COH Mythbusters

There's a difference between the People's Republic of China (China), and the Republic of China (Taiwan).

BAH! Mere legal mumbo jumbo!


FREE TALOS! NOW AND FOREVER!

What, exactly, is the law regarding other dimensions? Can we just invade them whenever we feel like it? Do we need a formal declaration of war? Can the Rikti have Nemesis put on trial by the Interdimensional court for war crimes? For that matter, what exactly constitutes a war crime, when you're at war with another dimension populated by what are, for all intents and purposes, aliens?

Or, for that matter, a dimension populated by yourself.

Does that count as a civil war?

If I were a lawyer on such a case, I could poke a bunch of holes in this. I will say, though, that EULAs have consistently been upheld by the courts, with the only exception I know of being when the EULA was not accessible. (e.g. A EULA inside a box stating, "By opening this box, you agree to...") One argument is that by agreeing to the EULA each time you sign in, you are effectively "electronically signing" it. Another is that the fee covers the gaming experience, but by providing hosting services for your creation, it is essentially "work for hire" in that what you are creating is at the expense of my resources. Would it fly? Maybe, maybe not.

I won't lie, there would certainly be a viable claim of unenforceability of the EULA if it really got ugly, and if I were a lawyer for the player, I would immediately trot out Title 17 Section 204a (yes, I have read it), as it is very compelling. But I can guaran-damn-tee you one thing, and that is that with IP lawyers being very expensive and copyright law being notoriously hard to navigate, especially in new digital ways such as these in which there is no precedent, unless you've got lots of money to burn, I could simply beat you by outspending you.

These statements are in direct conflict with each other. Note carefully that this does not specify "Member Content, other than publishing rights..." I promise that any lawyer or judge who looks at the EULA will immediately see that it is claiming IP rights.

Here's food for thought. These cases almost always have less to do with "black-letter law" and more to do with who has the better lawyer that can figure out clever technical ways to show that such a contract and the law are not in conflict at all, or if necessary, to simply figure out a way around the law. The agreement you are agreeing to is pretty clear and unequivocal. If all things were equal and a player and NC Interactive had equally competent lawyers, I might agree with you that the EULA would be overturned. In the real world, though, I know that NCsoft has orders of magnitude more resources they can throw at this than even a player who is moderately wealthy. And in the real world, I also know that when there is a non-trivial amount of money at stake, companies tend to do really stupid, greedy things.

Send the cops in, then, because that is exactly what the EULA is doing. If you know of a specific precedent of the outcome of a EULA vs. copyright claim lawsuit, do tell.

What rights are those? I want to see a citation for that. In the U.S., to my knowledge, there is no such thing as nontransferable "creator rights," unless you're talking about non-related "moral rights" like the right to claim authorship and the right to not have someone alter your work and keep your name on it against your will, which are irrelevant here. This myth is about you taking their intellectual property, not them taking yours.

Again, transferring a copyright is like selling a car. The only circumstances under which you can "reassert or reacquire" it is fraud or changing the law. I am not a lawyer, but I do keep up with this stuff pretty well (and do geeky things like read copyright law), and I have never heard of these non-transferable rights. There are plenty of court cases on record, however, where artists across various media have had cases of extreme seller's remorse when they sold out for a few pennies and a publisher or promoter buys a Caribbean island with the profits.

And most importantly of all, the takeaway from all this still holds very true: Never, ever, ever put anything in the game that you even remotely think you might want to commercialize someday. Resign yourself to the fact that anything you create in the game, you are irrevocably giving away for free, because for all practical purposes, that's exactly what you're doing.

I hate quoting, but for the morbidly curious, here is the relevant section of the EULA under which "client modification" would fall:

It pretty clearly modifies how the executable runs. It doesn't modify the .exe directly, but if you take a RAM snapshot of the game running with a client mod and without a client mod, you'll have two different images as a direct result of your tinkering. That would be enough to count as "modify."

I included the second part because it's a nice fallback for NCsoft if they want. The truth of the matter is that they don't have to have a reason to ban you, they can simply flip the switch, say, "see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!" and you'd have no recourse. So even if what you think is a client mod and what they think is a client mod differ, they have expressly said that they consider editing in-game images (which include "map patches" and the Splasher utility) against the Terms of Service, and if not by one, most certainly by the other section above, they could take action up to banning you for it.

But again, I'm not trying to scaremonger people here, I wholeheartedly don't think they would, especially without some kind of big warning, since these utilities are so popular. It would be a PR nightmare and we'd have another Enhancement Diversification on our hands. Oh, wait, that's not what I meant...

