You can do online business in any country AND NOT HAVE LEGALLY BINDING BUSINESS presence there
false
You are required to abide by regulations of the country you do business in.
Wallmart can't sell me a gun in Europe just because it's legal in the US.
Maybe so, but they EU / French has a right to (ISP Block Steam) or put out a warning or something.
. Legit RMT should be legal . Owning a game should be allowed to be traded at any time (Hopefully this will change in the future.)
^ Doesn't matter anyways because unless its an online game it will always be pirated anyways but allowing legit trading of a game would help cut back on that.
People don't really seem to understand why this case is being raised.
Basically, a German company was taken to court in the EU for selling second-hand copies of popular development software (think things like Photoshop, etc). The case was brought by a British company against a German company (to demonstrate the quasi-national nature of EU law, which is binding in all EU countries). The contention was that the EULA of the software explicitly stated that the software was not owned by the users, and as such the Right to Resale (which is enshrined in law in every EU state) did not apply so the German country were selling something that wasn't theirs to sell.
The court eventually ruled for the German company. Firstly, they said that no EULA could restrict EU citizens from their near-constitutional Right to Resale. Secondly, they made clear that when a person purchases a copy of a piece of software, whether it's physical or digital, they not only own that software but they also own the license key and any peripheral services provided by the software maker (ergo, software makers are not allowed to domesticate functionality so that they can block resale by blocking access to software functionality or services). The case basically established that software is a product, not a service.
Shortly after that case, Valve changed their EULA to the wording that the French consumer association has taken issue with to depict Steam as a "subscription service" and your game purchases as "rentals" or "subscriptions" rather than product purchases. The problem Valve has moving forward is that EU courts tend to compare the wording of an EULA to the perception of the transaction from the consumer's perspective; Valve says Steam is a subscription service, and the games you have are subscriptions, but is that how it appears from the consumer's perspective? The short answer here is: no, it isn't. Steam presents game PURCHASES, not game SUBSCRIPTIONS. Indeed, within the ecosystem the word "subscription" is used in specific instances to refer to specific transactions. They'll also consider case law: are Valve in breach of the previous ruling regarding ownership of software and right to resale? Again in short: yes, they are. Valve have purposefully attempted to block EU consumers from their right to resale - whether that covers the Steam account as a whole or the specific pieces of software on the account.
This case is the product of a multi-year, multi-agency investigation into Valve, who are also being investigated for their tax arrangements in the UK, involving British, German and French consumer rights associations. The French would not be bringing the case without considerable weight behind them; EU consumer groups rarely if ever take large corporations to court unless they are a good deal certain they will win (unlike the US, where test cases happen all the time). Given the case law involved, it's highly likely that Valve will lose the first round. There will then be a few more rounds as the case is passed through to higher courts, until eventually it gets to the European Court of Justice.
Regarding the nature of regulatory law, any product or service sold by any company to an EU citizen must abide by EU law. If you sell a product or service in the EU and you do not comply with EU law then your are a fair target for legal action. Regulatory law is not based on where a company is located but on where a product is sold and where the consumer is located. The same is true in the US, so I have no idea why everyone is acting so surprised about it.
What if the account and all the assets reside on a server that is outside the country, hmm?
It's not so cut and dry.
Again consider it's a Chinese game, on Chinese servers from a private chinese game company that has no assets outside China - no outside country has any right to any assets on those servers period.
It is cut and dry: If the service or product is being provided to a consumer based in the EU, then the Chinese company has an obligation to abide by EU regulatory and consumer rights laws. The law is very cut and dry about it at this point, but what ISN'T cut and dry is enforcing the law. It's hard to enforce sweeping regulatory laws on smaller companies and companies operating from outside of the EU. That's why EU consumer rights groups operate at the top end; they target larger companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Valve, Apple, Samsung, etc) because it has a top down effect and the courts can hand down far harsher terms and punishments that psychologically impact the behaviour of the rest of the market. The EU can (and frequently does) block the sale of or access to products and services provided by companies who reside entirely outside of the Union, and EU courts will happily hand down billions of Euros in fines (see Microsoft and Google) should companies persist in refusing to comply with EU laws or court rulings.
If they are able to make this ruling into an actual enforceable law, then it would be the beginning of the end for Digital downloads, and a step back to the bad old days of having to buy a physical copy of a game. For gamers, it will be a huge blow, because games will inevitably become far more expensive as a result. Whoever thinks this is going to be a good result for the consumer, is not only niaive, but very short sighted.
