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General discussionUpcoming update to GOG.com policies(465 posts)(465 posts)
(465 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 05, 2015
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Gersen: 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...)
It is _not_ just the for the website, it also covers the games. It explicitly says:

"1.1 This Agreement is a contract between you and GOG
Ltd, 7 Florinis Street, Greg Tower, 6th floor, 1065 Nicosia,
Cyprus and applies to www.GOG.com, your GOG user
account, the GOG Downloader, the GOG Galaxy Client for
updating games, any games or videos or other content which
you purchase or access via GOG.com, the GOG web
forums, GOG customer and technical support and other
services we provide to you"

In 2.2 it also states that it takes precedence over the EULA coming with the game installer (in case those two differ).

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Gersen: 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.
10 years ago I doubted whether there would ever be a video game publisher who would agree to distributing games drm-free. :p

Now just start with all those decade old games and simply ask the publishers to remove those useless prohibitions.
I mean, you can't tell me that companies are afraid that someone will reverse-engineer the "revolutionary" game engine of Zork to bring their own Zork clone on the market.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by immi101
Posted January 05, 2015
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shmerl: Are you just being opposing for the sake of it? And why would you oppose fixing the situation around users' rights?
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Gersen: I don't oppose "improving things" (at least not in principle) I just oppose FUD.
In practice you serve the interests of DRM proponents who sneaked that garbage into common EULA practices and such. You can claim that you do it unknowingly, but so far you do it fairly consistently.
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Gersen: 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.
There is no need to avoid "can of worms" here. There is copyright law already in place. If anyone reverse engineers your fancy 3D engine, you can either claim copyright violation (if they actually copied your code), or you can't claim anything, if copyright law itself permits it. So there is no reason to put such prohibition in the TOS/EULA except for companies which actually try to take away rights given by the law itself. It's not about what is "safer", it's about those who take away existing rights through contractual prohibitions. Those "lawyer premade" templates are made by the same lawyers who pushed for all the DRM garbage in the law so bringing this as some argument of good practices serves completely the opposite purpose and highlights common bad practices.

And that's exactly what we are talking about. About GOG fixing TOS/EULA in this regard.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by shmerl
Posted January 05, 2015
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Gersen: 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.
While copyright law is broken about many things, in this particular case you have it in reverse. Copyright law itself allows reverse engineering as fair use (at least in countries where applicable), while such kind of EULAs try to take away that right through contractual prohibition. So in this case specifically it's EULA that's need fixing, not the law.

About anticircumvention laws however I agree. Such laws need to be seriously fixed, explicitly allowing that activity when the purpose is not to infringe copyrights.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by shmerl
Posted January 05, 2015
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Gersen: 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.
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shmerl: While copyright law is broken about many things, in this particular case you have it in reverse. Copyright law itself allows reverse engineering as fair use (at least in countries where applicable), while such kind of EULAs try to take away that right through contractual prohibition. So in this case specifically it's EULA that's need fixing, not the law.

About anticircumvention laws however I agree. Such laws need to be seriously fixed, explicitly allowing that activity when the purpose is not to infringe copyrights.
While true for the anglosaxon law domain, fairuse is non existing in the continental european law tradition where poland Iguess belongs too. Also, fair use has very strict limitations which are not granting enough for e.g. an unofficial patch, therefore I dont think the fair- use approach is the right one. About preventing , clean room reveresengineering can't be prevented too, but this is hardly helpful for us.

"Studying and researching" (following the fsf terminology here) the software should be allowed in general by gog for the content.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by shaddim
Posted January 05, 2015
high rated
It baffles me how some people cannot see that encrypted installers are DRM. Perhaps it has to bite before you understand. It is designed to not bite the supported demographic, but it has already bitten us Linux users, so it's clear.

Think of us as the early warning system and consider the following: GOG.com may not be around forever to support their installer. On the other hand, the encryption in the files will be around forever.

By the time it bites you, it will be too late.
Posted January 05, 2015
high rated
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Rixasha: It baffles me how some people cannot see that encrypted installers are DRM. Perhaps it has to bite before you understand. It is designed to not bite the supported demographic, but it has already bitten us Linux users, so it's clear.

