TSR Sharing your infomation!

[Quinctia]

What I love was seeing them crow about copyright in regards to Sherrie's spoof site.  Parody is explicitly allowed in within copyright law.  Or else National Lampoon, MAD magazine, and SNL would have been sued by, like, everyone ever.  They really do not get it.

[mustluvcatz]

 

Never mind.





Silly pumpkin.

[daniyagami]

Pescado: I can imagine 

Atwat seems pretty about to breakdown on the latest screenshots. She seems... hysterical. Delusional.
Hm. I have an idea for a macro 

[KatrinaHighKick]

Dani, I have to ask, where are you from?

Brazil.

NO WAI. I'm Brazilian too! (although living in the US for 4 years now) Judging by the number of members at the orkut communities I know that The Sims is pretty big in Brazil, but it never occurred to me to wonder what they make of this whole paysite thing. I figure most are pro-pirate though 

[littlemisspirate]

EA would be crazy to come down against the pirates.  They know that custom content is what makes the game sell like hotcakes, and if they decided that paysites could enforce their "copyright," a lot of loyal customers would deflect.  (I know I would.)  I figured someone higher-up than the Maxoids (someone on the marketing end) heard about the changes and whacked the lot of them upside the head.

[Missbonbon]

Missbonbon:

And did I miss the e-mail!? I would love to see it, because I'm a nosy one.

 

What I'm talking about is in the latest installment of coconut's screenshots. Atwat was letting all the other ninnies know what to write when emailing forum administrators at file-sharing sites. She posted some (or was it all?) of the email she sent to fileden (she was pretending to be Thoma$$ when she first reported it...how funny!).

I was referring to the e-mail sherrie said atwat sent her. But thanks anyways.   

[Zazazu]

They claimed the new EULA wasnt ready in time to get it into BV but that it would be in all new EP's.  It never was.  It was posted on the main site in regards to the Content Manager and many assumed, falsely, that it was a universal New EULA!  They were wrong. 

There was truth in T$Rs claim over the new EULA (the new flavor was drafted after T$R came over to EA where they met a couple of EA top-honchos and agreed it), and the so-called Content Manager EULA was supposed to be put into all ep's (tho too late for BV).  But it vaporized into nothing.  EA either never bothered with communicating the EULA to the Maxoids, or they changed their equally-grabbing minds. 

Considering that the current EULA is a newer version than the Content Manager EULA and part of the changes included even stronger "noncommercial" statements, I find this hard to believe. Where exactly did you get this information? From Thomass?

[neriana]

Some Maxoids talked about it on the BBS, iirc. I know there was a discussion about it here.

[HeartOFire]

Assuming the paysites had the EULA they want, I wonder if they realize that this means that their ability to protect "their" creations (their is used for purposes of argument, not because I believe it) would not realistically change.

First, to prohibit others from using the creations, most paysites would likely have to retain local counsel in the US or a country of the than that of the paysite.  That costs money.  Now suppose the paysite wanted to go after the PMBD forum and its indivual members or just individual people.  Well, that is funny.  The money and manpower that would take would cost more than most of these sites bring in (that is to track each individual, file against him/her,etc. )  The money expended for the investigation alone would be astronomical.  First, the ISP would have to give up each individual.  This would likely require a subpoena (about $30 per individual). Hell, then the the filing fees alone would likely break most paysites (think about $50 x the amount of sharers).  This won't even count the fees for serving the pleading.

Sorry to go off topic, but I get sick of hearing how paysites want to construe the EULA because the sites think it will give them some sort legal leg to stand on.  In reality,  they should just sit down and STFU.

