Their host seems to be one in Croatia, which may explain the price.  If the person is from there it's sometimes difficult to get support from the US when timezones are so far apart.

Lets clear something up before this keeps spiraling downward.  Lets clear a few things up.
1. If you have copyrighted work on your site you may be approached with a C&D regardless of anything I do.  If you want to use someone else's copyrighted work then that is the risk you take and there is not one thing I can do or not do to change that fact.

2. IF someone finds their work on your sim site you will will be send a C&D letter or (in the US) a DMCA take down notice.  If you comply and take the work down and you weren't selling the work in the first place the likelihood of getting sued is half past nil.  Total cost is nothing.

Best of luck.

First of all a lawyer will lose his license very fast if he goes around soliciting cases very fast.  That is a major ethical violation of all the state/provincial bar associations that I know of.

That said I will assume you are talking about staff or cotnracted lawyers...
For two reasons, first it tends to be very bad PR to go after people not profiting off your work, or for that matter not depriving you of money.  Secondly they are getting the paysite stuff on a silver platter, they are going to have to do their own damn research if they choose to go after freeware, an expense I don't see them all that willing to front.  Furthermore contrary to what you think it may even garner less attention from copyright holders since they will see the community as self-regulating where it matters.


Being 'commercial' means nothing, the sites would get advertising revenue regardless of if the content was there.  What changes things is if the items are being sold, there is a tangible money being made off the items.

I am sorry if this has been said before but... The very cornerstone of contract law is that is to legally articulate an agreement between two parties.  If there is not an agreement or meeting of the minds then there isn't a contract.  Usually the two sides come together though negotiation; however a usage contract is something quite different.  Since EA doesn't leave the door open for negotiation, the contract really is a take it or leave it one, and since EA is setting the terms of the contract it is their and their only interpretation that sets the meaning of the contract.   If you do however make a good faith effort to understand the contract but for whatever reason what you think the contract means is far different then what the writer (EA) believes it is, all a judge can do (barring parts of the contract being illegal) is declare that there was no meeting of the minds and rule the contract invalid.  This only requires the writer of the contract to refund your money and you to return the software and destroy derivative works.   Never would EA be bound to your interpretation of the contract ever.

Thanks for the great help.  I do appreciate your work.  For the first if you want to let the artist know about the infringement please let me know so I can mark them as contacted.  If you would prefer me to contact them please pm me the contact info so I can get a hold of them.

The pay section at the bottom of paintings seems to be all Salvidor Dali's work witch almost all of it still under copyright and will be for some time.  I will get a hold of Artists Rights Society that manages his estate's copyrights.

Thanks again.



Understandable and no problem.

I think you misunderstood what I said.  I am not claiming anything negative about the lawyer, what I am saying is that you may have misunderstood what he was saying since if he did say it as you claimed it would be extremely irresponsible.  It would be the equivalent of a doctor saying they can cure a specific form of cancer or major disease in every situation.  You don't need to have a medical degree to know that if that is said it would be pretty irresponsible.


Big dogs?


That would be a good example of the kind of people whom would probably want to know that people are using the work in a commercial manner.  If you have any links to her work on TSR I would a love to put together a email for her showing her the infringement and offer any help I can provide (in my capacity as a non lawyer) to protect her work from abuse.

Yes you hit the nail on the head.


Thanks I will sure to try to keep everyone up to date.

Sorry from the delay in posting I had a lovely 16 hour work week.


I am not nor have ever claimed to be an attorney, I am however a paralegal (though working to be able to take the bar exam), but even if it does it would be unethical for me to give unsolicited legal advice lacking full knowledge of the situation.

I really don't know why you are going down that track, this specifically has nothing to do with EA.  What it is about is finding other copyright holders that will do what EA won't and demand take down of their work.  EA really has nothing to do with this.


Your copyright lawyer would have reckless, I can only assume you misunderstood the lawyer.  The problem is he isn't here and you are so it's quite hard to ask questions as to see what he truly means.   You got to remember there were some VERY smart and talented lawyers defending both Napster and Kazaa on their copyright claims on far shakier leagal ground (contributory infringement) then direct infringment we are discussing now and they failed.  Regardless images in this case are being sold in these collections.


I don't expect you to stop what you are doing, if you feel that what you are doing now will stop them, by all means go ahead but it sure as hell won't make their lives easier having to deal with artists demanding their work removed.


This is really starting to sound like a pout.  I will let them know of the infringement and point to the offender.  They do the rest.


This has nothing to do with EA.


Seriously if your bother and sister owed $200,000, which is a heck of a lot of in back taxes then I am certain that more then one person knew about it and likely the IRS itself already knew.

A C&D is a template letter, it takes about a minute to complete for a staff attorney.  When someone is profiting off of their work you will be surprised how bulldoggish artists will turn.   If you approach the right people, something will be done.


First of all you don't need to be a lawyer to create a C&D, it's not a legal document, it's a warning.  But licensing agencies have staff attorneys to handle that and often even have sections devoted to infringement.   The difference between a place like Imagenetion and a payware creator is one is doing it for commercial gain and the other as a free service.  That makes all the difference in the world to someone who charges money for their work.


They are.


This is just plain untrue.  Please cite a case.


I have spent about 1/10th of my career in court, apparently you seem unaware that the job of the court is to uphold laws.  But I would love to see the case where a just thew out copyright law.  I don't believe you fully understand the law if that is what you believe is happening.  Again if you have the case in question I would be happy to explain it to you.


There is only so much you can do in a contract and it requires explicit acceptance in order to be enforced.  You cannot just say someone is bound by a contract you need to though action (be it a signature or installing a program on your hard drive).  Secondly you cannot assign putative damages though a contract, which means you are bound to injunctions and actual damages.


