Out of Pod Experience

You fall under the distant sellers act.

You do have an operation in the uk because you sold goods in the uk.

It sounds like its a piece removing the seller to refuse refunds based on lack of service at time of purchase/subscription due to their own fault. Simcity being the best example.

CCP offer an internet game based on subscriptions, hence the connection. The two most important countries to CCP are Iceland and the UK in that order, hence why its more important than say New Zealand enacting the legislation as I understand it.

Not quite sure what else can be said really until CCP throw their two pence in.

I love how people have taken off running with a poorly written article that manages to turn a poorly worded quote from a non-technical person into a game "freezing," whatever that is supposed to mean.

Also, this is still the advisement phase and no one has actually submitted any legislation yet.

CCP wont have much to fear.

Its the likes of the sim city **** up that this thing will clobber. Which in my book is a good thing.

Distant sellers act.

It doesnt matter where in the world you are based, if you sell to the uk then you obey our laws in the sale fo those goods.

The way international laws work in the majority of Commonwealth countries is that, if you sell a good or service to a citizen or company within that country, then that good or service is subject to the sales and after sales laws of that country. Note that I said the majority, not all. Most have updated their laws and those laws do indeed cover international sales of goods and services over the Internet. Some have not.

However if a seller doesn't do some research and gets caught out by the laws of a Commonwealth country, then they cannot claim ignorance of the law. The basic principle of British and Commonwealth law is that ignorance is no defense.

But we can legislate for companies that want to trade with the UK. If CCP wants to have a customer base in the UK, currently they trade under UK law with UK customers. Polish law with Polish customers under the framework of the EU and EFTA.

Really? I believe the stupidity here is on your part. A quick search got me to http://www.out-law.com/page-430 which outlines the law in everyday language.

While it has been a while since loss of service has happened in EvE (for me at least) I do not believe that CCP will have to change anything to comply with the law. Best Practice in older MMOs is that if the consumer has sustained loss of service then those days are credited back to the account. My old WoW account has day, two day and three day credits littered through it from when service was lost.

This law is more aimed at sustained loss of service such as Sim City's launch day, sustained loss of service to streaming services (effectively offering similar protections to the consumer as in cable and digital signals) and ensuring that if other companies don't already use the above best practice of crediting when sustained loss of service occurs that they do so. It also acts as a deterent to companies thinking they can launch a game without reasonably testing their servers or supplying lower server load than could of been reasonably assumed.

The Distance Selling Regulations were passed to protect consumers when they shop online or enter into other contracts at a distance from the supplier. It was brought into power in 2000 and covers every online sale apart from private sales and business to business sales.