ECA’s Halpin Warns Gamers to Read EULAs
By Shawn on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 8:28 PM PST In Gamer Life, Games Industry
According the Entertainment Consumers Association president Hal Halpin, if you’re not in the habit of read those End User Licensing Agreements that come with your games; you should be.
Halpin has stated that while EULAs are necessary, he believes that game publishers have exploited EULAs to the point where they are often detrimental to customers.
EULAs are a real and tangible problem… Quite simply, they’re out of control… these contracts have become so unwieldy that they regularly infringe on consumer rights. Many would likely be unenforceable in a court of law. Others, consumers would be shocked to find out what all of that fine print actually meant.
The reason for the EULAs existence is sound. Certainly no reasonable person would expect the creator or seller to lose all of their rights in a sale. But neither should a consumer…
I propose that we form [a] working group to address this problem… It needs to be an open and inclusive process… There’s no reason to think that we couldn’t standardize the EULA and create one contract that all developers, publishers, retailers and consumers know, understand and respect. The implications would be broad and the downside negligible…
Actually reading through the EULA for programs is a tedious, time consuming hassle. However, simply hitting “I accept” can land you in an awkward position in the future should you ever have a legal dispute with the publisher.
via GamePolitics
What would help is a list of bad EULAs to shame some companies into improvement.
The Problem with EULAs in general is that by the time your game is installed and you are wanting to play you’ve already purchased it. To then say “do you accept?” is a bit of a no brainer since you bought the game youre going to want to play it.
Its a form of blackmail in my opinion, you’ve already paid for the game now no matter what the EULA says you have to accept or you can’t get what you paid for. Who really wants to spend an hour reading through a legal contract in order to play a computer game? Movies don’t make you read through an hour of legal documents before the cinema will let you enter so clearly theres something wrong with the way computer games are being designed.
I think alot of this started with Ultima Online where customers sued them due to downtime in game, then everybody started to bring in the lawyers to make sure it never happened again. I also remembered a time when I played Asheron’s Call where the servers were down for hours to fix an error in the EULA. I am curious though, I myself am one of those guilty of clicking accept to get myself to that gaming goodness whenever I get a PC game. The EULA is quite an over-inflated document, I am curious to know which sections of it can be the most exploitable. This could lead to allowing things in games just as bad as the Star-Force copy protection, or worse.
i suggest this guy actually TRY reading a EULA.
the last time i tried reading one, i ended up with a bleeding nose, headache and leprachaun related hallucinations!
Should read some MMO EULA’s…. Most of them basicly say you bought this game but we still own it and we have the rights to end it at any time.. everything you do in the game is ours.. not yours and your only barrowing it. but we cant take it when ever we want.