Raph’s Website » The better EULA





By N2H

blog · games · writing · music · art · shop · about Raph · contact

The better EULA

October 11th, 2007 (Visited 1262 times) Tags:

While here at Virtual Worlds Fall, I ran into Prokofy Neva, who asked “whatever happened to that GoPets initiative to come up with a rights document?”

Well, the answer, I believe, is over at BetterEULA, where a Wiki has been set up to do research, work on drafts, and so on.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “The better EULA”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Metaplace Forums • View topic - copyright issues? wrote on October 17th, 2007 at 1:15 pm:

[...] issues? I thought I remembered reading something EULA related on Raph’s site…and whatta ya know…http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/10/11/the-better-eula/Might be worth checking out. _________________Hoojib, jefmes, Rodo, Dwalthoror just call me [...]

Reader Comments

Prokofy Neva said on October 12th, 2007 at 1:17 am:
Hi, Raph, I was told by David Fleck who is now at GoPets (he used to be at Linden Lab) that a person has been hired to work on this project part-time and it is definitely continuing. I already submitted a lot of concerns about it, and I will go look at the wiki and see what else needs to be said.
Morgan Ramsay said on October 12th, 2007 at 2:19 am:
Crazy! A comment by Prokofy Neva that excludes the phrase “game gods” or the typical musings of a Second Life fundamentalist. That confirms my suspicion that “Prokofy Neva” is a character role just like Ann Coulter can’t really be that stupid. I’m impressed.
Erik Bethke said on October 12th, 2007 at 5:18 am:
Yep!

Absolutely we are continuing on with BetterEula - thanks Raph for pointing out the link!

I asked Erin Hoffman to be the main editor for the wiki as well as write a lot of the articles.

Erin Hoffman is extremely passionate about the rights of players and citizens in virtual worlds and has an inherently strong sense of justice - after all, she was the author of ea spouse!

We are currently outlining where we need to go, personally I am fairly satisfied that we will figure out the property rights side of things quickly.

It is the human rights side of things that seem so sticky. I *really* want to find a path to due process.

Cheers,
-Erik

http://www.bettereula.com
http://www.gopets.net
chabuhi said on October 12th, 2007 at 6:55 am:
@Morgan - lol
Robert Brackenridge said on October 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am:
As was mentioned in the conference by many, this is definitely one of the most challenging areas young companies such as ours are faced with. Between the EULA and the Privacy Policy (our market is kids…) we are spending a considerable amount of time, and money, on this effort. Kudos to Erik / GoPets for taking this on!
F. Randall farmer said on October 12th, 2007 at 10:04 am:
From BetterEula:

“virtual goods exchanged via commerce should belong to the purchaser to the same degree that real life goods are;”

This is such a non-starter. I guess I should post that there, but years of experience shows that it won’t be worth the effort, again.

Randy
Erik Bethke said on October 12th, 2007 at 5:46 pm:
Randy,

Out here in Asia it has been established in actual court cases that operators of online games have had to replace lost in-game items due to bugs.

Your non-starter comment is the normal western developer side assumption that I have seen for the last 3 years.

There are *so* many examples of *virtual property* in the “real world”:
Starbucks Coffee
Time-shares
Condos
bank accounts
futures markets
I could go on for a substantial fraction of world GDP is in non-physical, ephemeral goods and services that people pay real money for.

-Erik
Prokofy Neva said on October 20th, 2007 at 11:17 pm:
Morgan’s comment is typical of the kind of really troublesome assault that some people try to make on the concept of the avatar. There’s this horrid little conformism at work especially on forums like this where anonymous posters whose real names aren’t known can say stuff like “Oh, you’re being good here and that must be your true self and we approve whereas you’re being bad there and that must be your false self and and an RP avatar and we get to determine what is legitimate and has integrity and what doesn’t.”

Well…No.

Avatars aren’t used merely in MMORPGs, where you write “OC” before a post, literally or figuratively.

My avatar is a legitimate, bona-fide real aspect of my real self. Prokofy Neva isn’t some sort of lame “role play” on some “RP server”. I stand by every single thing he says, absolutely, because there’s no “contradiction” in the way Morgan imagines.

Hamlet nee Linden Au recently did this awful thing (at VW07 in San Jose) where he sneeringly told me that while Prokofy Neva was banned from his blog, my RL person could post on his blog with my RL name. Ugh. Can you imagine anything worse?! Than the idea that some blogmeister gets to pick how you express yourself, and with what — and does this only in the very, very mistaken belief that you “RP an avatar” to make forums posts but if only you can be trapped, shamed, cajoled, whatever into filing with your RL name, you will be “behaved” because of the Google linkage immortality factor. Bleh to that — I don’t play that game.

In this thread, I merely made the point that this whole discussion on GoPets is continuing, as Raph indicated, and mentioned Fleck’s comment at VW merely for informational purposes — but that’s because the huge voluminous amounts of dissenting opinion I filed with Erik’s well-intentioned but wrong-headed notions are all on the record.
Morgan Ramsay said on October 21st, 2007 at 6:54 pm:
Morgan’s comment is typical of the kind of really troublesome assault that some people try to make on the concept of the avatar.

I’m not talking about avatars. I’m talking about your condition.