EVE Technology Lab

This devblog is almost the latest info on the topic, there were a couple related forum posts in January '13 saying they were forwarding the questions/issues raised after the devblog to their legal department. And I think there might have been another forum post a couple months later basically saying "still working on it".

Dunno if the email address still works, back then I got a reply when I mailed something (the reply however was just saying I'd get an answer later).

Unfortunately, despite CCP's promise to have updates on this topic soon, something around 3 years have passed without any news on topic. I think it's time to do something about that. I think this problem can be solved one piece at a time.

I would like to discuss concept that I'll call Voluntary donations. Please note, I'm not saying to limit the developer's license to this concept only. I'm going to polish and adopt at least this concept while the full license is not available.

The Voluntary donations concept will have these properties:
0) Program is some piece of software that uses EVE API and follows current EVE terms.
1) Any sort of legal donations can be made, be that in-game or real-world.
2) Program must be publicly and freely accessible, with its description posted on forums.
3) Donations are not required in any way to use the Program.
4) Making a donation does not improve experience with Program in any way.

Adopting this concept seems to be a win-win situation.
a) Points 2-4 prevent any malicious intent from developer's side.
b) If there're no donations, then the situation is not different from current.
c) If donations are made, it's good for developer.
d) If donations are made, that means that Program is valued for EVE, hence it makes EVE a more pleasant experience, which is good for CCP.
e) The fears of potential misuse (such as violating trademarks) are not handled at the current moment anyway, hence nothing will change.

Given that this thread already has the attention of the devs, and that I have zero profiessional knowledge of contract law, I'm not sure what you'd like me to contribute. Would I like the sites I use like Dotlan as so forth to be able to cover their server costs? Sure. Do I want Dotlan to get tangled up in another Somer-style shitstorm? Not so much. How would I like the job of drawing the distinction? Not at all.

I support EVE's 3rd party community, and I've advocated increased data transparency, but when it comes to the real money side of things, well even I can see that it's a pretty stinky can of worms.

After the Somer incident, CCP might be a little leery of poking the hornet's nest of trying to define where exactly the line between "in game" and "out of game" lies, and who can blame them?

So what would you like me to do?

EDIT: I have flagged this thread to the other CSMs and asked them if there's anything they can think of to add.

Regarding Somer: as far as I understand it, the very issue of the storm was the CCP's interference which was considered unfair, that is giving some players unfair advantage (valuable prizes). As for donations, that's not CCP's interference at all, that's players dealing with other players. As far as program's authors remain polite and don't stress the desire to get donations, that shouldn't be a problem at all.

The problem is that, a lot of the 3rd party websites aren't actually small scale operations that can run on a 5$ VPS from DigitalOcean, but require rather huge infrastructure.

DOTLAN itself requires some pretty beefy processing power to run, EVE-KILL / zKillboard the same, BattleClinic / Griefwatch too. None of these sites would survive for 5 minutes without the income they get from ads / donations / what have you.

So as much as i agree it's a can of worms, it's a can of worms that really has to be treated properly, and just flat out denying 3rd party sites to make money any sort of way, would pretty much mean the death of it.
Hopefully CCP knows this, and are willing to hand out some sort of waiver for those sites. But, i guess we'll see once the license in it's current form is actually released

Part 1.
I hope my comments below help to put scale and context to this worthwhile discussion. No TL;DR, sorry. It's an important topic.

Let's first separate the talking points for clarity. The Somer controversy was about the perception of graft involving a fan-site favored by a few CCP devs. We're talking here about 3rd party sites entering into licensing arrangements with CCP. The Somer debacle reiterates the need for transparency but it's not the discussion at hand.

To focus the discussion then, there are third-party developers who would like to enter into transparent contracts with CCP to charge money for some portion of their services.

First a point about the donation topic raised here, with above as the context.

The idea of donations providing enough working capital is simply unrealistic because the facts are, few donate. Let's take EVEMon. It has been installed over 250,000 times in the last 3 years (I'd have to dig into the archives for the stats prior to 2010) and has received zero donations. ISK the Guide Volume 1 PDF has been downloaded 1.6 million times and has received less than $200 in total donations. Capsuleer folded because donations alone would not support them. Big loss to the community in my opinion.

I find myself in full agreement with Karbowiak (how's that for a revelation!) on his point:


...and let me add some color here. BattleClinic's server budget last year alone was over $50,000. And total operating costs far exceeded this number. Yet we have no full-time employees because we cannot afford them. We're aware that the site's UI needs refreshing, but we struggle to afford the resources (the most recent estimate from a professional design firm was $45,000).

Clearly, donations alone won't support these expenses.