Think of us as the early warning system and consider the following: GOG.com may not be around forever to support their installer. On the other hand, the encryption in the files will be around forever.

By the time it bites you, it will be too late.
This is the best argument I've read since the start of the discussion, cheers.

But I guess it's hard to convince the crowds that move from game to game with no interest of preserving their titles, or the crowds that also think that they'll always have access to their Steam games.
Posted January 05, 2015
I have been a customer of GOG for several years now, and I am slightly dismayed that GOG is starting to become more like the other venders.

Their motto was, "Games for gamers".

Other venders, their motto is "games to make money", if you happen to like the game, then that is a bonus. But their goal is to please themselves and make money, not to make the gamer happy.

From my perspective, GOG tried to resist selling out for as long as they could, but people who have been paying attention need to admit that things were starting to get hard.

GOG was having difficulty getting new games to add to their catalog because the games are owned by companies that want DRM on their titles. People have to admit that the new games that have been added are starting to suck more and more. That is because GOG cant get the games we really want unless they use DRM.

Without new inventory, GOG will wither and die. They need more titles, but the only way to get them is to sell out to the big corporate machine and become what we all hate.

This is the world we live in, one ruled by money and greedy capitalists.

Related to GOG selling out is the internet. The internet use to be an open frontier, full of freedom and promise. In ten more years, everything will be owned by a few large multinational corporations, net neutrality will be dead, and everything will have DRM. The internet will be locked down, and we will have to pay a premium to rich fat cats even for basic things.

At least the ride was fun while it lasted. Enjoy the freedom we had for the short time it remains.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by Tomkel
Posted January 05, 2015
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Tomkel: At least the ride was fun while it lasted. Enjoy the freedom we had for the short time it remains.
I don't think there is a need to be so pessimistic. More and more games come out DRM-free. Just look at great crowdsourced titles which come out lately. And GOG were doing a good job so far pushing for DRM-free approach. And they were profitable, quite profitable actually, so I don't see them withering in any way.
Post edited January 05, 2015 by shmerl
Posted January 05, 2015
What I don't like is that store credit only lasts one year (after most recent purchase that gave store credit). I think this is a bit too much quibbling. It would sound much better if you could be generous and make it at least lasting two or three years or even longer. After all maybe one day I want to buy store credit and gift it to someone else. I would not like to have an expiry date on that I don't like expiry dates for other things either.
Posted January 05, 2015
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Trilarion: What I don't like is that store credit only lasts one year (after most recent purchase that gave store credit). I think this is a bit too much quibbling. It would sound much better if you could be generous and make it at least lasting two or three years or even longer. After all maybe one day I want to buy store credit and gift it to someone else. I would not like to have an expiry date on that I don't like expiry dates for other things either.
I do wonder if that's even legal. Around here gift cards cannot expire and they're only able to remove money from them if the balance is under a certain amount.

I realize that store credit isn't the same thing as a gift card, but it's a matter of semantics. Especially given that you can't get your money back.
Posted January 06, 2015
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Tomkel:
And again: "Folks have been conned into thinking they can't change the world, have to accept what is. I'll tell you something my friends. The world is changing every day, the only question is who's doing it."

What you said will be the result if we'll accept it, and it currently is the direction things are heading in because most do just that.
Posted January 06, 2015
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shmerl: In practice you serve the interests of DRM proponents who sneaked that garbage into common EULA practices and such. You can claim that you do it unknowingly, but so far you do it fairly consistently.
Congratulation, your straw man argument skill just leveled up! ;)

It's not a question of promoting DRM but more a question of being pragmatic, yes those limitation (i.e. the reverse engineering & co ones) in the EULA (and often most of the EULA in general) are stupid and anti-customers, but in practice those limitations had very little real life impact, at least as far as games are concerned, the big publishers didn't sue ScummVM team when they reverse engineered Lucasarts or Sierra game engine and yet their respective EULA forbid reverse engineering; EA didn't go against Exult even thought Ultima EULA also explicitly forbid reverse engineering too, and let's not talk about emulators.

