J. Michael Monahan, an IP lawyer in Chicaco, adjunct professor at Chicago-Kent Law School teaching Video Game Law, is here to talk about the CCP EULA and your rights as an EVE player. (He is NOT CCP’s lawyer, and he wants everyone to know that he can’t tell you what CCP wants or is planning). It’s gotten some attention lately with the botting/RMT scandals that were revealed recently by EN24, among others.

“The Shackles of EVE Online” – the EULA is a list of stuff you don’t get to do.  A EULA is a contract between uou and CCP – they give you EVE, you give money and agree to play nice. It’s the “play nice” where EULAs become an issue.

Contract law: Could they agree? Did they agree? What did they agree to?

The question of “could they agree” covers questions of whether all parties to the contract are capable of understanding it – not insane or mentally deficient, not trading for contraband.

“Did they agree” – does the person have an EVE account? Did you push butan? If so, you agreed. Whether or not you read the EULA, you agreed if you pressed that button.

What did you agree to? EULA, Terms of Service, Forum Rules, Chat Rules, Website Terms of Use, User and Character Name Policy, and Suspension and Ban policy. Even if you didn’t click through to all those things, you’re still bound to it because you agreed to the EULA, and all those other things bind into it. Like Voltron.

Breaking it down, CCP gives you access to EVE, basic privacy protection and limited license to download and use the EVE client. You give them $15 a month, commit to follow the rules of the game and commit not to break the scope of the license.

Do not: Hack eve, decompile the client, rip off EVE client, RMT, bot or be a douchebag. It’s not hard.

Why do people care about RMT? It’s bad for the game’s balance and its economy as well. Beyond that, though, there’s also the fact that CCP doesn’t want isk to have a cash value. The problem with ISK having a cash value means that CCP is an issuer of currency – making them, legally speaking, a bank. That makes it is a huge regulatory issue – it means that the FDC and other national entities step in and make CCP keep enough cash on hand for the player base to cash out all their money at once. It’s a huge set of extra legal hassles, and would cost CCP a lot of money.

Then there’s the fact that CCP might need to close EVE some day. If all their isk has a real value, that just became a bankruptcy – the players become creditors and the company is liable to them.

There’s also the matter of EVE casinos – if there’s an element of risk or chance, do they have to explain to governments why they are an unregulated casino? Again, huge risk and huge hassle.

So why doesn’t CCP just sell isk? It alters the $15 bargain, requires in-game policing, and eliminates gameplay generated by PVP losses, espionage and player scamming.  Every single transaction has to be investigated so deeply, which is just not practical because of the “butterfly effect” – server rollbacks are a lot harder than in WoW.

Player scamming and espionage would be real, legally prosecutable crimes. Scammers are now committing felony fraud.

But what about PLEX? Isn’t that the same thing? No, the transaction is isolated. You buy time, in units of 30 to 60 days, not money, as far as CCP is concerned. Nice legal loophole.

So why not bot? Bots free up time for real life. BUT EVE is a game, not a simulation. Bots throw off the economy, supply RMT operations and interfere with real player activity. You can’t really plan for the botting activity, so it throws the game off for everyone else.

In conclusion, EVE’s EULA is not a burden for the average player, holds no bizarre prohibitions, and offers limits that benefit the player base and the EVE community.  A game without botting, RMT, and people spouting Nazi propaganda is a better game. So learn to love the shackles – they help the game work.

Q&A

Player: “So if I spend three weeks at whatever my skill level is to buy an item, then all of a sudden player kills me, why is that not assault or theft?”
JMM: “I hear what you’re saying – when I say value, I mean value that CCP issued to you. If the action is possible within the context of the rules of the game, you both agreed to follow those rules – so there is no legal implication.”

DNSblack: “Is there a legal precedent for petitioning to be legally reinstated to a game after being banned?”
JMM: “If you were banned under the EULA you agreed to, then generally you can’t fall back on legal means to be reinstated. It depends on the EULA; some are more vague than others.”
DNSblack: “Is the burden of truth on the developer, or the player?”
JMM: “Again, it depends on the EULA.”

Player: “Thanks for coming out and talking to us, it – especially the isk as cash issue – is something I’ve been curious about for some time. Are you familliar with some of the terms for API terms?”
JMM: “You mean the $99 thing? They didn’t want me to cover that in a lot of detail, to be honest. I did some work on a similar but not exactly the same case…”
Player: “My question is that with part of the API usage policy, they wanted charge fee for use based on real money transactions as well as API programs that were taking isk donations. That seems like it’s bridging the isk-to-real-cash issue.”
JMM: “Yeah, I don’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole, but I think that was also reversed.”
Player: “What about in a wider perspective, as microtransactions become more popular?”
JMM: “You’ll find that these are mostly applied to purely cosmetic items or that the items are depreciable. The idea is to generate a steady income stream.”

Player: “How enforceable aside from terminating service, how enforceable is a EULA in a tactical sense? Can a company enforce a EULA even further, in terms of lawsuits or prosecution?”
JMM: “The liability comes to $15. They could sue you for that fifteen bucks, but it’s not worth it.”
Player: “Will you represent my posting?”
JMM: “That would be a violation of public policy.”

Player: “I actually read the page you had up there about you not being a lawyer for CCP and I understand that, but you made some really thoughtful statements which made me think about things. My question is whether you would speculate on if I had in my hangar a bunch of PLEX, and CCP decides to turn off the game. If the currency is time, what happens to the PLEX in my hangar?”
JMM: “It depends on whether you bought them with ISK or cash. If you used cash you might be able to get something; if you paid ISK, you don’t have a chance.”