The New End-User License Agreement is Unacceptable

[Vanamonde]

Please don't accuse each other of dishonesty or trolling. It just leads to arguments. 

[KerBlitz Kerman]

2 hours ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

7.7 Reverse engineer, derive source code, modify, decompile, disassemble, or create derivative works of the Licensed Application, in whole or in part.

Isn't that how modding works??!!

[regex]

1 hour ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

Isn't that how modding works??!!

We're not allowed to talk about that on the forums but, yes, that is the only way to practically mod the game to introduce new code.

[KerBlitz Kerman]

So surely they ought to change that considering the hundreds of thousands of KSP mods.

[linuxgurugamer]

2 minutes ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

So surely they ought to change that considering the hundreds of thousands of KSP mods.

You are joking, i hope.  The number of mods is in the low to mid thousands, not hundreds of thousands.

and it is possible to write mods without decompiling the code.  I should know, I do it.

[KerBlitz Kerman]

That was an estimate counting all sorts of patches and is probably in the hundred thousand range.

*The s was an typo!*

[linuxgurugamer]

3 minutes ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

That was an estimate counting all sorts of patches and is probably in the hundred thousand range.

*The s was an typo!*

I still doubt that number.  Not counting patches which a person wrote for themself, I stand by my original number.

look at Spacedock, Curse, and this forum.

Edited September 26, 2017 by linuxgurugamer

[stibbons]

1 hour ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

Isn't that how modding works??!!

Not really. The vast majority of mods work with a public, published API, which is documented at https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/api/index.html

[Ty Tan Tu]

Reading through most of this it seems they are just trying to protect their intellectual property. You can't install 10 instances of KSP on your computer and then share out your hard drive to everyone in your dorm so ten of your friends each have their own version of the game to play. You can't steal their artwork and audio files and make money on them for yourself. You can't recompile their code and use it to write your own game that you make money on.

Scott Manley is fine making advertising money from his YouTube videos because what he is offering is what is call 'commentary'. There are very specific rules in re-claiming advertising dollars on YouTube. It is not what I do, but I work for a company that does re-claim advertising money from people who post movies or things like the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor, and we re -claim advertising money   I have overheard very serious discussions on whether or not a bad Russian translation of a movie is a violation of the studios rights, or an attempt to make a 'commentary' on the movie. These dissensions are not made lightly.

No one cares if you install multiple instances of KSP on your personal computer for your personal use. To be honest, no one evens knows you have even done that ..  or at least they do not care. - Stream let me install the game three times on my computer.

You can not make money off of the hard work of KSP programmers. You can not make money off of the hard work of KSP artist. You can not make money off of the hard working people who made the KSP audio files.

That is what you are agreeing to.

 

[Zeiss Ikon]

5 hours ago, Ty Tan Tu said:

Reading through most of this it seems they are just trying to protect their intellectual property. You can't install 10 instances of KSP on your computer and then share out your hard drive to everyone in your dorm so ten of your friends each have their own version of the game to play. You can't steal their artwork and audio files and make money on them for yourself. You can't recompile their code and use it to write your own game that you make money on.

This.

This has been the spirit of EULAs since I got into computers in 1986 (and much of the software I bought then was used; EULAs at that time couldn't restrict "right of first sale" because copyright law at the time didn't allow doing so.  "Treat it like a book" was the law).  The legalese has gotten more and more and more restrictive over that time, but the EULA for KSP isn't any more restrictive than most, and significantly less so than that for, say, Photoshop (one of the most pirated software packages of the modern day).  Squad/Take2 have already done the most important thing to protect against wholesale piracy: their software is affordable.

Bottom line is, if you're not distributing copies or stealing the internal IP, a software publisher isn't going to go after you -- not if they have any sense, anyway.  Trying to chase down the guy with copies on two machines that he doesn't/can't use at the same time is a massive waste of resources and has the potential to generate massively bad publicity.  "Software giant sues Podunk man for accidentally installing "Generic Game" twice."  This is not a headline any software company management wants to read.

[Gaarst]

11 hours ago, KerBlitz Kerman said:

That was an estimate counting all sorts of patches and is probably in the hundred thousand range.

*The s was an typo!*

There are about 1100 mods in the mod library I am maintaining, including outdated mods. Say we've been slacking a bit and that a bunch of mods were never released on the forums, and you can bring that number to 2000.

[p1t1o]

Isnt there legal precident for an EULA to be essentially moot anyway? Didnt I hear of some case being thrown out because a judge literally ruled "Nobody reads these" (but probably in better language. Something about a contract having to represent a "coming together of minds" and an EULA, as presented, cannot be expected to do that)?

Also, if it was biased the other way, for the user, the EULA probably wouldnt even exist. Its very presence is biased towards the company. Which is kinda fair because it is there for their protection, not ours.

[jhousen]

On 9/23/2017 at 7:20 PM, T.C. said:

I read license agreements. The license agreement for Kerbal Space Program has changed since I last downloaded the program. The new license agreement is unacceptable. It is ridiculously one-sided in favor of the company. It is an insult to the customers.

I know most of you don't bother to read license agreements. Please read this one. Then tell Squad what you think about it. Companies deserve to be called out when they do things like this.

-TC

@T.C. this looks like a normal eula, what part are you looking at?

Edited September 27, 2017 by Snark
Fixed it for you... you were pinging "tc" instead of "T.C.", that's a different person ;-)

[Zeiss Ikon]

6 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Isnt there legal precident for an EULA to be essentially moot anyway? Didnt I hear of some case being thrown out because a judge literally ruled "Nobody reads these" (but probably in better language. Something about a contract having to represent a "coming together of minds" and an EULA, as presented, cannot be expected to do that)?