This as nothing to do with DRM, those clauses existed long before DRMs and as you said yourself DRM are protected by the anti-circumvention laws, they don't need EULAs for that.

So yes it would be nice if GoG removed those clauses from the EULA but IMO in the grand scheme of thing it wouldn't really make any real difference, it would be more symbolic than anything. And personally I am not sure if it would really be worth the hassle (I am talking about the games here), they would need to renegotiate with the various rights owners to see if they agree with their new tweaked EULA and put themselves even more barrier in trying to convince them to release new games.

Personally I prefer they spend their time and energy convincing publisher to release more DRM-free games on here, which will have a real tangible benefit rather than wasting time trying to convince publishers to remove a bunch of lines from their EULA just for the sake of it. Especially given that GoG, unlike Steam, Origin or others, don't have any technical mean to enforce them.

So yes, if GoG manage to remove them, great, like I said, nothing wrong with asking, but I find that jumping on their throat, like some have been doing, because their EULA contains a clause that 99% of the other EULA contains too, to be pretty silly. (Especially as, for games at least, this clause was there since the very beginning).
Posted January 06, 2015
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Gersen: Personally I prefer they spend their time and energy convincing publisher to release more DRM-free games on here, which will have a real tangible benefit rather than wasting time trying to convince publishers to remove a bunch of lines from their EULA just for the sake of it. Especially given that GoG, unlike Steam, Origin or others, don't have any technical mean to enforce them.

So yes, if GoG manage to remove them, great, like I said, nothing wrong with asking, but I find that jumping on their throat, like some have been doing, because their EULA contains a clause that 99% of the other EULA contains too, to be pretty silly. (Especially as, for games at least, this clause was there since the very beginning).
So you think than convincing backwards thinking publishers about anything DRM related is easier than convincing GOG who claim to be user oriented? Good luck with that ;) And don't mix two separate issues together. We are mostly talking about GOG fixing their own rules, not about GOG approaching publishers to fix their EULAs. GOG explicitly even asked for feedback on it.

If laws and rules are written badly, they should be fixed, even if they aren't enforced today. Because you never know how they can be misused tomorrow.
Post edited January 06, 2015 by shmerl
Posted January 06, 2015
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shmerl: So you think than convincing backwards thinking publishers about anything DRM related is easier than convincing GOG who claim to be user oriented? Good luck with that ;)
No, I said that it's probably already hard enough for GoG to convince publishers to release DRM-free games here without adding the extra difficulty of convincing them to release DRM-free games and at the same time use a specific tweaked EULA that their lawyers might disagree with.

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shmerl: If laws and rules are written badly, they should be fixed, even if they aren't enforced today. Because you never know how they can be misused tomorrow.
EULAs are not laws; and like I said before I agree that copyright laws are broken and should be fixed.
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shmerl: And don't mix two separate issues together. We are mostly talking about GOG fixing their own rules, not about GOG approaching publishers to fix their EULAs.
I don't mix the two, if you look at this thread and at the others, a lot of peoples mix the two and would like GoG to remove this clause from both the site and the games EULAs.
Post edited January 06, 2015 by Gersen
Posted January 06, 2015
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Gersen: EULAs are not laws; and like I said before I agree that copyright laws are broken and should be fixed.
EULAs are regulated by contractual law and as such are (normally) binding legal documents. Therefore you can't dismiss them as irrelevant.
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shmerl: And don't mix two separate issues together. We are mostly talking about GOG fixing their own rules, not about GOG approaching publishers to fix their EULAs.
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Gersen: I don't mix the two, if you look at this thread and at the others, a lot of peoples mix the two and would like GoG to remove this clause from both the site and the games EULAs.
So propose for those people to separate these issues, rather than suggesting that nothing should be changed, including GOG's own rules.
Post edited January 06, 2015 by shmerl
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionUpcoming update to GOG.com policies(465 posts)(465 posts)
(465 posts)