If they are able to make this ruling into an actual enforceable law, then it would be the beginning of the end for Digital downloads, and a step back to the bad old days of having to buy a physical copy of a game. For gamers, it will be a huge blow, because games will inevitably become far more expensive as a result. Whoever thinks this is going to be a good result for the consumer, is not only niaive, but very short sighted.
I think you are naive and shortsighted here. Having physical copies of the game is good because you can trade them later on AND lend to a friend for a short period of time. Not like lending as Steam does it, where you lend your whole library and the moment you start to play an other game your friend is kicked out of the game (s)he plays at the moment.
Moreover, the thing about PHYSICAL being more expensive than DIGITAL is so bogus. Just look at the console games right now, where the prices of both physical and digital are EQUAL and in some cases the physical copy is even cheaper (WHY???). And those few developers still selling games for the PC in physical form do the same - both digital and physical copies are equally priced...
If the cost (and risk) of doing business internationally on the internet becomes too high, every country will have its own set of "internet retailers", which will of course lead to much higher prices for everything, and a much smaller selection of goods offered.
But it's the price of "safety". Your consumer rights will be guaranteed for the handful of items you can affordably buy online in your own country. Buying anything outside your own country will probably be illegal.
Regulation can cut both ways. It can regulate what companies do on the internet, but it's a small step to extend that to what YOU are allowed to do on the internet. Just ask the Chinese how that works out for them...
There are many past examples of US-based MMO's using third-party "partners" to run their game services in the EU. Every single one of those examples showed that the EU players ended-up paying higher prices and often receiving inferior customer service. It's inevitable, the more links in the supply chain, the higher the eventual selling price will be.
QFT. Assuming that this french group manage to pass this law into practice, then it could mean that companies with an online presence are less likely to have a physical presence in countries like France, or support localisations, it would also likely mean that people in France incur additional costs for using online services not also based in France or have to agree to terms that include waiving their right to specific things covered by those laws, you could also get situations like this occurring;
GTA VI NA/USA 50$ UK £40 EU €150
I use the 3 values as its highly unlikely that the UK will be a member of the EU within the next year. As for the increased costs of games, companies rely on individual sales of games to generate revenue, if people in one area can resell games then the initial purchase cost will probably be used to offset future game sales losses. It will probably also mean that games will have on disc DRM and won't run unless the game disc is physically present not to mention, the games would also have to have a form of region locking. It would mean a huge backwards step for the games industry as a whole.
You're forgetting the other half of the free market. If you incentivize piracy to that
point the EU becomes China 2.0 where no one pays for single player games
because they're all pirated.
A lot people seem to be oblivious to the fact if a company sells digital goods in a country it has to abide by the laws of that country. Here in Australia, our government sued Valve over its returns policy and won. So the precedent is there. However Valve would only be required to do so in France if the suit is successful.
If the cost (and risk) of doing business internationally on the internet becomes too high, every country will have its own set of "internet retailers", which will of course lead to much higher prices for everything, and a much smaller selection of goods offered.
But it's the price of "safety". Your consumer rights will be guaranteed for the handful of items you can affordably buy online in your own country. Buying anything outside your own country will probably be illegal.
Regulation can cut both ways. It can regulate what companies do on the internet, but it's a small step to extend that to what YOU are allowed to do on the internet. Just ask the Chinese how that works out for them...
There are many past examples of US-based MMO's using third-party "partners" to run their game services in the EU. Every single one of those examples showed that the EU players ended-up paying higher prices and often receiving inferior customer service. It's inevitable, the more links in the supply chain, the higher the eventual selling price will be.
QFT. Assuming that this french group manage to pass this law into practice, then it could mean that companies with an online presence are less likely to have a physical presence in countries like France, or support localisations, it would also likely mean that people in France incur additional costs for using online services not also based in France or have to agree to terms that include waiving their right to specific things covered by those laws, you could also get situations like this occurring;
GTA VI NA/USA 50$ UK £40 EU €150
I use the 3 values as its highly unlikely that the UK will be a member of the EU within the next year. As for the increased costs of games, companies rely on individual sales of games to generate revenue, if people in one area can resell games then the initial purchase cost will probably be used to offset future game sales losses. It will probably also mean that games will have on disc DRM and won't run unless the game disc is physically present not to mention, the games would also have to have a form of region locking. It would mean a huge backwards step for the games industry as a whole.
You're forgetting the other half of the free market. If you incentivize piracy to that
point the EU becomes China 2.0 where no one pays for single player games
because they're all pirated.
