EVE General Discussion

I ask you, do you believe if suported in a court of law that rejects electronic standard–form agreements and finds the contract unenforceable by resonable standards that items earned in an online game actually belong to the individual or do they still belong to the designer?


Had a nice long disccusion on TS last night with a prelaw pilot and this is what it boiled down too.

When you Click I agree when you first launched EVE. You signed your rights away to owning anything in game, IP of CCP. Everything belongs to CCP.

Possession is 9/10 of the law right ?
And all of our assets are sitting on servers owned buy CCP.
We rent game time.

So I would say no.

If a college or company can say anything you produce while using there facilities / assets is the property of the college or company and this has been held up in a court of law.
Then tell me why anything you produce in a game would be any different.
You are still using the game owners servers and program they created.

The courts should just throw these cases right out as a complete waste of tax payers money.

You described a totally different situation.
Purchasing software and designing something at your house is not the same as.

WOrking for a company that has autocad and whatever you design becomes the property of the company you work for not autocad. You are using your companies assets.

The same can be said for playing video games and creating a character / assets on a game server.
CCP in this case controls what you can and can't do because you are using their equipment.
Once again you are only renting game time that is it.
Even if say they are using a game engine from a different company CCP still have claim on what you are making and can remove all your work tomorrow if they feel like it and you can't stop them.

That is perhaps the most critical part of ownership.
If CCP deletes your character, could you demand that CCP bring back your character and would they have to do it.
The answer is no they can kill at just for the fun of it.
And as such you don't own it.

And just to add on to that.

If you really did own said character & assets then CCP could charge you a storage and maintenance fee.
Something you couldn't get out of by cancelling your account.

Those charges would be on top of the current rental fee for server time.

The only game I could see you possibly having a case is something like Entropia, where there's a real-cash economy, with established conversion rates and advertised means of depositing and withdrawing money.

I agree with you but what if a nations law contradicts a developers TOS contract?

Actually there is some guy who creates clothing items in another game and seels them for real life money and hes rumoured to have earned upwards of £70k a year [$130k ish]

I forgot the game but for sure this is factual.

In this specific instance AutoCAD software designer would not own any of the intellectual property as it is a program used to illustrate a concept / prototype within your patent application.

On the other hand you would not be able to copyright / file for ownership any part of the AutoCAD program. It would be a tool.

America's Senate went for a full-blown first past the post methodology last year, didn't read the whole article. This would have excluded the UK law establishing common ground and copyright in the build up to a patent application.

I.e.
You design a product.
Copyright it at home.
You're assocaite views the document on a cloud computing model where the copyright claim is also clearly stated, and then files patent on the design of the product.
||| In this circumstance it is arguable that intellectual property was held by yourself when the association viewed the document with the copyright claim.

In the proposed American First-past-the-post system, the concept would remain the property of the filing party, eliminating any form of safe collaboration.

In EVE, all models and designs are part of the Intellectual property owned by CCP Games. meaning you couldn't use any skins, modules, fittings, rig slots etc as they are part of the IP. It would be like patenting a meccano truck

No, but you're going to need clear evidence of ownership to have a good case without posession. If the ownership is unclear, the one in posession of it is presumed to be the rightful owner.