From history, I think a cynical but accurate definition of war crime would be "losing a war" to the West and/or its allies. To be fair, other regimes don't need to bother with the pretense and go straight to execution if they'd won.

Without knowing more specifically what you're referring to, the life story of Siegel and Shuster would disagree with this.

Our EULA is freely available online and you don't need to buy the game to load the client and see it either.

You're right. I meant EULAs in general, that is my fault because I was not clear at all on that point.

But at the same time if somebody buys CoH without going online and reading the EULA then they never agreed to it. They get home and open the box and they don't like the EULA and all of a sudden they can't take it back to Best Buy(or wherever it was purchased) because the box is open. That isn't right. The EULA should have to be agreed to before the sale even happens. That is the most fair solution for the consumer.

It gets more complicated if the person is a minor. some states do not allow a minor to sign away any rights, or go into a contract agreement with anyone. Will Ncsoft decide to not let minors play their games in these states?

No, you can't.


No way, not even close. Work for hire is not a colloquial term: it has a fairly specific meaning. While there is some grey area that has been litigated, I believe you would be laughed out of court if you attempted to argue that a customer *paying for service* was actually operating as an employee of NCSoft.

Title 17 Section 101 contains the definition of a work for hire for the purposes of copyright:


That's also unlikely, this doesn't make it past summary judgement unless I get a judge that is suffering from a brain tumor.


Except the EULA goes on to state that where that is not possible a different set of conditions apply.

Without that escape hatch, the EULA would be no more enforceable than if it were to say:

By submitting Member Content to or creating Member Content on any area of the Service, you acknowledge that you are no longer protected by the laws of the United States of America and can be summarily executed by NCSoft for typing your password wrong.

It is *literally* that ludicrous.


Technically, then, murder is not against the law in this country either.


This particular situation has never been tested to my knowledge, because no one is stupid enough to attempt to test it.


I don't know how you could have read section 204 and not read section 203. Section 203 specifies under what conditions exclusive transfer of rights can be revoked or terminated by the original author. These rights cannot be transferred contractually as with copyright rights themselves: it can only be passed on by act of law, which is essentially the case where it transfers to my estate or is transferred as part of my assets during a situation like bankruptcy.

But I cannot otherwise transfer those rights, nor can I be compelled to give them up contractually.


Once again: this is black letter law. Anyone asserting otherwise is manufacturing ambiguity where there is none. If I don't explicitly transfer my rights, Federal law doesn't recognize the transfer. NCSoft doesn't even have a case to make: they cannot say "I know what the Federal Copyright statute says, but my EULA says something different." Basic contract law: contracts specifying illegal or impossible conditions are automatically unenforceable.

NCSoft's attorneys are more aware than you are, because they specifically left escape hatches designed to ensure their EULA is *not* unenforceable under US law.


For those that are interested in this subject, this is the best relevant example I can find on the subject of author rights over and above copyright owner rights:

Marvel vs Simon. Although this judgement involves some fairly subtle legal reasoning surrounding the issue of estoppel (in this case, the Appellate court ruled that a settlement which includes a declaration by an author that a work was actually a work for hire *doesn't* preclude that author from revisiting the question of authorship rights when attempting to assert a right that didn't exist at the time he surrendered that right), it is noteworthy for demonstrating in an actual court case an author attempting to exercise the rights granted in section 203: namely the right to revoke an exclusive transfer of copyright by the author, overriding contractual agreements to the contrary. In fact, the appellate court said something more significant: it said that even if an author claims in a settlement that they did the work as a work-for-hire the author can challenge their own assertion when it comes to attempting to assert rights which did not exist for the author at that time. In other words, the court recognizes that the purpose behind copyright law (or parts of it) are to protect authors from being strong-armed into giving their rights away to cheaply (the decision states that rather specifically). As a result, the court's view was that if copyright law grants a right to the *author* and not just the *owner* an author has the right to attempt to assert their authorship to gain those rights, even if he was asked to surrender those rights earlier as part of a settlement agreement.

A summary of the decision is here.


Again: this is some of the blackest of black letter law: you cannot be asked to surrender ownership of copyright without a written and signed agreement unless you are operating as a work-for-hire, and work for hire always requires actual employment in some capacity as a mandatory condition.

As I say whenever this issue comes up: "How much are you willing to pay that you're right?".

