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PC Gamer: All your Warcraft 3: Reforged custom games belong exclusively to Blizzard
- Thread starter Lukar
- Start date
That you can justly criticise them. I thought this topic was about the boilerplate eula. :p
Not sure why you are surprised. Same here in 2 different universities in two different EU and non EU countries.
Your school's policy was bad, then. My university explicitly states they they don't own any of the IP of their students, yet still has programs and workshops set up to help us make our own stuff. Idk about WC3 modders, but I know I felt more inclined to try out my school's resources after finding out that they weren't trying to grift.
The bolded is simply false.
The (intended) effect of the provision is to give Blizzard an interest in something you create with the map editor. It doesn't protect Blizzard's existing interests in any way. Those interests are protected by myriad other mechanisms which operate to ensure that Blizzard will have legal options if someone copies their material. The reporting on this that suggests that this is a novel attempt by Blizzard to become an automatic stakeholder in any successful mod produced on their platform is basically correct.
What Blizzard wants to be able to do is intervene in a scenario in which someone makes a successful mod and then goes on to make a standalone game with the same design qualities. They'll do this on the basis that the map editor EULA gave them an overriding interest. I don't know if this approach will be successful, but that's what the provision is supposed to do. Again, it has nothing at all to do with copyright.
All of this to say nothing of the fact that EULAs would be a terrible way to enforce property rights since it would be very easy to get around this by simply not singing the contract in the first place.
(Also: This isn't strictly a boilerplate contract since we are quite evidently talking about terminology that does not appear in most similar contracts.)
Yeah, totally.
Valve was always pretty smart in regards to mods (I mean, just look at Counter Strike)
But Blizzard had years to approach the creators of Dota and work with them. So being sore about that now is just, well, ridiculous.
Signing away your intellectual property rights and working for free is wrong. People are upset because it's wrong. Don't dismiss people because you think they stand to make money. Blizzard is the one who made a classless move motivated by money here. Blizzard is the one who stands to make more money. Blizzard doesn't deserve your defense.
Hurm, most schools I'm aware of don't claim ownership of work, just an unlimited license to use.
In fact I think in the UK (and possibly the EU?) such a term claiming ownership might be considered an unfair contractual term, and thus void under consumer law. Even if the school is making money from a student project that would could be considered problematic. As it stands, the unlimited right to use is really just there so they can mark and moderate work without hassle.
Edit: I should be clear, most schools don't claim ownership of students' work unless they are part of some kind of research collaboration, in which case the work is owned by the university or collaboration group. In that case it makes sense, as work is being done on behalf of the group. If something is entirely your own work though, I can't find a school in the UK that claims ownership of it.
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I am not a lawyer, but I think you're wrong here. I think that's precisely the scenario Blizzard is trying to shut down, since Blizzard owns all of the mod's IP which would preclude making a standalone game sans the Warcraft models. If this clause was in effect for the original Warcraft 3 release, I think Blizzard could (and probably would) snuff out League of Legends immediately.
You need to explain the word "protection" in that statement. What's currently happening here is the exact opposite, in that people who mod Warcraft III need protection from Blizzard swooping with a "yoink!" and stealing their creation. Yes, it was built on the bones of Blizzard's work, but what the EULA says is once that's happened it can't be removed. Blizzard would need protection if people were modding Warcraft and then selling the mod separately using Blizzard's code, but what's happening here is "idea developed through iteration using Warcraft as base is Blizzard's property, no matter how far the end concept is removed from its origin", and that's just wrong. People are right to be upset by it.
As far as I know, you cannot copyright / trademark / register a system design. The same way you cannot do that to an idea.
I'm not a lawyer, but after working in the industry for the last 5 years, that has been my impression.
Have yet to see a case one challenging another company for the use of a similar design (not rip off visuals, obviously).
But as you say, I may be wrong. :D
You're wrong. Blizzard literally sued Valve over Dota. Pubg sued epic. It happens.