Not really, it will become much harder to pirate copies of a game, that the EU will perforce be a party to ensuring that piracy is stamped down on, as they benefit from increased tax revenues from increased physical copies sales, and don't from piracy, then piracy will be much more difficult, particularly as the threat of legal action against the person using pirated software becomes that much more likely. And if you don't think this is about Money be it € or $ then you probably haven't considered all the ramifications inherent to what this particular legal action will unfortunately entail.
If they are able to make this ruling into an actual enforceable law, then it would be the beginning of the end for Digital downloads, and a step back to the bad old days of having to buy a physical copy of a game. For gamers, it will be a huge blow, because games will inevitably become far more expensive as a result. Whoever thinks this is going to be a good result for the consumer, is not only niaive, but very short sighted.
I like the good old box days much better than todays DD , reaklly enjoyed going to the store and getting the Box , many of the games had great stuff packed in there and many with very informative manuals that made for great reading ... Miss those days
So any country can change the law to whatever they want and then online companies have to comply to 100 different laws in 100 different countries.
Yeah I don't think so.
I am quite shocked by this statement, quite frankly.
Let me ask you a question. If you have an hard copy of FIFA 15 and go down to Gamestop do you need permission from EA before you can sell it? If you have a car and go to your local dealer are you allowed to sell it or you need permission from Ford (or whatever car brand you own) before doing so? Why Digital Goods should be any different?
France is not reinventing the wheel, these are laws that existed since the dawn of our civilization, it is indeed the Companies that are trying to be clever thanks to the fact there are not specific laws that deal with Digital Goods yet. Well now there are, and Digital Goods should be treated on par with Hardcopy Goods, it's a no brainer.
If you buy something it is yours and you can do what you like with it, end of.
If the cost (and risk) of doing business internationally on the internet becomes too high, every country will have its own set of "internet retailers", which will of course lead to much higher prices for everything, and a much smaller selection of goods offered.
But it's the price of "safety". Your consumer rights will be guaranteed for the handful of items you can affordably buy online in your own country. Buying anything outside your own country will probably be illegal.
Regulation can cut both ways. It can regulate what companies do on the internet, but it's a small step to extend that to what YOU are allowed to do on the internet. Just ask the Chinese how that works out for them...
There are many past examples of US-based MMO's using third-party "partners" to run their game services in the EU. Every single one of those examples showed that the EU players ended-up paying higher prices and often receiving inferior customer service. It's inevitable, the more links in the supply chain, the higher the eventual selling price will be.
QFT. Assuming that this french group manage to pass this law into practice, then it could mean that companies with an online presence are less likely to have a physical presence in countries like France, or support localisations, it would also likely mean that people in France incur additional costs for using online services not also based in France or have to agree to terms that include waiving their right to specific things covered by those laws, you could also get situations like this occurring;
GTA VI NA/USA 50$ UK £40 EU €150
I use the 3 values as its highly unlikely that the UK will be a member of the EU within the next year. As for the increased costs of games, companies rely on individual sales of games to generate revenue, if people in one area can resell games then the initial purchase cost will probably be used to offset future game sales losses. It will probably also mean that games will have on disc DRM and won't run unless the game disc is physically present not to mention, the games would also have to have a form of region locking. It would mean a huge backwards step for the games industry as a whole.
You're forgetting the other half of the free market. If you incentivize piracy to that
point the EU becomes China 2.0 where no one pays for single player games
because they're all pirated.
Not really, it will become much harder to pirate copies of a game, that the EU will perforce be a party to ensuring that piracy is stamped down on, as they benefit from increased tax revenues from increased physical copies sales, and don't from piracy, then piracy will be much more difficult, particularly as the threat of legal action against the person using pirated software becomes that much more likely. And if you don't think this is about Money be it € or $ then you probably haven't considered all the ramifications inherent to what this particular legal action will unfortunately entail.
So your position is that market forces are unstoppable when they affect businesses but largely impotent to affect consumer behavior?
If the cost (and risk) of doing business internationally on the internet becomes too high, every country will have its own set of "internet retailers", which will of course lead to much higher prices for everything, and a much smaller selection of goods offered.
But it's the price of "safety". Your consumer rights will be guaranteed for the handful of items you can affordably buy online in your own country. Buying anything outside your own country will probably be illegal.
Regulation can cut both ways. It can regulate what companies do on the internet, but it's a small step to extend that to what YOU are allowed to do on the internet. Just ask the Chinese how that works out for them...
There are many past examples of US-based MMO's using third-party "partners" to run their game services in the EU. Every single one of those examples showed that the EU players ended-up paying higher prices and often receiving inferior customer service. It's inevitable, the more links in the supply chain, the higher the eventual selling price will be.