If you want to force the issue, you certainly can win... if you have many thousands of dollars to spend to do so. If you're unable or unwilling to go to that level to assert your rights, then it's just best that you do not create any characters that you intend to use elsewhere on any online service of this nature anywhere, ever.

While in theory, rights are universal, in fact they actually only belong to those with the means and intent to defend them. Without such means, your best just playing it safe and not forcing the issue to begin with.

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Ah, but in the very unlikely case that 1) you find yourself making a commercially successful property based on one of your CoH characters, which does not use any elements of the game's background, 2) NCSoft decides to take you to court despite the massive bad publicity this will cause and 3) they trow all their money and lawyers behind the suit in a specific attempt to shut you down, *then* you'll be sorry you haven't listened to TonyV!

What about those of us who have copyrighted characters that thought it would be fun for a lark to reimage them in CoX and have them chasing people down the street yelling "COME BACK! I JUST WANT TO HURT YOU!"

Myth: Hero One was lost to enemy action.
Truth: Portal Corporation stated that the "portals collapsed", and while Statesman was able to gather the manpower to assault the Rogue Isles, and Nemesis was able to assault the Rikti Homeworld, Portal Corporation was never able to find out the fate of Hero One, even though Rikti have defected. How is it that Nemesis can develop a portal to the Rikti Homeworld, but Portal Corp is unable to insert a few operatives to find out the fate of Hero One?

Wait, I know the fate of Hero One. Technically I suppose you could say he fell to "enemy action". Eventually.

Myth: Everything quoted above.
Truth: After Vanguard and Earth's heroes went to so much trouble to destroy/close the Rikti's original portal to Earth to cut off Rikti reinforcements it would have been somewhat counter-productive if Portal Corp (or anyone) re-opened a portal to the invaders' homeworld... and monumentally stupid... and disrespectful to the sacrifices of the 800+ heroes from the Alpha and Omega teams who died in the struggle to close the original Rikti portal. [Source]

Nobody sane would have wanted to re-open a portal to Rikti Earth - that would have invited another invasion before CoH Earth was ready/able to fight them off again (i.e. before the player heroes created since launch had replenished the decimated ranks of Vanguard). Which just leaves Nemesis - the only thing I don't understand is why didn't he re-establish his portal to the Rikti homeworld?

RWZ SPOILERS: Was Nemesis content to wait until the Rikti re-established the portal themselves (in I10)? Did he not have sufficient power to open another portal? Was his original portal just a one-way trip for the Freedom Phalanx automatons he sent through to trigger the war? But then, who can understand the plots of Nemesis...

This works for Jim Tremblor, Stephanie Peebles, Gordon Bower, and Seer Marino as well.

From before the defense revamp: Every time someone levels on an ice tank, it crashes the server.

That small change would precisely accomplish what the reps have said here and what so many people on the forums seem to want it to say or treat it as saying. But again, that's not what it says. In court, any interpretation of intention, anything that the devs or reps posted, and a million player posts here to the contrary will all be instantly superseded by the actual wording of the contract.

So please stop acting like what it says is not what it actually says and what it actually means, and stop encouraging people to act contrary to the contract they're agreeing to, quite possibly to their serious financial detriment. I challenge anyone who doesn't believe me to take the EULA to a lawyer and ask, "Is it a good or a bad idea to commercialize something I've created in City of Heroes?" Better yet, just read the friggin' EULA for yourself with the perspective of, "how can I screw someone with this?" (which is what lawyers are paid a lot of money to do), and proceed at your own peril.

I still stand by my original statement:

Myth: I can use characters I create in City of Heroes in other commercial ventures.
Fact: This is explicitly against the EULA. EULAs are generally upheld as legally enforceable contracts. If you commercialize your character, you are in violation of the EULA, period. NCsoft has specifically written the EULA so that this is true, and barring them rewriting it, no amount of dev, rep, or player opinion will change that. If you choose to violate the EULA, you put yourself at risk for very serious financial damages. You may be able to have the EULA invalidated, but only at significant expense, at least in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That's not arrogance or condescension any more than rolling my eyes at someone whose "opinion" is that the quadratic formula is wrong is. Everything in that statement if fact, pure and simple, period, except for the "you put yourself at risk" part. If you want to dispute that, then the only argument to the contrary I can think of is that there's no risk at all, that the EULA and the law are diametrically opposed, and that it is impossible for a judge and/or jury to come to a legally incorrect decision.

I respectfully disagree on both counts, but hey, feel free to roll the dice, violate the EULA, and see what happens. I just want to make sure you and everyone else understands what you're in for if you do.