“Only use the Program for your personal enjoyment and not for any commercial or political purposes.”
Hear that folks? No making political statements with this zombie game! I don’t care if it features vaccines or pandemics. :)
Oh wow, and they kept all the “this might be a beta” language in there (Section 7). Not harmful necessarily but completely unnecessary on retail release.
They include incorrect cross references to Sections 18 and 19 for User generated content. (The real sections are 17 and 18.)
UGC is the stuff folks make through the program itself (think photo mode).
Fan works is everything else. Keeping in mind that they have not granted anything but private use rights they then say you can make any fan works permitted by law unless otherwise stated.
Since they also make you promise that you won’t infringe copyright, won’t use it for commercial purposes, and won’t make political statements with it, I have a question:
Can you stream it? Legally?
We know that largesse will be in play, but I don’t see a license to broadcast.
Finally they end (Section 20) with an “all rights reserved” concept. How in the world does that work with the “you have rights to the extent not expressly prohibited” given the ambiguities already pointed out?
The fundamentals here are that California and Activision disagree as to what the law requires to be retained/turned over. You can see that with California calling what Activision claims as privileged as merely “attorney involved”.
Similarly, the document destruction looks bad because California is framing the documents as related to the case/complaints, but Activision’s claim is that they are not. Could Activision be lying? Absolutely, but…
…it’s important to note companies destroy documents every day for security and other good reasons, and Activision’s practice would likely be to effect such destruction. Could this be nefarious? Again absolutely, but the act of destruction itself doesn’t make that case.
This piece is wrong in that it completely misses the distinction between “society” and “government” (not to mention in treating a bureaucracy’s unelected officials as emblematic of “democracy” itself.)
That said, it’s a common erroneous conflation and one I may discuss further.
Specifically, Mass Effect has a great deal of faith in “people” (or more specifically, individuals). It does not have really any faith in collective action or institutions (including the military). It’s a very 80s media approach to the question (think Ghostbusters and the EPA).
So the article is wrong on its premises, and from there wrong on its argument and conclusions, but one interesting question is ‘Why?’.
A wild thread here from a famous Internet figure putting a stake in the ground against games and “gamers” because...some folks on a Minecraft server used slurs.
It’s a wild take against a whole industry, but video games (and gamers) get compartmentalized more than others.
I’m a gamer of course, and we’ve talked a lot about industry perceptions/reporting in #VirtualLegality, but it’s always interesting to see games in particular get labeled industry-wide for the actions of a few.
You don’t see the same pushback to YouTube comments, for instance.
Which is all a long way of saying: I never recommend judging entire industries made up of a multitude of different participants, content, and experiences solely based on the bad behavior of a few.
I’d be happy to talk with @tomscott about it sometime.
So, this is a political document (Democrat-led), and should be taken as such, but it is certainly interesting to see a major House committee declare effectively all current Big Tech companies as monopoly abusers in violation of antitrust laws.
Most notably in respect of Apple, vast weight is given to arguments made by various members of the “Coalition for App Fairness”, including that Apple’s 30% is too expensive, and that they are illegally restricting access to their own hardware.
Will be interesting to see what, if anything, the Republicans add here, but it certainly suggests that a Democrat-led Department of Justice would intend to knock some heads in Big Tech (and that Apple vs Epic will get a bit wilder before the end).
A laughable assertion. His authority is expressly limited (outside of prohibiting gatherings) solely to "procedures...to insure continuation of essential public health services and enforcement of [existing] health laws."
Absent a threat to "continuation" there is no authority.
The order, for those interested. Difficult to see how application of the non-delegation doctrine that prohibited an elected official's actions in this regard would permit an unelected official's, but I guess that's for the next lawsuit.
Notably, the court in Certified Questions was particularly concerned with the lack of contours given to the executive's use of power, where here, virtually no such contours are established at all. Instead, the director simply shouts "continuation" and provides 4 pages of "law".