So let's talk about how fansites are good for CCP's business. This is not lost on the people I speak with most regularly at CCP. They *do* see how fansites can drive additional revenue (via player acquisition, mostly). I also make the argument that fansites in general improve player retention, and I've got a few numbers around this (feel free to ping me for them if you wish). And during one Fanfest, Torfi said to me, (paraphrasing) Fansites are valuable because they see a need and can implement that need more quickly and more creatively than CCP, since CCP has to funnel any augmentation through the design approval process.

Weekly, someone contacts me with a "great idea that BattleClinic should implement" ... and 9 times out of 10, it *is* a great idea...one that would help players "fight smart" as we say. And my first filter for these is always (always!), "would this idea enhance player enjoyment of the game?" A lot pass this filter, yet few of these get implemented because we simply don't have the means to build--and then support--them. Corps want dashboards. Top ranked players want analytics. Beginners want...everything. There's lots of need, and I believe supplying this need keeps players playing.

So there's certainly an economic benefit to CCP to have robust, well-developed fansites. And there certainly is no shortage of fantastic ideas that could help players at all levels deepen their enjoyment and stick around longer. Continued...

Since the discussion in this thread so far has mostly been focused on the monetary side of a dev license, I'd like to remind that different kinds of 3rd party tools have different needs. Personally, I'm not really interested in the monetary side because I believe we make enough in donations to pay for our modest hosting costs (Disclaimer: I don't actually have any numbers, so it's just a guess). I'm much more interested in the license as a means of establishing a legal relationship with CCP which allows them to let our tool modify Eve data (a.k.a. CREST write access).

So I completely understand that website operators running up huge traffic and hardware bills have a major interest in being able to support themselves through the license, but please don't forget about the other aspects of the license.

I might be able to shed some light on why CCP are behaving as they are, and declining to give much guidance on IP policy.

The thing is, CCP are in the business of promoting art. All art business models operate in the same way, insofar as advertising to expand the brand increases the value of the core capital asset of the firm, which the authors' IP in the artwork.

This is just as true for old paintings by dead french guys, as it is for music and movies, and games such as Eve. The owner of the authors IP rights gets a capital asset increase every time anybody promotes the artwork.

For this reason, companies like CCP encourage non commercial folks to spread their artwork, and increase brand profile. It boosts the capital value of their core asset, and costs them nothing. That's good business.

However, when a commercial entity, for example a publishing house, begins to make money promoting the IP, CCP begins to lose the royalties that should reasonably go to their artists, as authors of the art. In this context, they want to assert their rights over the IP.

this isn't greed. CCP has a lot of artists. I would assume at least some of them get royalties for IP, under contract. This means CCP jus obliged to pay out royalties to their artists, and so they are also obliged to collect such royalties from publishing houses that exploit their artists work.

So, a major commercial question for CCP is "How big is this commercial operator?" If they are not so big, and more of a hobby outfit, it will not be worth drafting and negotiating a specific contract. It is economically rational to let the bobby business carry on without bother. But, if that business grows, it is reasonable and fair for CCP to start negotiating on behalf of their artists, for IP royalties.

In other cases, very large publishing houses, such as Sony PS, may bring so much advertising to the brand franchise that CCP will actually share limited IP rights, in exchange for the capital growth of the core IP and brand that results from a very large marketing campaign.

If you follow all that, it will be apparent that having a very public, "one size fits all" IP policy is a bad business strategy for CCP, and more importantly for their artist community. They are better served by having the flexibility to claim their royalties where their work is being exploited for profit, and to let fans use the artwork, and build its profile, as much as they see fit.

The big problem with having a "one size fits all" IP policy is that big publishing houses may rely upon its terms to ague that your IP has entered the public domain, and so they don't owe the artists anything. That argument wouldn't fly against competent counsel, but IP battles are always messy and very expensive, so CCP are executing the smart play by keeping silent, and not publishing policies that will be used as contractual representations, to the detriment of their artists IP rights.

It is not that CCP want to be rude or arrogant about IP, or that they are confused. Sometimes the smart play is to say nothing, and I would suspect that is the case here.

That's exactly why I posted before, because this discussion could use a bit of a broader horizon. There are other things than fansites coming from the 3rd party community. Our userbase (EveHQ) is not that small, and neither are the ones of EveMon, EFT or pyfa. Yet I'm sure we all don't have large hosting costs simply because we're not web services. So naturally, our priorities regarding the dev license will differ from yours.

That part is true, applications which aren't webapps are inherently less hosting cost demanding. But some things just can't be native applications

As for EFT / PYFA, there is a web app for that. O.smium.org



Actually, CREST is documented all the way through. And it's also highly easy to understand, once you come to grips with how it presents the data.

As for an SLA on CREST, you might be supriced, that we might actually see something like that. Since they use CREST internally for DUST<>EVE communication.