[Metatwaddle]

TSR and Simfreaks always had direct contact with EA, since 2000. I know because I read several messages from EA staff posted at the "closed for members" area at Simfreaks board when I was there as a creator, before Simfreaks went pay. Simfreaks and TSR had at that time a very friendly relationship. Heather got access to special tools to make furniture and other customizations all provided by Simsplus owner (I forgot his name) who was once EAxis employee, according to her. That´s how Simfreaks and 7Deadly Sims had perfect z channels while most of people were making those handmade. When Simfreaks went pay they had a meeting at EAxis and they were celebrated as a "successfull small business". All of this happened before the EULA changed. At that time Maxis wanted to keep all sites running because this meant, of course, help to sell the game more.
I suppose they still have the same contact and it is not with Maxoids, it´s people from the administrative and develop area. I know I have here, in my country. Maxis always tried to not get involved in paysites discussion because all customized sites helped them to sell the game. It´s also interesting to notice that there is not paysites in my country, all players support PMDB and freely redistribute stuff from paysites, it was always like this here. It is considered illegal by our laws as any other kind of atempt to "claim copyrights" involving anything from games, they belongs to their developers, end of story.

That's good to know, thanks. It seems plausible that they could have contacts working specifically as moderators or Maxoids on thesims2.com, in addition to the things you mentioned. Thomass wanted any reports of piracy to go through Steve to TSR's "friends over there" rather than using the normal report system. So they must have contacts that can ban people from ts2.com, and I doubt the administrative people or the developers could do that (or would know how - it's kind of not their job). It sure sounds like they've got Maxoids on their side too.

[KatrinaHighKick]

Some Maxoids talked about it on the BBS, iirc. I know there was a discussion about it here.

Do you know what they said? Is the thread still there? I try to avoid the BBS... All those sheeple in one place gives me allergies.

[SimARR]

NO WAI. I'm Brazilian too! (although living in the US for 4 years now) Judging by the number of members at the orkut communities I know that The Sims is pretty big in Brazil, but it never occurred to me to wonder what they make of this whole paysite thing. I figure most are pro-pirate though 
[/quote]

SimCredible Designs is a Brazilian paysite. 3 of the 4 artists are from brazil... so I guess that every country has a few greedy morons.

[neriana]

Some Maxoids talked about it on the BBS, iirc. I know there was a discussion about it here.

Do you know what they said? Is the thread still there? I try to avoid the BBS... All those sheeple in one place gives me allergies.

The idea was that EA would be removing "non-commercial" from its EULA. Paysites were all disgustingly smug about it, while people here were a bit worried. One could probably find more information about what happened by searching PMBD, though that sounds like something of a pain, which is why I'm not doing it . (I've had enough of searching for stuff on JSTOR to tire out my search muscles for a while.)

As we can see, instead of giving paysites what they wanted, EA chose to actually make the smart business decision for once and pretend they cared about protecting their copyright.

[KatrinaHighKick]

Some Maxoids talked about it on the BBS, iirc. I know there was a discussion about it here.

Do you know what they said? Is the thread still there? I try to avoid the BBS... All those sheeple in one place gives me allergies.

The idea was that EA would be removing "non-commercial" from its EULA. Paysites were all disgustingly smug about it, while people here were a bit worried. One could probably find more information about what happened by searching PMBD, though that sounds like something of a pain, which is why I'm not doing it . (I've had enough of searching for stuff on JSTOR to tire out my search muscles for a while.)

As we can see, instead of giving paysites what they wanted, EA chose to actually make the smart business decision for once and pretend they cared about protecting their copyright.

Ahh I see... I thought you meant they had said something in light of the recent events.

[daniyagami]

SimCredible Designs is a Brazilian paysite. 3 of the 4 artists are from brazil... so I guess that every country has a few greedy morons.

Not exactly. The owner is brazilian but they live in California. I exchanged emails with whiteshark a couple times and they speak portuguese with accent (wrong verbs and so). I believe they live outside Brazil for some time. This explains why they have a paysite. It is forbidden to get foreign payments in Brazil, we can not use paypal to get money. They probably have double citizenship. To brazilian people, they are not brazilian, they just have citizenship, for our culture is not the same.