QFT. Assuming that this french group manage to pass this law into practice, then it could mean that companies with an online presence are less likely to have a physical presence in countries like France, or support localisations, it would also likely mean that people in France incur additional costs for using online services not also based in France or have to agree to terms that include waiving their right to specific things covered by those laws, you could also get situations like this occurring;
GTA VI NA/USA 50$ UK £40 EU €150
I use the 3 values as its highly unlikely that the UK will be a member of the EU within the next year. As for the increased costs of games, companies rely on individual sales of games to generate revenue, if people in one area can resell games then the initial purchase cost will probably be used to offset future game sales losses. It will probably also mean that games will have on disc DRM and won't run unless the game disc is physically present not to mention, the games would also have to have a form of region locking. It would mean a huge backwards step for the games industry as a whole.
You're forgetting the other half of the free market. If you incentivize piracy to that
point the EU becomes China 2.0 where no one pays for single player games
because they're all pirated.
Not really, it will become much harder to pirate copies of a game, that the EU will perforce be a party to ensuring that piracy is stamped down on, as they benefit from increased tax revenues from increased physical copies sales, and don't from piracy, then piracy will be much more difficult, particularly as the threat of legal action against the person using pirated software becomes that much more likely. And if you don't think this is about Money be it € or $ then you probably haven't considered all the ramifications inherent to what this particular legal action will unfortunately entail.
So your position is that market forces are unstoppable when they affect businesses but largely impotent to affect consumer behavior?
My position is that the ones who have the most to lose from this, is actually the consumer, and that this is an attempt to control both the producer and the consumer equally, when both lose, you have to consider who is actually gaining something from this, and for the most part, the only ones to really gain, are those who benefit from an increased rate of taxation.
What if the account and all the assets reside on a server that is outside the country, hmm?
It's not so cut and dry.
Again consider it's a Chinese game, on Chinese servers from a private chinese game company that has no assets outside China - no outside country has any right to any assets on those servers period.
It's funny that you bring up China in this 'sovereignty of law' discussion. Because what you say might be true of other countries, but if you reverse the situation and it's some other country's assets and China needs them, they just take them, copy them, and make a competing product that is half the price of the original and turn around and make billions off of the work of others.
When some other country or government tells them they can't do that and to respect their laws of I.P. infringement, they just laugh and say, "That's a capitalist concept! We aren't capitalists, we're communists. Anything made by anyone is open to use by anyone." And the grieved company has to just shrug and say selling our product to a billion people is worth this thievery because they can't sue the company performing the theft. These corporations dealing with China are basically robbing their (and the rest of western society's) future for an immediate fractional bit of profit.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
This will NEVER work,it would change all the present laws which would change a lot including al l; that money for copyrights. What has been law until now is that you only own a license to play the game,you never own the game.If they change it to allow you to actually claim you own it,then what happens to that copyright material,you would own that as well,no way is that ever taking off the runway. The only curious thing for me is to know how they plan on skewing this to make it seem plausible the purchasers actually own that entire product which contains the game's coding.
This is going to be a nice settlement,Government gets some nice Christmas money,Valve gets invited to the Christmas party,everyone is happy opening presents.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The only way around it, would seem to be that by registering your game you create a game account, which cannot be transferred, but creating a game account beyond the original, incurs a fee, say €40 per account beyond the first
.. it may not even come to that, as i have no doubt that it will be appealed against.
By your logic, any podunk municipality ought to be able to censor the entire Internet, since everything posted on the Internet is accessible from that town. You are implicitly arguing that everyone who ever makes a web site must always comply with all regulations made by any government body anywhere in the world, no matter where the web site is located or what it deals with. Any freelance person who wants to put up a simple site would first have to sift through regulations made by tens of thousands of entities and written in hundreds of different languages. Any real effort at enforcing that would be the end of the "world wide" web.
It's not by "my logic", the cookie law, is not my logic, it's EU regulations. And it's a good law, studies show far more Europeans know what cookies are and do, than in other continents.
And no, that does not give the EU the right to dictate what happens on "the entire internet", but within their digital borders it does, which is normal when you think about it.
As far as "freelance person", most of those rules don't apply to those people. The cookie law deals with storing private data of people. When you start storing private data of people in cookies, you are no longer a "freelance person", you know what you're doing at that point, and it's perfectly normal you are forced to comply with laws at that point.
Frankly, anyone not knowing what the cookie law is, shouldn't be allowed to make a website in 2015, because that person is clueless. They should make a wordpress site and not be allowed near a 10 mile radius of Dreamweaver.
