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Towers of Licensing?
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Wandered onto Towers of Londinium earlier. Saw the terms, spotted an oddity.
- You agree to grant to TowersMUX and the administrators thereof a
non-exclusive, non-commercial license to any content you create via the
mediums of TowersMUX or its game website; including, but not limited to,
descriptions, poses, bulletin board posts, wiki pages, et cetera.
Does anyone know what the bloody hell this is in aid of? Because from over here it’s sounding kinda shady.
- You agree to grant to TowersMUX and the administrators thereof a
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Yeeeeah, I’m interested in the game. And I’ve definitely played places where they continued using my writing after I left, with or without my consent. I kind of figured that anything I created was kind of a donation to the game, save the one that lifted from a site I’d been on to use on one that I wasn’t a part, and then lied right to my when I confronted them about it…
But licensing? What? What is that?
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I’ve never done anything quite so legalese sounding, but I’ve created similar policies that basically prevent a player from going scorched-earth if they leave the game. Whatever you contribute becomes part of the community property, basically. Most games do this in practice, even if they don’t spell it out in policy. I do appreciate the non-commercial part of that clause, actually.
I’m not a lawyer, but from what I know of copyright law, “licensing” is the correct legalese term to protect the game against you trying to claim that they’re taking your copyrighted work (which is basically any original character or writing).
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It doesn’t really seem shady to me? On reading it, it just seems to say that they have the right to use anything you create or put on the game or wiki. It’s non-exclusive, so you aren’t losing any right, just giving them one, and it’s non commercial, so they can’t use it to make money or for business purposes.
To me, obvious uses of it would seem to cover situations like:
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You volunteer as build staff. Some time later you fall out with the game’s administration and leave. You cannot demand they delete all those rooms you made, as you have given them a license to use that writing.
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Your character becomes the vampire prince. Two weeks later you vanish from the game and are never heard from again. The staff is allowed to turn your PC into an NPC until they eventually replace them. You have given them a license to do this.
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You volunteer to create a number of wiki pages and help the staff with wiki organisation. You later become uncontactable. The staff is allowed to alter your design, use the template elsewhere on the site, or replace what you did with something altogether different.
So, it is a bit overly formal, but there are definitely plenty of legitimate use cases for having such a clause.
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They’ve just put in writing what most games do/expect already, it’s just that law words seem scary. I’d probably want it to be non-transferrable or based on an existing CC license (probably CC BY-NC-SA) if I were going to be picky.
In the past, people have demanded games remove their work after falling out, so this is just Towers staff covering their ass to avoid the potential, if unlikely, legal ramifications – since you do own the copyright to your writing (if my understanding of copyright is correct, which it probably isn’t, because copyright is hard).
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Having seen people use descs etc. directly stolen from other people/games, I’m a little wary of giving someone carte blanche to use the shit I write anywhere and everywhere they please without even the ability to say ‘Really?’
And given the rise of AI data scraping, I’m even more wary of a clause allowing them to use my writing as training data. I don’t claim to be the next literary great, but the modern world is a total hellhole when it comes to automated copyright theft.
I can absolutely understand wanting to defend against scorched-earth idiocy, but giving the administrators the power to use anything I create on their game wherever and however they please feels like a bit much in this modern era.
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@Evilgrayson They could certainly do a better job of clarifying, e.g., “right to use in the context of the game” or something (again, I am not a lawyer). There’s a philosophical difference between “you can’t take back the toys you contributed to our shared sandbox” and “we can do whatever we want with your content”. My interpretation is they were going more for the former but you could always ask them to be more specific in the policy.
As far as AI goes - I hate it too, but realistically those companies are not respecting copyright claims anyway. They consider anything on the open internet fair game. Unless you’re playing on a locked down sandbox, your content is likely going to get scraped no matter what the game policies say.
@Pavel Generally in the US you have an automatic and immediate copyright to your creative works. That’s why you’ll find that most sites driven by user-generated content (social media, wikis, etc.) will all have a similar clause in their terms of service somewhere. For example, Facebook’s ToS (abbreviated):
We need certain permissions from you to provide our services:
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You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks)
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However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a “license”) to use this content. …Lawyers could debate whether something as small as a MU description constitutes a copyrightable “work”, but elaborate wiki pages, vignettes, etc. would be more likely to qualify.
Of course, in the context of a MU it gets a little murkier. Many them are not on solid copyright ground to begin with (operating in the gray area of fan fiction) and there’s probably (IANAL) some defense in the expectations around the shared nature of the experience.
All in all, it seems unlikely that anyone would go to the expense of pressing a copyright claim over MU stuff, but I can understand why the game runners may want to protect themselves.
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@Evilgrayson I think you’re rather overthinking something that they are underthinking.
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It’s weird but probably not malicious. I’d baffle, as I do at many policies, in a ‘where did the need for this arise’ kind of way.
she/they
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@Tez said in Towers of Licensing?:
in a ‘where did the need for this arise’ kind of way
At least with this, I can kind of see their point, unlike those weird policies that sound like “Every third Tuesday, nobody named Keith may connect to the game unless they are wearing a purple bowler hat.”
We’ve all either experienced or heard about people who build something, code something, post a log, or whatever who then quit/shitfit/get banned and start railing about how the game is still using their work.
And given Towers’ requirement for… extensive explanation and justification regarding stats, they seem more from the old school of WoD MU development.
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Hi, all. Just a quick note from TowersMUX staff to clarify.
As some people here have speculated, the intent of this clause is to avoid situations where players contribute content that becomes a major part of the game, and then become disenchanted with the game and attempt to withdraw it. Most of the time, that’s fine, but we don’t want to be placed in a position where someone is trying to abruptly pull popular in-game locations, wiki content that other players rely on, log files that involve other characters, etc., by claiming copyright violation. We hope that’s not something that’ll ever come up (and we’ll be happy to work with players who no longer want to see their content in-game), but it’s also something that has come up in the past on other games.
To be clear: we do not and will not resell or reuse content created for the game and websites outside the context of the game and websites. (Some will likely get scraped off the wiki whether we like it or not; we’ll try to prevent that if we reasonably can, but the reality is that it’ll happen.) We’ll work on rephrasing item 3 so that it definitively closes off that possibility. In the meantime, we hope this isn’t a deal-killer for anyone who would otherwise be interested in giving the game a try.
Thank you!
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Doesn’t seem like a big deal.
Has everyone forgotten about how WORA once had to change hosts so that it was in Malaysia, where they don’t care about such things, because Nymeria kept threatening to sue because one of her descs was in the ‘tasteless descs’ area? She wouldn’t have won, but the US hosts didn’t want to bother. She was playing, “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride,” and might well have won with that strategy in a smaller world.
I dunno if Towers’ policy would hold up in court, but it might at least discourage such hijinks.
