parties to distribute in limited geographies we won't go to anyhow. For example, someone wants to sell equipment in Turkey, we don't have any business or foothold there, it'd cost a lot for us to even try. We do have partners however who live there and can do business profitably, they just need our product to sell. More power to them, but they better not sell to anyone else. Thus limitation is a good thing. In this particular case it is good too, Valve made the game, they own it, not the publisher. The publisher in this case was given the right to sell the game to a specific market. Vivendi needed to be smacked for the old fashioned belief that they simply own anything they are chosen to publish. Bad doggie.