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#1 2019-10-17 20:57:32

N1KF
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Legal status of Everybody Edits Material

Yesterday my interest about EE's legal status was raised when I saw "Everybody Edits Universe™" on the EEUniverse GitHub page. I searched and found that ™ means something is an unregistered trademark. Yet on EE's main page, there's a © registered copyright symbol. Out of curiosity I searched the U.K. and U.S. online copyright listings and couldn't find anything EE-related. Am I missing something? Anyway, I'm just going to assume that it's a valid registered copyright

The terms and conditions are quite flawed. They're very loosely defined at parts, and any malicious owner could change them without warning to ban or delete accounts without refund. Though that probably wouldn't hold up in court, the staff restrictions are a lot flimsier than they may seem at first. The privacy policy doesn't even exist anymore! That said, since the servers will go offline let's talk about legal ownership of Everybody Edits material.

You may not use any of Everybody Edits material, such as avatars, blocks, images, logos, icons, audio files etc. for commercial purposes outside of the Everybody Edits website. This means that you may not copy, distribute, sell, publish, send or otherwise recirculate Everybody Edits material to a third party without the written consent of Everybody Edits. You may not change, revise or replace any of the material found in the game or website, either in its entirety or parts thereof.

The second sentence is unclear. Based on the context I'm assuming this is meant to prevent people from giving EE stuff to third parties to sell. However this is not directly stated. Am I able to upload EE-related content to  archive.org? May I upload old, unusable versions of the game? I assume I can, based off what the Staff have allowed in the past, but this part could definitely be made clearer.

Also, what counts as EE material? The game uses edited sprites from Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, New Super Mario Bros., and old Facebook. Are these fully protected legally?

This includes making and/or distributing alternative clients that connect to the Everybody Edits server or an alternative server. One exception to this rule are clients that help players create better gaming experiences for other players, also known as “bots”.

Is this part even relevant? For years people have released graphic and sound edits of EE without criticism. Even Gosha created his own client edits and he later became a staff member. The terms state "You may not [...]" do this, yet even the staff have done it. I made a C# program that connects to the EE server, but because it's not an official client it breaks the terms and I didn't even distribute it.



Why is this stuff important? The only proper license used for the game seems to be a generic registered copyright, meaning that if in a worst case scenario a bad owner ever gets hold of the EE franchise then that person could use evil lawyer powers to take down things like recordings, asset dumps, or any copies of EE or EEO. (Offending users could also be banned or removed for breaking the terms, but the chance of all that happening while the game is still online is very low.) I hope this matter is clarified.


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#2 2019-10-17 21:06:52

TaskManager
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Re: Legal status of Everybody Edits Material

N1KF wrote:

my interest about EE's legal status was raised when I saw "Everybody Edits Universe™" on the EEUniverse GitHub page. I searched and found that ™ means something is an unregistered trademark

is this the pinnacle of n1kf's pedantry


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#3 2019-10-17 21:17:04

LukeM
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Re: Legal status of Everybody Edits Material

(Note: I'm not a lawyer, and I wasn't the person to put them there, so this is just what I've heard about the subject)

The © just means copyright, it doesn't have to be registered (at least here). You don't really need to include it anymore, but historically you had to include it for your work to be protected under copyright law. Now all work is protected (you don't need to register it or anything), the © just helps make it clear that it's something you shouldn't be copying and makes it a bit easier to make a case should someone copy your work.

As for terms and conditions, they're broad by design. We can't think of every single scenario we'd want to prevent so it's better to write it so that it catches more than is needed then make judgement in a case by case basis for things close to the boundaries. We just don't want to introduce loop-holes which allow people to do things we wouldn't want.

With the sprites based on other games, to be honest I'm not sure, but with EEU we're making sure to make everything from scratch so we don't have this problem.

(See the terms and conditions paragraph, we're fine with some of things that are technically against the terms and conditions, it's just covering our bases in case we're not) For the C# thing that's what the bots exception is for.

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#4 2019-10-17 22:23:52

Kentiya
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Re: Legal status of Everybody Edits Material

N1KF wrote:

Ah, thank you! I've looked for where the grass blocks came from but could never find them outside of a fan game.


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#5 2019-10-18 02:28:27

N1KF
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Re: Legal status of Everybody Edits Material

LukeM wrote:

(Note: I'm not a lawyer, and I wasn't the person to put them there, so this is just what I've heard about the subject)

The © just means copyright, it doesn't have to be registered (at least here). You don't really need to include it anymore, but historically you had to include it for your work to be protected under copyright law. Now all work is protected (you don't need to register it or anything), the © just helps make it clear that it's something you shouldn't be copying and makes it a bit easier to make a case should someone copy your work.

Thanks for the response. I suppose I assumed © is a registered copyright symbol like ® is a registered trademark sign, but that doesn't seem to be the case so that clears things up on my part.

As for terms and conditions, they're broad by design. We can't think of every single scenario we'd want to prevent so it's better to write it so that it catches more than is needed then make judgement in a case by case basis for things close to the boundaries. We just don't want to introduce loop-holes which allow people to do things we wouldn't want.

With the sprites based on other games, to be honest I'm not sure, but with EEU we're making sure to make everything from scratch so we don't have this problem.

(See the terms and conditions paragraph, we're fine with some of things that are technically against the terms and conditions, it's just covering our bases in case we're not) For the C# thing that's what the bots exception is for.

You say the terms and conditions are broad so Staff don't have to deal with edge cases, but that seems to suggest that is hard to draw a line to be drawn between good copying and not good copying. It's not that hard to think up of some principles that could be used to figure this kind of thing out–for example, the T&C currently has a blanket ban on commercial selling of EE material which is reasonable. I don't know what goes into being a staff member, but I assume figuring this out would be a fairly minor task compared to developing and moderating the game.

I think many users trust the Staff to allow non-commercial creative remixing of Everybody Edits, but not everybody will realize this. There may be users with a creative vision of Everybody Edits who wants to make a fun client but get the impression that the Staff are not ok with it. Instead of disallowing this altogether, it may be more productive to request that users get staff permission first. Or even better–find a license that fits the staff's wishes and is more legally reliable, such as Creative Commons.


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