EVE Information Portal

I'd throw in a much more precise example, which is the Swedish jaywalking laws.

In Sweden, it is illegal to walk against a red light. In Sweden, you will never be punished for walking against a red light, for the simple reason that no punishment exists for this offence. No fines, no marks in the protocol, no wrist-slaps — nothing. It's not that sanctioning people is impractical — it's downright impossible. In and of itself, the crime of jaywalking cannot be enforced because doing so serves no purpose. However, if you do walk against red and cars have to swerve out of the way to avoid you, you are the one who has broken the law and caused any (near)accidents — any insurance disputes will hinge on the simple fact that you broke the law.

In short, rules are something completely separate from enforcement.

Same goes here: the rule is “no cache scraping”. The enforcement is “if you cache scrape to cheat, then we're going to stomp your colon; if not, who cares.” The rule is simply wide enough that there is no wiggle-room to get out of it, should you be caught cheating through the use of some kind of cache-scraping mechanism that does not interact with the game in any other way.

No you're still missing the point.

2 DOESN'T MATTER

What matters is what I agreed to when I signed up for the game - which says what is and isn't against the EULA. There's also a paragraph on a wiki that clearly states a particular action is against the EULA.

Posts by devs on the forums stating what currently is being enforced, are certainly interesting, but do not change the agreement I agreed to.

Cars can be used to run over people. I don't see the government issuing blanket threats to car drivers.

Also

http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=734561&page=1#9

Look, you can't go and say that stuff we routinely do is against the EULA and that we should live in constant fear of getting at least a 30 day ban and at worse a permanent ban on our accounts just because at this time you chose not to enforce a particular thing. If you want to "clarify" anything, then clarify this: Should players have any fear of cache scraping or not? Should they have any fear of using EveMon or not? Eve-market or not? etc. Be clear on that or retract all this posturing and then figure out what you really want to say before you come back to us!

So is ISBOXER OK or not? And don't give us any unclear answer like: No, but we will enforce at our discretion.

Are you actually scanning our system processes beyond the Eve client? Are you able to read memory outside of the Eve client? And don't give us any BS about not being able to answer due to concerns about revealing your security strategies, because these are our computers, not yours, and our data belongs to us and not to you. We all have lots of "data" that we don't want just anyone snooping around and "looking" at. And by data, I don't just mean pictures and by looking I don't just mean viewing, but also scanning. Are you guys looking outside of the Eve process? We have a right to get a "clarified" answer on this one.

Hi Entity! There are no blanket threats here, I'm sorry you see it that way.

We've stated our intent numerous times, and I'll do it again; the policies are in place to protect the well being of the game. We'll use these policies to get rid of cheaters, and I'm sure you don't want them around any more than we do.

Not that I use any of these tools. I actually prefer to play the game.

But isn't this eerily familiar to what was said about ISBoxer a while back?

This is the problem with selective enforcement.

There were questions as to how this was to be enforced.
We were given a Dev blog specifically aimed at how enforcement would be handled.

If, even though you have been specifically told it's okay, you choose to not use EvEMon that's fine. Nobody cares.
But the fact remains you have been specifically told the overriding goal of EULA and TOS enforcement is to use what is specified in those documents is to catch botters, RMT, and other specifically cheat oriented activities... and NOT to go after folks using common handy activities.

It really doesn't matter what was discussed in the past, this is your official word on the subject at this time.

As an actual, RL lawyer I'm going to have to break it to you that this is bollocks. In practice CCP can ban you for no reason at all and you have no legal redress whatsoever

More often it's a history of EvE players interpretting GH statements any way they wish to further their own agenda... or for simple trolling purposes.