You can't have it both ways. You're basically asserting that:
1) A government does not have the right to regulate the entire Internet. 2) A government does have the right to regulate the portion of the Internet within their "digital borders". 3) The entire Internet is within the digital borders of all governments.
That is a logical contradiction. At least one of those must be false. Pick which one.
They literally just use it as a digital games market and Valve owns none of the rights of the titles unless Valve made it. So if they are trying to take Valve to court then they are attacking literally every developer who has a title on steam.
Literally Valve does not own the rights to the games they sell and since France would have to target every developer who has ever released a game on steam this is nothing but a big joke.
In many lawsuits the primary reason that someone is targeted is because they have a lot of money. There's no money to be made in suing someone who was about to go out of business, anyway.
Thats not up to European law thats up to the rights holder for the IP of the game. Its in their terms of service of use that you do not own the game nor any of the Intellectual properties or assets of the game you are simply given the right to use them. The IP holder holds full rights to deny your usage as well.
What do you think defines the extend and limits of IP rights within Europe a) Magical fairies, or b) European laws?
When you go elsewhere in the world to access a web site, what makes you think that European laws magically apply to what you're doing thousands of miles away from Europe?
People don't really seem to understand why this case is being raised.
Basically, a German company was taken to court in the EU for selling second-hand copies of popular development software (think things like Photoshop, etc). The case was brought by a British company against a German company (to demonstrate the quasi-national nature of EU law, which is binding in all EU countries). The contention was that the EULA of the software explicitly stated that the software was not owned by the users, and as such the Right to Resale (which is enshrined in law in every EU state) did not apply so the German country were selling something that wasn't theirs to sell.
The court eventually ruled for the German company. Firstly, they said that no EULA could restrict EU citizens from their near-constitutional Right to Resale. Secondly, they made clear that when a person purchases a copy of a piece of software, whether it's physical or digital, they not only own that software but they also own the license key and any peripheral services provided by the software maker (ergo, software makers are not allowed to domesticate functionality so that they can block resale by blocking access to software functionality or services). The case basically established that software is a product, not a service.
Shortly after that case, Valve changed their EULA to the wording that the French consumer association has taken issue with to depict Steam as a "subscription service" and your game purchases as "rentals" or "subscriptions" rather than product purchases. The problem Valve has moving forward is that EU courts tend to compare the wording of an EULA to the perception of the transaction from the consumer's perspective; Valve says Steam is a subscription service, and the games you have are subscriptions, but is that how it appears from the consumer's perspective? The short answer here is: no, it isn't. Steam presents game PURCHASES, not game SUBSCRIPTIONS. Indeed, within the ecosystem the word "subscription" is used in specific instances to refer to specific transactions. They'll also consider case law: are Valve in breach of the previous ruling regarding ownership of software and right to resale? Again in short: yes, they are. Valve have purposefully attempted to block EU consumers from their right to resale - whether that covers the Steam account as a whole or the specific pieces of software on the account.
This case is the product of a multi-year, multi-agency investigation into Valve, who are also being investigated for their tax arrangements in the UK, involving British, German and French consumer rights associations. The French would not be bringing the case without considerable weight behind them; EU consumer groups rarely if ever take large corporations to court unless they are a good deal certain they will win (unlike the US, where test cases happen all the time). Given the case law involved, it's highly likely that Valve will lose the first round. There will then be a few more rounds as the case is passed through to higher courts, until eventually it gets to the European Court of Justice.
Regarding the nature of regulatory law, any product or service sold by any company to an EU citizen must abide by EU law. If you sell a product or service in the EU and you do not comply with EU law then your are a fair target for legal action. Regulatory law is not based on where a company is located but on where a product is sold and where the consumer is located. The same is true in the US, so I have no idea why everyone is acting so surprised about it.
What if the account and all the assets reside on a server that is outside the country, hmm?
It's not so cut and dry.
Again consider it's a Chinese game, on Chinese servers from a private chinese game company that has no assets outside China - no outside country has any right to any assets on those servers period.
It is cut and dry: If the service or product is being provided to a consumer based in the EU, then the Chinese company has an obligation to abide by EU regulatory and consumer rights laws. The law is very cut and dry about it at this point, but what ISN'T cut and dry is enforcing the law. It's hard to enforce sweeping regulatory laws on smaller companies and companies operating from outside of the EU. That's why EU consumer rights groups operate at the top end; they target larger companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Valve, Apple, Samsung, etc) because it has a top down effect and the courts can hand down far harsher terms and punishments that psychologically impact the behaviour of the rest of the market. The EU can (and frequently does) block the sale of or access to products and services provided by companies who reside entirely outside of the Union, and EU courts will happily hand down billions of Euros in fines (see Microsoft and Google) should companies persist in refusing to comply with EU laws or court rulings.
