White Wolf Applying License to Indie Games

Enigma23 writes "White Wolf, Inc. has decided to enforce a licensing system upon those who run their games in their World of Darkness. Here is the full text of the license. The Licensing process will force those who have not already joined the Camarilla, White Wolf's official fan club, to pay a yearly $20 fee. They're not going to go after games that don't charge money for the event, but the wording is such that they can legally sue those who don't comply even if they only charge enough money to cover costs. The practical upshot is that technically the WW Stormtroopers could raid your house merely if everyone chips in a few quid for pizza. This is evidently doubly so if anyone in your gaming group is under the age of 18, which is against the membership policy of The Camarilla. There is a further discussion on RPG.net about the various issues involved." The BoingBoing discussion is interesting, as well.

Comments

Re:That's unenforcable...

[cpt kangarooski]

The reason for that is that while, as far as I understand, the purchase of a piece of software is being interpreted as buying the right to use it, so to speak, not as buying anything tangible, a book is different: you actually buy the physical book, and there is no license agreement between you and the author or publisher: the only contract is between you and the seller of the book.

No. There's no actual reason to have EULAs. They're totally useless in that they offer no real advantage to developers, overcomplicate transactions, and are a bad practice.

However, there's nothing that limits them to the software field. If you're willing to tolerate them for programs, you had better expect to see them elsewhere. Frankly, I think it'd be better to prohibit virtually all adhesive contracts with regards to creative works. Copyright protection is sufficient for most people. In the rare cases that it's not, real contracts are likely to not be a burden. This makes OSS licenses a little tricky -- we'd need to carve out an exception -- but they're really not that good an idea anyway. I'd rather have copyright law that made them unnecessary.