Like I said, unless a law (written, jurisprudence, etc...) authorize you to, or it fall under fair use.

For the same reasons why most weird things appears in a EULA, to cover their ass, it might not sound like a "good" reason at first but in reality it's sadly a valid one. Creative "Interpretation" of laws work both ways and while some unscrupulous companies/organization have abused of it for their own benefit (MPAA & Co), they are not the only one doing so; so as a result companies usually tries to be as throughout with their EULA/term of service/disclaimers/etc... as possible to prevent any loophole that could be detrimental for them.

As to why forbid reverse engineering ? well it's a debate as old as the open source vs closed source debate the problem is that if you explicitly authorize reverse engineering, you would have then to give "limit" to what you authorize, do you authorize peoples only to reverse engineer your software to allows it to be executed on unsupported system, or to allow them to play an old games that no longer works on modern system, or do you also authorize them to also reverse engine your all new "revolutionary" 3D/physics/whatever engine and allows them to create their own version ?

To avoid this whole new can of worms most companies take the "safest" route to use the safe and proven "pre-made" lawyer friendly formulation we see in most EULAs. Of course GoG could put an "exception" for Galaxy in their own EULA, as I doubt there will really be that many important trade secret in it they want to protect, but for the games themselves I doubt the rights owners will ever allow them.

Personally I think it's not really an issues with EULA but more with the copyrights laws themselves; those are old and/or broken laws that should be redone from scratch, most date from the times of books and other physical media and are no longer adapted to digital ones. If fair uses or more generally customers rights were more clearly defined most of those issues wouldn't exists.

Thanks gog, for asking the community for feedback, appreciated.

On pragraph 9.1 (b) I'm totally with Shmerl and I'm concerned by even more verbs "modify, merge, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble", the only one I would accept are "distribute" and "create derivative works of".
While I would accept more restrictive EULAs for specific games from specific copyright holders which are unavoidable, such strong general restrictions for all content is not needed and not user oriented.

Infact, this would prevent the creation ("disassemble, debug") and the applying ("modify, merge") of Fan patches, which were also used by gog for several games (Outcast, Dungeon keeper 2, etc etc). Also source ports for other platforms (linux) would be illegal e.g. Arx Libertatis (due to "merge, modify"!). And finally the creation and applying of fan translations would be prevented too.

This formulation must have been created unintentionally strict! :/

PS: beside, this clause " or by the law in your country." give me a very bad feeling, it sounds like: "we try in general to limit the usage rights to a minimum, unless it is explicitly not preventable by a law domain" ... this is leaves a bad taste. I guess you meant to formulated in a way which goes beyond the bare minimum, a formulation which is so louse the all gamers globally enjoy the same rights, at least according to your EULA? Gog, Don't follow this common and ugly legal habit of EULAs which try to minimize the usage rights of the licensee to a bare minimum, be a positive example for the whole industry in this regard too, make your followers proud with a Gamers' Bill of Rights which include this rights! :)

They say a picture is worth a thousands words :

Yes, now is the right time to fix such standard EULA non-sense as a new & better EULA is in debate with the community! Horrray! :)

Except what they are talking in this thread is the update of the site "Term of use" replacement, not the games EULAs.

Maybe you are a lawyer and you can enlighten us? What is the difference of a service's "Terms of use" which explicitly mentions content vs the content specific EULAs? Beside that the impact of this specific general "Terms of use" seems greater as it seems to be relevant for all software/content?

Do you suggest that this part is overall superfluous as the content ("software") is addressed already by the specific game's EULA?

I am not a lawyer but I actually have read the first post of this thread...

You were also actively opposing proposals to drop passwords from RAR packages in installer (since that would retain triggering the anticircumvention restrictions). A coincidence?

Neither of both is helpful in this context....

Infact, I think now the general clause handling the content should be not there in "Term of use" for the service (should be handled by specific EULAs) or way more granting and only limited by the EULAs.

Or it is just an misformulation according to the gog included comment which mentions only malicious hacking or other disruptive behavior & seems to want to grant all "rights for personal use/enjoyment". I guess this was copied from the EULA without bigger thinking about....