You say that this is based on a case where company A sued company B to force company B to stop reselling company A's software. But the Valve case isn't about that at all, unless all that it is asking is that people be able to sell their Steam accounts in their entirety. If Valve is being sued to force them to allow transfer of individual games within an account, then company A is being sued to force company A to participate in reselling company A's software.
How is this even a good thing? This just hurts game development, particularly smaller devs who make quality single player games. If this actually gets passed I imagine we'll see a lot more ads and p2w cash shop mechanics.
What a BS argument that it'll hurt developers. In the past we had PHYSICAL discs & cartridges (we still have for consoles) and sold them when we played through those games. Back then both developer and players were better off because of the option to trade/reselll PHYSICAL games.
Now with the digital age you can't resell your games when you're done, the games are insanely expensive AND most games come with only about 20 hours of gameplay before you're done.
Only because of this I'm no longer buying DIGITAL games because I think €60+ for a new game that I play through in 20 hours (or less) is just way over the top, only to never look at it ever again. If that same DIGITAL game can be resold I would consider buying it.
So you don't think it will hurt game developers at all if n people buying your game means that only n/2 buy the game from you and pay you for it, as opposed to all n people pay you for it? I'd say that cuts your revenue in half.
Less revenue expected from making games means money spent making games--both lower quality games and fewer games. And that's supposed to be a good thing?
So any country can change the law to whatever they want and then online companies have to comply to 100 different laws in 100 different countries.
Yeah I don't think so.
I am quite shocked by this statement, quite frankly.
Let me ask you a question. If you have an hard copy of FIFA 15 and go down to Gamestop do you need permission from EA before you can sell it? If you have a car and go to your local dealer are you allowed to sell it or you need permission from Ford (or whatever car brand you own) before doing so? Why Digital Goods should be any different?
France is not reinventing the wheel, these are laws that existed since the dawn of our civilization, it is indeed the Companies that are trying to be clever thanks to the fact there are not specific laws that deal with Digital Goods yet. Well now there are, and Digital Goods should be treated on par with Hardcopy Goods, it's a no brainer.
If you buy something it is yours and you can do what you like with it, end of.
Let's suppose that I want to sell a game online. My game is illegal in Doesnotexistan, so it's impossible for me to comply with the Internet laws of Doesnotexistan. So I need to make sure that I'm not selling the game in Doesnotexistan in order to comply with the laws. How do I do that?
Is it possible for me to sell my game on the Internet to people outside of Doesnotexistan without violating the law? And if so, how? I'm only selling a digital copy, not a physical copy, so I'm not mailing anything to Doesnotexistan. I never set foot there, hire no employees there, and have no buildings there. I don't translate my web site into Doesnotexistanese.
But the Internet being as it is, that doesn't stop someone from Doesnotexistan from coming to my web site and buying my game. If I try to block IP addresses for that country, he'll just use a proxy server and now I think he's coming from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Am I in the clear, or does the government of Doesnotexistan have the right to come after me for violating their laws?
The real situation is that there is not one Doesnotexistan, but tens of thousands of them. How do I comply with the laws of all of them? I haven't even heard of most of them. Most of them write their laws in languages that I don't understand. If merely putting something on the Internet means that I have to comply with all of them, that would shut down the Internet entirely.
What sometimes happens in cases like this is that you don't get in trouble until you attract the attention of regulators. Numerous and broad regulations mean that everyone is always in violation of many of them and there's no way around it. Prosecutorial discretion in choosing who to prosecute has then left the domain of law entirely and is purely about politics.
The fine points (and quirks) of this are as follows:
Steam (and the account used to access it) is a subscription service. There is no right for resale or transfer. The games that are purchased via Steam are owned by the user, and can be transferred.
The issue is that when the account is closed, access to the games is also lost. This results in a situation where the customer is denied access to their own goods. This is the issue that is in violation of the law for the EU.
What if the account and all the assets reside on a server that is outside the country, hmm?
It's not so cut and dry.
Again consider it's a Chinese game, on Chinese servers from a private chinese game company that has no assets outside China - no outside country has any right to any assets on those servers period.
It's funny that you bring up China in this 'sovereignty of law' discussion. Because what you say might be true of other countries, but if you reverse the situation and it's some other country's assets and China needs them, they just take them, copy them, and make a competing product that is half the price of the original and turn around and make billions off of the work of others.