Absolutely they have been tested and largely they are a mixed bag.  Legal in concept, however parts (for example bundling of software) of them have been invalidated as they abridged the users rights under the law (in that case the doctrine of first sale).


I don't know how you expect me to look anything up with no information on it.


I believe you are misunderstanding what is going on.  Mis-using software cannot be tried a copyright infringement since they legally own the software (unless .  Had they not owned it they wouldn't have been bound by the EULA.


The attorney would be wrong:
Novell v. Network Trade Center 25 F. Supp. 2d 1218 (C.D. Utah 1997)


Contracts exist within the law and not above it.  


The contract really was on the sidelines, what the majority of, and the most severe parts of the case arise out of the DMCA anti-circumvention features.


They didn't even try to argue the case on fair use grounds.  The case didn't even really go into "traditional copyright" per se but rather a lot of the new protection features of the DMCA.  While there are some exceptions unfortunately and for some stupid reason fair use really doesn't carry over quite the same when have access controls.


I have no idea what you are trying to say here.  I maintained all along that the paysites using copyrighted work would not fall under fair-use no more then a poster manufacturer would printing posters of copyrighted works.


What they did was allready illegal under DMCA even if they had not agreed to the EULA.  The EULA is the quick fix, it's the copyright claim in the form of DMCA that has the teeth.



The problem with that is unless you know the person is not paying taxes on the site there is not much you can do much.  It's not as if it's impossible or impractical for them to pay taxes on the earnings.  The IRS and government is going to need some solid proof before they would look into it.

Parody applies only to works that carry commentary and by definition is an imitation (ie a derived work), not a copy of the work.

Fair use however has some very specific tenants to it:

The commercial selling of objects derived or containing artwork satisfies none of those tenants.  In reality it's the equivalent of printing posters of the works and selling them to be bundled with a furniture set.   Being digital does not change that.


I have actually worked awhile in this field while, this may be true for armature artists but it's not the case with professional ones and certainly not ones under distribution contracts.  Their income is typically derived from the sale and use of the artwork and having the image infringed will dilute the value of the work.  Secondly a professional artists are under contract for exclusive distribution of their work to a media company, "letting it go" would breach that contract.


In the US at least only works earlier then 1923 are guaranteed to be free of copyright and anything created after 1977 is automatically copyrighted for life of the artist plus 70 years.  Of course copyright doesn't apply to works done by the federal government but I doubt you would see much of those.



Actually it's really not all that hard when you know your art.  You can date a photograph or painting by style and medium and 1923 is a long time ago a lot has happened in the art world since then.  What I plan on doing certainly doesn't prevent doing the same thing over clothing designs, it's just painting and photography is what I know.  If you know clothing and design and would like to help that is cool too.



No one said this would be easy, but as the saying goes many hands make light work...  Think of the psychological impact of payware artists having to deal with even a few C&D letters, DMCA take down notices and such and being forced to rework their content every time.  I think that is a very powerful tool for the cause.


I am not sure if you are talking about sales or income tax but...

Problem with sales taxes in the USA at least is that under currently law (they want to change this but it's not moving very fast) they are only obliged to collect taxes in states they conduct retail business and being a virtual business they can claim they have no retail location in the US.  In these cases it's on the buyer to pay the sales tax when filing income taxes.

As for them filing their earnings on income tax some may many more probably don't but short of getting their tax filings it would be impossible to tell.

I thought I would bounce an idea off of you guys.  It's pretty clear that the payware guys have very little respect for copyright and it goes beyond just EA's copyright.  After looking over the some payware sites I have noticed a lot of images in the form of paintings appear to be either photos of still in copyright real paintings and photography.  Basically what I was thinking is, putting together a group of people to essentially scrutinize payware works and attempt to find the artists and licensing agencies of any work in the payware and tipping them off to the copyright violation that in all likelihood they were unaware of.

It seems that a lot of these payware artists live in some sort of fantasy world where they can take whatever the hell they want from anyone yet they will cry when others do far less to their work.  Time for your medicine.

From what I have read, the university thing is a film or media program that is using the Sims in their curriculum.  Since the work that is created could potentially be used to promote the school they would need clear and clean copyright on all of the content to prevent getting sued.  After getting EA's permission to use the game in this manner the next big hurdle would be finding a pool of copyright clean addons and I think that is where this agreement comes in.  If indeed that is what is going on I doubt we have much to worry about as I doubt they would care much about what happens to the content outside of the university.

Quite honestly I feel about the same about them as I do idiots that sit double parked in disabled parking in the grocery store selling bootleg DVDs out of the back of their car.  Just because there are idiots out there willing to part with their money on something doesn't mean what they are doing is moral, legal or useful.

Not to mention (d) They don't want to fuck it up.  These cases aren't going to be clear cut and failing on the first case can spell serious problems if not disaster for any subsequent cases.

There is of course option number 3:
Strategically hit the 10 largest and most popular abusers.   Once injunctions have been granted against these sites the rest will probably cave rather fast with simple C&D notices or DMCA notices to the ISPs.


Actual damages really aren't all that important, what is however important is getting an injunction filed against the site.   Regardless in the US at least you can file your court and lawyer costs under actual damages.

However I suspect if they do sue these places the arguments would likely hone around the fact that selling the objects is unfair competition and dilutes their trademarks.  Using tools developed under their R&D dime to create commercial content that competes directly with their object booster packs.  Not to say that would be an easy case to prove, but I believe it is doable.


It's very hard for companies to just disappear when they have fixed assets (the content itself as an asset).  When a company goes into bankruptcy they have to auction off all of the company assets otherwise they could go to spend some time in club fed for embezzlement.  The best content could be bid on by EA itself (since really it is only them they would be of any use to) and be sold in object packs, expansions, etc themselves.