And you have no idea how contract law works at all. I'm not an attorney, but I can tell you that the way the terms have been interpreted previously has changed. And GOG doesn't get to reinterpret the terms unilaterally after all this time in order to make things more favorably for them.

Of course you could do it, and GOG waived any right to enforce that term by virtue of ignoring the issue for so many years. If the trading and buying/selling had been done on a 3rd party site, they could be forgiven for ignoring it. But, as it is, their failure to enforce their own rule represents a waiver of the provision.

Saying that it was always in there, when it was never enforced and GOG was turning an obvious blind eye is missing the point. At a minimum the interpretation of the term has clearly changed.


This isn't grey area. It's not even a little bit grey. It's never been tested in court specifically because companies know damn well that they can't enforce that term. It's like the jurisdiction and the relicensing clauses. They're in the contract, but they're completely unenforceable. the first time they go to court with that and lose, that's that. They remain in the contracts because nobody they want to scare people into thinking that they have fewer rights than they do.

It won't ever go to court because there's no way they can enforce it.

Because travel is expensive and if I choose to file a lawsuit, the court has to have actual jurisdiction. You don't get to name a random court that you think is going to be friendly. If they want to file suit against me, they have to do that in WA, regardless of what the agreement says. And If I want to file suit against them, the likely venue would be Poland. And in no case would a Californian court have jurisdiction as neither I nor GOG are located there.


The ability to put something into a EULA is not the same thing as having an enforceable agreement. The only way that they can change the terms is if they allow people to opt out of the changes. I've got a rather sizable library of games here and ultimately they don't have the legal right to change the licensing on the games that I've already bought.

To my knowledge EULAs and ToS almost never go to court specifically because the companies the depend upon them know that they're not likely to stand up in court. I'm not aware of any cases where a company took somebody to court over a changed agreement.

Cell phone carriers in the US have to waive the early termination fee if you refuse to accept changes to the contract or they have to let you continue to use the service under the previous contract because you cannot change the terms of the contract unilaterally after the sale.

I'm not an attorney either, but I'm familiar enough with contract law to know you're full of it. Just because something is in a contract doesn't mean that it's enforceable and companies like GOG bank on the fact that people are largely ignorant of that fact.

No, I never said that, you are making things up; I said that it would be more realistic to ask GoG to either "repair" the installer compatibility with Wine or to provide an easy way to obtain the password rather than asking them to re-engineer, re-develop, re-test, re-deploy the installers.

That it would be IMO a good compromised that would allows those not using Windows to extract the installer while at the same time not costing too much time nor money to GoG.

I didn't mean that you mentioned anticircumvention restrictions, but your proposal not to ask for removing the password in essence equals to retaining those. And they are just bad.
You'd expect that users' rights should outweigh bad contractual restrictions which try to take those rights away. I'd expect that too, but I wouldn't always bet on it. Even EFF mentions it as a risky combination (see here https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq). So whatever is really the case with such combination, it's worth asking GOG to remove that stuff from TOS / EULA altogether, in relation to what they control at least.

From that FAQ:

You do know that the term of services already changed before ? it's not the first time this happens and most likely won't be the last.

So because GoG didn't thought from day one that some peoples could abuse the gift system they lose forever the right to change it ever again ? interesting.

I thought you said you weren't a lawyer....

Honestly I have to admit that this was at least a good laugh, thanks! You should be happy; if anything traveling to California should a lot cheaper than traveling to Cyprus.

Again it's something pretty common for a company working internationally to chose a specific jurisdiction; an given that CD Project Red said multiple times they wanted to open a local branch in the United States, I wouldn't be surprised if said local branch end up being in California.

And, at least for now, they didn't say anything about changing the games EULA, they talked about updating the term of service of the website and related services (i.e. movie streaming, Galaxy, etc...)

Also most of the point you disagree with are already present in the current game EULA.

So then why are you worried about it ? if those are useless and not enforcable they shouldn't bother you in any way ?

And I never said it necessarily was.

I don't oppose "improving things" (at least not in principle) I just oppose FUD.