EA Owns your work now, good or bad?

[VampLena]

Im trying to figure out if this would be a bad thing in Sims 3, EA put this part in their Spore EULA, and given the way EAxis is going, I think its highly likely we'er going to see it show up in future games with content creation like Sims 3. Which means All those idiots who run sims paysites are going to be out of business. EAxis lawyers will probaly go after them.

"Your Contributions. In exchange for use of the Software, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Software give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant EA an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Software and related goods and services, including the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions. You hereby waive any moral rights of paternity, publication, reputation, or attribution with respect to EA's and other players' use and enjoyment of such assets in connection with the Software and related goods and services under applicable law. This license grant to EA, and the above waiver of any applicable moral rights, survives any termination of this License. For example, and without limiting the provisions above, if you create a Spore creature and upload it (pursuant to EA's agreement) to an EA partner's site to create articles (such as a T-shirt or a replica), you acknowledge and agree that any other person can make the same or different article using the Spore creature or other assets that you created with the Software without any compensation, attribution, or notice to you."

[Inge]

My policy towards EA using my work has always been like that.  If I do something worthwhile, and EA can make it available to even more players than I could, then I am pleased.

[eevilcat]

There's some interesting wording there, but it doesn't actually state what EA's policy on third party creations/tools will be or how they will enforce it. It just says EA ultimately own the copyright to everything and don't complain if someone else makes money on the back of your creations, so it cuts both ways. I'd hazard a guess that in using the term EA partner's site they probably intend to allow paysites to continue in some shape or form but that there will be some sort of licensing governing them, call it an official stamp of approval. It's much less hassle for EA to have TSR pay them for the privilege of doing what they do as it means EA don't have to employ a small division of people to do the equivalent. I imagine that the sheepboard already sucks up way too much of EA's precious time/resources so it's much easier to license it out to a third party. While the wording can be interpreted as giving carte blanche to redistributing pay site content, it can equally well be turned 180 degrees and gives paysite the right to charge for free content. Ultimately it allows EA to cherry pick the best creations and innovations then resell or redistribute them themselves e.g. in an EP/SP or invidual pay download.

[Zazazu]

In short, EA has always owned your work. Read the current EULA.

If anything, this wording makes things even more clear for sites like TSR: "All your base belong to EA. You have no real rights to your base. Do not bitch that your creations are on our Exchange, because it's our stuff. 'Night."


I really, really like this EULA.

[Inge]

There's potentially more to these EULAs than the paysite issue.  The success or failure of paysites doesn't really affect the vast majority of content creators or their users.  What would be more problematic is if any policy of EA was going to restrict the freedom to create innovative content in general - never mind what EA might do with it after it's made.   For instance, what about the wording of any "reverse engineering" clauses?  While they say we're welcome to make new fabrics to apply to objects, an overstrict reverse engineering policy can spell doom to anything like a SimPE for Sims 3, or the open sharing of its output (assuming someone would go ahead and make it anyway) and leave most of us dependant on the feeble EA content creation tools.

[Zazazu]

I didn't read the whole EULA that came with Spore, so I'm just going off what was quoted above. However.

"In exchange for use of the Software, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Software give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant EA an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Software and related goods and services, including the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions."

This doesn't say anything about restricting the user from creating content or any products that could be seen as reverse engineering. What is says is that they hold the copyright to anything made with their product (nothing new), that they can do pretty much anything with it (not really new, but more explicit) and that they don't have to pay you.

The rest is your basic "our word is law" and examples.

[SJActress]

I think the whole reason behind this EULA is they are covering their asses for taking your creations and putting them in other peoples' games, which is what they've always said they'd be doing.