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Valve Angry Over Counter-Strike Subway Ads
Gamepocalypse writes "I noticed over on GamePro that Valve is considering legal action over the Subway ads that Engage In-Game Advertising was pumping into Counter-Strike matches. Valve's Doug Lombardi: 'Advertising or any other commercial use of our games requires our written permission.'" I'm unclear on this: Were the ads actually in the game already, or was the company just saying they were going to put the ads in? If the ads were displayed in-game, how was that done without Valve's knowledge? If the ads weren't in the game ... why would you make a public claim like this without clearing it with Valve first? Odd all around.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Valve is not the one who has the right to complain in this matter; the authors of the modified maps are. (However, if the modified maps were originally made by employees of Valve, then it is most definitely their right to complain.) Most custom maps for virtually all moddable games these days ship with a readme, and this readme has a short legal disclaimer that outlines most or all of the following the following rights:
1. Others may not use the map as a base to build new maps. (But in practice, the author is commonly known to grant such permission if contacted directly.)
2. Commercial exploitation of the map and its supporting files by any method is strictly forbidden. (Such permission is almost never granted under any circumstances.)
3. Otherwise, anyone may freely distribute the map files as long as the readme is distributed along with it.
4. The license ends with a list of copyrights and trademarks that the map author used but that don't belong to him, such as the name of the game that the map was created for.
In general, such mini-licenses are just as binding as the GPL, and should be taken no less seriously. If I wrote a free game engine that people wanted to use for such a method, I would not object. However, I would require them to build their own maps; any maps I built for the engine would be off-limits for commercial purposes. On the other hand, any non-profit modifications they wanted to make to my maps would be perfectly fine, as long as the people playing those maps knew that my map was a base for someone else's work.
One of the fundamental reasons why I hate in-game advertising, beyond the fact that I already paid for the game, is that these ads are complete and utter garbage. First of all, no effort whatsoever is put into making them attractive or interesting, and secondly they just drop them in random places on the map.
It's pathetic.
It's like the crap that passes for advertising on the internet. At some point I had hoped that internet ad design would improve. It really hasn't, primarily because the barrier for entry into web design is so low. Any inept designer can slap together a web graphic and apparently thats sufficient for the web. These guys obviously don't put any effort at all. But I'm forced to stare at this garbage, advertising products I have no interest in whatsoever.
The best part is stalking around in a terrorist hideout and finding that the interior designer of the group decided to adorn the walls with soft drink and fast food ads.
in case anyone was wondering, i was one of the first people to figure out how to do it and i wrote up a detailed howto on how to add these to maps (as well as add spawn points, convert map types, and other things)...
here's the instructions
http://www.joe.to/cstrike/ents/