Neither of those won, as far as I know. And if there is such a win, it will be a disaster for the industry, which I highly doubt will happen.
You said "challenged", not won. It's a disaster regardless of who wins because the vast majority of users can't afford lawyers to defend themselves in court.
More to the point, blizzard has shown that they absolutely want to own all intellectual property created by users. It's indefensible.
I'm as eager to continue the pile on as anyone else, but I'm now really curious:
For other games with similar editors have similar EULA rules regarding who owns the content? How much of this is Blizzard still salty over DOTA and how much is just the reality of games being a huge business and having more complicated rules than the early days of smaller budgets, teams, and profits.
If it's the former, Blizzard continues to learn the wrong lesson regarding DOTA. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a couple older officers there still smarting over "losing" DOTA, but they never owned it in the first place. My gut tells me the latter is playing a bigger role than most people would like to admit. Some indie games might release with EULAs that basically read do what you want with this stuff, sell it, whatever. AAA studios are simply bigger, they have more revenue, they have more bean counters, and they are more worried about things going sideways regarding IP ownership.
For other games with similar editors have similar EULA rules regarding who owns the content? How much of this is Blizzard still salty over DOTA and how much is just the reality of games being a huge business and having more complicated rules than the early days of smaller budgets, teams, and profits.
If it's the former, Blizzard continues to learn the wrong lesson regarding DOTA. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a couple older officers there still smarting over "losing" DOTA, but they never owned it in the first place. My gut tells me the latter is playing a bigger role than most people would like to admit. Some indie games might release with EULAs that basically read do what you want with this stuff, sell it, whatever. AAA studios are simply bigger, they have more revenue, they have more bean counters, and they are more worried about things going sideways regarding IP ownership.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, you are wrong about what the effect of the provision is and that's framing your whole approach to the discussion.
The provision does not protect Blizzard from IP theft. It paves the way for them to claim that they own whatever rights to an idea may arise should that idea be effected in the Warcraft 3 map editor. It is better understood as facilitating IP theft, because it will provide a basis for Blizzard to make (likely vexatious but nonetheless highly damaging) claims against developers who cut their teeth on the Warcraft 3 map editor. It gives them a bargaining chip should a DotA situation happen again because it allows them to undermine, at least superficially, the legal position of the developer.
The extent to which ideas are subject to ownership is a tricky area and not altogether relevant to the discussion at hand.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
My impression is: if you make a custom game "The Arglebargling of Shmooblebork" then Blizzard will own the character of Shmooblebork and his the epic theme song you composed on your kazoo. You should be able to make the independent but mechanically-identical game "The Umpenthortening of Schmucklezuck", though Blizzard may well attempt to frighten you into not doing so.
It certainly goes well beyond protecting the company's internally-developed IP, in any case.
I don't think any other game has any clauses that goes beyond "we retain copyright to the models and textures and other assets that's built into the level editor". Certainly, I don't recall any company staking a preemptive claim to the mechanics of any and all mods made using its tools.
Ironically, Valve demonstrated the correct approach to all this with their agreement with Drodo on making standalone versions of Dota 2 Autochess. (And then Riot ran in, made their own version in the League client, and seemingly ate both of their lunches)
This is really not my area of the law but it is my understanding of things that the bolded is the main impetus behind including this provision.
Two things are pretty clear to me:
1. These provisions can't stop you from making a competing game (and that a provision that did would probably be unenforceable) provided you don't reuse assets/characters/etc.; and
2. These provisions will scare prospective developers into thinking they can, at least to the extent necessary to get them to acquiesce, by raising the specter of very expensive and very lopsided litigation to resolve the question.
Somehow this clause sounds familiar. I could swear I read something like this in the eula of another Blizzard game some years ago. I remember because I specifically showed it to some friend so that we could laugh at how ridiculous it sounded (like "Blizzards owns your soul" or something)
PC Gamer must be reading our threads.