When some other country or government tells them they can't do that and to respect their laws of I.P. infringement, they just laugh and say, "That's a capitalist concept! We aren't capitalists, we're communists. Anything made by anyone is open to use by anyone." And the grieved company has to just shrug and say selling our product to a billion people is worth this thievery because they can't sue the company performing the theft. These corporations dealing with China are basically robbing their (and the rest of western society's) future for an immediate fractional bit of profit.
I bring up China because they are first ones to give a big middle finger to any foreign online law trying to impose rights of digital owership.
China don't give a flying F about EU online laws, nor anyone elses.
But this is not China, this is the European Union and if you're here as a foreign company that wants to do business then this foreign company has to obey the European law or don't do business here.
Comments
. Legit RMT should be legal
. Owning a game should be allowed to be traded at any time (Hopefully this will change in the future.)
^ Doesn't matter anyways because unless its an online game it will always be pirated anyways but allowing legit trading of a game would help cut back on that.
Basically, a German company was taken to court in the EU for selling second-hand copies of popular development software (think things like Photoshop, etc). The case was brought by a British company against a German company (to demonstrate the quasi-national nature of EU law, which is binding in all EU countries). The contention was that the EULA of the software explicitly stated that the software was not owned by the users, and as such the Right to Resale (which is enshrined in law in every EU state) did not apply so the German country were selling something that wasn't theirs to sell.
The court eventually ruled for the German company. Firstly, they said that no EULA could restrict EU citizens from their near-constitutional Right to Resale. Secondly, they made clear that when a person purchases a copy of a piece of software, whether it's physical or digital, they not only own that software but they also own the license key and any peripheral services provided by the software maker (ergo, software makers are not allowed to domesticate functionality so that they can block resale by blocking access to software functionality or services). The case basically established that software is a product, not a service.
Shortly after that case, Valve changed their EULA to the wording that the French consumer association has taken issue with to depict Steam as a "subscription service" and your game purchases as "rentals" or "subscriptions" rather than product purchases. The problem Valve has moving forward is that EU courts tend to compare the wording of an EULA to the perception of the transaction from the consumer's perspective; Valve says Steam is a subscription service, and the games you have are subscriptions, but is that how it appears from the consumer's perspective? The short answer here is: no, it isn't. Steam presents game PURCHASES, not game SUBSCRIPTIONS. Indeed, within the ecosystem the word "subscription" is used in specific instances to refer to specific transactions. They'll also consider case law: are Valve in breach of the previous ruling regarding ownership of software and right to resale? Again in short: yes, they are. Valve have purposefully attempted to block EU consumers from their right to resale - whether that covers the Steam account as a whole or the specific pieces of software on the account.
This case is the product of a multi-year, multi-agency investigation into Valve, who are also being investigated for their tax arrangements in the UK, involving British, German and French consumer rights associations. The French would not be bringing the case without considerable weight behind them; EU consumer groups rarely if ever take large corporations to court unless they are a good deal certain they will win (unlike the US, where test cases happen all the time). Given the case law involved, it's highly likely that Valve will lose the first round. There will then be a few more rounds as the case is passed through to higher courts, until eventually it gets to the European Court of Justice.
Regarding the nature of regulatory law, any product or service sold by any company to an EU citizen must abide by EU law. If you sell a product or service in the EU and you do not comply with EU law then your are a fair target for legal action. Regulatory law is not based on where a company is located but on where a product is sold and where the consumer is located. The same is true in the US, so I have no idea why everyone is acting so surprised about it.It is cut and dry: If the service or product is being provided to a consumer based in the EU, then the Chinese company has an obligation to abide by EU regulatory and consumer rights laws. The law is very cut and dry about it at this point, but what ISN'T cut and dry is enforcing the law. It's hard to enforce sweeping regulatory laws on smaller companies and companies operating from outside of the EU. That's why EU consumer rights groups operate at the top end; they target larger companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Valve, Apple, Samsung, etc) because it has a top down effect and the courts can hand down far harsher terms and punishments that psychologically impact the behaviour of the rest of the market. The EU can (and frequently does) block the sale of or access to products and services provided by companies who reside entirely outside of the Union, and EU courts will happily hand down billions of Euros in fines (see Microsoft and Google) should companies persist in refusing to comply with EU laws or court rulings.
Moreover, the thing about PHYSICAL being more expensive than DIGITAL is so bogus. Just look at the console games right now, where the prices of both physical and digital are EQUAL and in some cases the physical copy is even cheaper (WHY???). And those few developers still selling games for the PC in physical form do the same - both digital and physical copies are equally priced...
