There are two serious issues related to this thread. The first was the poorly worded addition to the EULA. The text (not sure if it's posted elsewhere on the thread) read:
"You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload (i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii) data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion, determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest.
Now Mr. Smedley claimed that no hard disk scanning would be done but as you can tell from the wording just about anything is fair game.
More disturbing is Mr. Smedley's admission that scanning and reporting was already being done. Supposedly only the task list was being scanned for an unknown list of running tasks and if one or more of them were running this information was reported back to Verant. This is disturbing because it clearly violates California Penal Code (section 502). (read the law here)
Given the unauthorised scanning that took place before the proposed change to the EULA (which I think we all can agree that unilateral EULA changes are probably unenforceable, moreso than EULA's in general =), it was pretty hard to believe them.
Verant is now in a position to be pursued for criminal prosecution and is also open for civil action according to 502. It will be interesting to watch this develop further.
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Now Mr. Smedley claimed that no hard disk scanning would be done but as you can tell from the wording just about anything is fair game.
More disturbing is Mr. Smedley's admission that scanning and reporting was already being done. Supposedly only the task list was being scanned for an unknown list of running tasks and if one or more of them were running this information was reported back to Verant. This is disturbing because it clearly violates California Penal Code (section 502). (read the law here)
Given the unauthorised scanning that took place before the proposed change to the EULA (which I think we all can agree that unilateral EULA changes are probably unenforceable, moreso than EULA's in general =), it was pretty hard to believe them.
Verant is now in a position to be pursued for criminal prosecution and is also open for civil action according to 502. It will be interesting to watch this develop further.