Same here. The collector's edition seems to be entirely lacking in that department. Every other game I own has some form of warning.

Copyright is not notification of an end user license agreement. Did you sign an EULA for the last book you bought? Software isn't special just because some people in the software industry want it to be. We're protected against fraud specifically to stop that sort of tactic, and the onus is to be on the buyer to figure out the hidden terms to his purchase?

There are copyrights on nearly everything you buy, and almost none of them come with an EULA. You have no EULA written in a book, you have standard copyright notification. There is no EULA for the instruction manual to your TV, or the packaging on your soap. Everything down the the label on your ass(Levi perhaps?) is protected by copyright and or trademark. If you don't know standard copyright law, then your problem is ignorance of your own laws. Ignorance of the law is not a defense, legal precedent abounds. For those copying and distributing software, yeah, it's illegal, the EULA has no bearing on that.

EULA's aren't law, though they generally cover the law, some of them only cover the law, resale, distribution, reverse engineering, all that good stuff you're not supposed to do with software. Some of them, like EA's current ones, have restrictions that are not law. They are just like any other contract, except one you don't see at purchase. They weren't even backed by any law until the atrocious DMCA.

There is severely bad case law backing up the asinine view that you can be bound by a contract not disclosed at sale, but the majority of the court rulings have been that EULA's are non-binding unless disclosed prior to sale. The DMCA was passed in part to change that little problem.

Unfortunately for the DMCA, the exchange of legal tender is a binding contract. As legal tender is constitutionally guaranteed, the piece of unconstitutional shit that is the DMCA is trumped and will be tossed if we ever get an honest ruling on it. All terms must be presented at sale, any terms that aren't, aren't part of the binding contract that is the exchange of legal tender. Any terms in the EULA you haven't been shown at sale that aren't already covered by copyright law, such as EA's termination clauses, are illegal. It doesn't get any less gray than that for copyright law in the US.

Let's look at a real-world scenario. By default any created work is covered under copyright law (which says no distributions of any kind), but copyright law does allow for custom licenses to be issued.

Let's pull a book off my shelf. The first one happens to be Dune: The Machine Crusade. A page in the beginning state that I may not make copies of it, store it or disseminate it. I may also not distribute it in any form other than the original binding. Therefore I retain the right to resell the book itself (depriving me of it) and to lend it to a friend.

Now, let's look at software. We will take a industry giant (Microsoft) as a case study. The Windows Vista Home Basic EULA is available here:

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/Windows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875-8153-889cf5105718.pdf

Some terms from it that drew my attention:







Therefore we have two products, both covered under copyright law. One is sold to me and one is not. But interestingly enough, while the book felt it necessary to state that the original binding is required, Microsoft did not. Indeed, the media is never mentioned, other than at the time of purchase. The license is the label, not the media it is on.

Microsoft also has this page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326246 that states that if I manage to lose/damage my copy of the software, then I will be able to get a copy from them again (at an additional cost). Therefore I can assume that they don't consider the software CD to be anything other than a way to get the software to me, and the lack of possession of a CD does not in any way violate my use of the software.

Why doesn't the game companies fall under the same restrictions, then? Now I have to have BOTH the CD and the license to play. And losing the CD now suddenly voids my license? After all, I lose the ability to exercise my rights in the license.

And it has been suggested we are teenage law-readers. I am in the IT software industry. If a client buys from me, they buy licenses, not software. If they lose the media, I will gladly replace it. If they lose the license key, I will replace it with the one I have on record. There will be an additional fee payable, but it's a token to cover time done to research the original purchase.

If it was right to charge everything again because you lost the physical media of your rightfully purchased software, i believe we would have seen a lot of much lower quality CDs in the stuff we pay for...

Concerning the burguer software, i'm not sure that when you get a Big Mac, you paid for the license to use it in your organism until it gets assimilated

I'm a bit confused regarding your opinions on Starship Troopers.

You say it was a treatise on fascism - which, if it was, it was certainly not arguing against the government on display in the novel. I think it's awfully hard to argue he wasn't on at least on some level advocating for the nationalistic and military based government in the novel. If you thought it was fascism, then it is a natural leap to believe it was advocating a fascist government. I disagree that it is fascism, I *do* believe he was arguing for a militaristic and nationalistic form of government, albeit with it's own checks and balances, and in fact one I disagree with heartily. But he makes a valid case for it.


But now - you've replied that you never thought he was arguing for fascism in a rather "How did you get that idea?" tone of script, in which case I have to ask - why did you bring it up?

in all honesty, it sounds like you didn't want to answer the original question and bringing it up as a "a treatise on Fascism within Western Democracies" managed to neatly sidestep the issue: Whether, by arguing for a Legal Framework that deprives the buyer of a work of the rights they would have if they bought a physical property (and indeed, one that allows for EULA's that extend those rights even further), the seller does not in some fashion take onto themselves additional responsibilities.

Because that was the original question, and frankly, I have no compunctions aspiring to and applauding the principle that those who are granted a larger portion of the rights in a transaction being also gifted a greater portion of the responsibilities.

If you disagree, by all means make your case for disagreeing.

Jonnan

If I am not mistaken, making a "crack" for a game requires decompilation of the sofware.
And I have a hunch hackers focus so much on removing DRM's *because* the offended companies squeal so much about it, not because they have this evil urge to steal stuff. The stronger, more complex a DRM involved, the greater the incentive for hacker groups to try and best it.

So basically, if you want your game receiving *less* attention from pirate groups, drop the DRM. Sure it will get pirated, but at least you save money on the DRM system licence. And you give less hassle to your legitimate customers. If I were making a commercial game, that's what I would do.

I mean, I don't understand companies which use DRM - look at the track record for those systems. They are cracked, sometimes as soon as the game is released! That means hackers already have a standardized way of removing copy protection.
So why do some companies still insist on wasting money on methods which are proven to be utterly innefective?

A game CD takes a few minutes to copy.

Thieves are lazy bastards by definition....

Have you ever tried to photocopy a book?....

Although this is hopelessly off-topic....read my lips...I said 'treatise', not 'advocating' or 'arguing'.

A dictionary is your friend....

I live near universities, and there are plenty of photocopying shop around. Students flock to there every beginning of a semester to photocopy their textbook. And they photocopy entire texts even though if that text is like 1500 pages.

Burning a cd takes few mins, i thought it takes a few hours. I burn cd for my own files, not games, but just documents of a few gigs here and there put together. It takes like few hours. Usually, there are even errors in the burning process, or the dvd don't work after. That is not fair. I am not even burning games, only my own stuff of my own making and my cd burner treats me like i am a thief.

I am not disagreeing that pirates may be lazy, but in regard to photocopying books, why would you waste you time when you can just go legally borrow one from the library?  Last I checked I couldn't legally borrow a piece of software from anyware.

The Baen Free Library has been brought up as an example before. Perhaps not in this thread, but in similar ones. The point is that a particular publisher voluntarily giving up some rights to a works for promotional/advertising purposes does NOT give the general public the right to force that same decision on other publishers. No matter how well the scheme works.

In reality, the BFL is on par with the public library in terms of advertising effectiveness. The form of the promotional material makes the customer much more likely to purchase their own copy - who wants to read a book on a computer screen, and who wants to depend on the library having a copy available when you get the urge to reread?

is not good to have full progrmas for free, but is too expencive.

to hell piracy is good