Let me ask you a question.
If you have an hard copy of FIFA 15 and go down to Gamestop do you need permission from EA before you can sell it?
If you have a car and go to your local dealer are you allowed to sell it or you need permission from Ford (or whatever car brand you own) before doing so?
Why Digital Goods should be any different?
France is not reinventing the wheel, these are laws that existed since the dawn of our civilization, it is indeed the Companies that are trying to be clever thanks to the fact there are not specific laws that deal with Digital Goods yet.
Well now there are, and Digital Goods should be treated on par with Hardcopy Goods, it's a no brainer.
If you buy something it is yours and you can do what you like with it, end of.
When some other country or government tells them they can't do that and to respect their laws of I.P. infringement, they just laugh and say, "That's a capitalist concept! We aren't capitalists, we're communists. Anything made by anyone is open to use by anyone." And the grieved company has to just shrug and say selling our product to a billion people is worth this thievery because they can't sue the company performing the theft. These corporations dealing with China are basically robbing their (and the rest of western society's) future for an immediate fractional bit of profit.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
What has been law until now is that you only own a license to play the game,you never own the game.If they change it to allow you to actually claim you own it,then what happens to that copyright material,you would own that as well,no way is that ever taking off the runway.
The only curious thing for me is to know how they plan on skewing this to make it seem plausible the purchasers actually own that entire product which contains the game's coding.
This is going to be a nice settlement,Government gets some nice Christmas money,Valve gets invited to the Christmas party,everyone is happy opening presents.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
fudge your meaningless borders
Sway all day, butterfly flaps all the way!
.. it may not even come to that, as i have no doubt that it will be appealed against.
1) A government does not have the right to regulate the entire Internet.
2) A government does have the right to regulate the portion of the Internet within their "digital borders".
3) The entire Internet is within the digital borders of all governments.
That is a logical contradiction. At least one of those must be false. Pick which one.
In many lawsuits the primary reason that someone is targeted is because they have a lot of money. There's no money to be made in suing someone who was about to go out of business, anyway.
You say that this is based on a case where company A sued company B to force company B to stop reselling company A's software. But the Valve case isn't about that at all, unless all that it is asking is that people be able to sell their Steam accounts in their entirety. If Valve is being sued to force them to allow transfer of individual games within an account, then company A is being sued to force company A to participate in reselling company A's software.
So you don't think it will hurt game developers at all if n people buying your game means that only n/2 buy the game from you and pay you for it, as opposed to all n people pay you for it? I'd say that cuts your revenue in half.
Less revenue expected from making games means money spent making games--both lower quality games and fewer games. And that's supposed to be a good thing?
Let's suppose that I want to sell a game online. My game is illegal in Doesnotexistan, so it's impossible for me to comply with the Internet laws of Doesnotexistan. So I need to make sure that I'm not selling the game in Doesnotexistan in order to comply with the laws. How do I do that?
Is it possible for me to sell my game on the Internet to people outside of Doesnotexistan without violating the law? And if so, how? I'm only selling a digital copy, not a physical copy, so I'm not mailing anything to Doesnotexistan. I never set foot there, hire no employees there, and have no buildings there. I don't translate my web site into Doesnotexistanese.
But the Internet being as it is, that doesn't stop someone from Doesnotexistan from coming to my web site and buying my game. If I try to block IP addresses for that country, he'll just use a proxy server and now I think he's coming from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Am I in the clear, or does the government of Doesnotexistan have the right to come after me for violating their laws?
The real situation is that there is not one Doesnotexistan, but tens of thousands of them. How do I comply with the laws of all of them? I haven't even heard of most of them. Most of them write their laws in languages that I don't understand. If merely putting something on the Internet means that I have to comply with all of them, that would shut down the Internet entirely.
What sometimes happens in cases like this is that you don't get in trouble until you attract the attention of regulators. Numerous and broad regulations mean that everyone is always in violation of many of them and there's no way around it. Prosecutorial discretion in choosing who to prosecute has then left the domain of law entirely and is purely about politics.
Steam (and the account used to access it) is a subscription service. There is no right for resale or transfer.
The games that are purchased via Steam are owned by the user, and can be transferred.
The issue is that when the account is closed, access to the games is also lost. This results in a situation where the customer is denied access to their own goods. This is the issue that is in violation of the law for the EU.
But this is not China, this is the European Union and if you're here as a foreign company that wants to do business then this foreign company has to obey the European law or don't do business here.
Again:
The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that publishers cannot stop you from reselling your downloaded games.