Also, if it was biased the other way, for the user, the EULA probably wouldnt even exist. Its very presence is biased towards the company. Which is kinda fair because it is there for their protection, not ours.

I very seriously doubt that a judge ruling that a EULA isn't and can't be a contract would invalidate all EULAs.  License to use intellectual property is never a contract -- your license to listen to music you've purchased isn't a contract and no one expects it to be; it's set forth in copyright law and music publishers don't expect to alter or add to it.  EULAs came about because copyright law wasn't restrictive enough to suit the lawyers once software grew enough zeroes in its annual income.  The lawyers wanted to restrict everything because the technology didn't exist (in the 1980s, when EULAs started to grow) to reliably prevent or even track unsanctioned copying.

And once the lawyers get their hands on something, it takes Congress to pry them loose.  Problem is, Congress is mostly made up of lawyers, so we get a situation where Congress passes something like DMCA (which was mostly designed to incorporate all the restrictions in European copyright law, when the ink was barely dry on the European Union agreement).  Now most of the bad/stupid things in EULAs are part of copyright law.  Worse, the Patent and Trademark Office (and foreign versions of same) started issuing software patents around the late 1980s, allowing a company to protect its property until it becomes hopelessly obsolete (the patent for Stacker's hardware-assisted whole-disk compression expired around 2004 -- when was the last time you saw a Stacker board or Stacker software? Hint: the boards were 8-bit ISA).

[wumpus]

On 9/26/2017 at 4:33 AM, Zeiss Ikon said:

This.

This has been the spirit of EULAs since I got into computers in 1986.

My googling has been weak, but I understand that EULAs are at least 100 years old.  The point was that copyright law wasn't settled and record companies had to license (but not sell) their records to prevent anyone from copying their records (why you couldn't do that with books/sheet music is beyond me, but courts have made stranger decisions).

I'm not that certain that EULAs were all that popular in 1986.  I don't recall seeing any on any 8-bit machine, and only saw them when I moved on to PCs.

[klesh]

Presumably Take-Two Interactive is responsible for the EULA now?

[Curveball Anders]

45 minutes ago, wumpus said:

I'm not that certain that EULAs were all that popular in 1986.  I don't recall seeing any on any 8-bit machine, and only saw them when I moved on to PCs.

For professional software there was EULAs, at least as hairy as today's norm.

But for games there was possibly some text inside the leaflet or box, but that's about it.

The reason is of course that the issue with users abusing intellectual property was limited to rapidly degrading analog copies that couldn't be redistributed very widely, and even less with commercial gain.

Something that changed quite dramatically with the availability of something called 'Internet' expanding to the masses (as in those who didn't work/study at a good university ;))

[The_Rocketeer]

If I'd never seen this thread, I would never have known KSP had an EULA. I mean, sure, in theory it probably had to have one somewhere, but in 5 years of KSP I've never seen it to know it.

[Ty Tan Tu]

On 9/23/2017 at 7:20 PM, T.C. said:

The new license agreement is unacceptable.

I suppose the short answer is, if you find it unacceptable, don't accept it.

[Vanamonde]

19 hours ago, Ty Tan Tu said:

I suppose the short answer is, if you find it unacceptable, don't accept it.

His point is that he already has, in the sense that agreeing to the old terms is carried over to the current ones. 

[regex]

On 9/25/2017 at 7:25 PM, stibbons said:

Not really. The vast majority of mods work with a public, published API, which is documented at https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/api/index.html

When did that show up? I've always used an assembly browser, likely because I started modding around 0.22, and even then you had to dig into the code to figure out what they'd obfuscated (and then speculate widely on IRC regarding why, and it was never a good reason).

[Ty Tan Tu]

4 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

His point is that he already has, in the sense that agreeing to the old terms is carried over to the current ones. 

You are right it does say they can change it without telling you.

Quote

20. MODIFICATIONS.
DEPORTED has the right to modify this license agreement and impose and modify new or additional terms and conditions regarding the use of the Licensed Application at any time. All new and/or modified terms and/or conditions will be effective ten (10) days after publication through the Licensed Application or on WWW.KERBALSPACEPROGRAM.COM. Within five (5) days following the publishing of the modifications and/or additions to the license agreement, the user must inform DEPORTED via e-mail, regarding its non-acceptance of the modifications or additions. Once the five (5) day period has elapsed, your continued use of the Licensed Application will be deemed as the express acceptance of the new or modified terms or conditions. Therefore, if you do not accept the new terms and conditions you must immediately stop using the Licensed Application.

 

[stibbons]

4 hours ago, regex said:

When did that show up? I've always used an assembly browser, likely because I started modding around 0.22, and even then you had to dig into the code to figure out what they'd obfuscated (and then speculate widely on IRC regarding why, and it was never a good reason).

The SQUAD API docs were definitely generated for 1.2, maaaaybe 1.1 (the thread for the 1.3 API is stickied, here's the 1.2 docs, I gave up looking after that). My mod tinkering started around 0.25 - 0.90 and I distinctly recall having nothing more than the anatid generated docs to work with.

Using an assembly browser to decompile and list public interfaces and members is a mildly interesting grey area. Technically decompilation is flat-out wrong, but the public members are designed to be, well, public. I guess it's good that SQUAD are at least trying to make it unnecessary now.

 

Edited September 29, 2017 by stibbons

[regex]

8 minutes ago, stibbons said:

 I distinctly recall having nothing more than the anatid generated docs to work with.

Which were completely inadequate, I might add, and the reason why we used assembly browsers 

8 minutes ago, stibbons said:

I guess it's good that SQUAD are at least trying to make it unnecessary now.

That's a good step, for sure, I'm glad they've taken that route.

[klgraham1013]

Owning the software you buy is so 1990.