Originally Posted by schmittyd
so here is a warning to Curse and WI - be very careful with your false pander, you are actually breaking the terms of the open source licences by disallowing distribution by third parties. WM, authors and users have the legal right to file class action lawsuits against Curse and WI, which would result in severe financial losses so please reconsider your decision as who will you be helping if you have to close due to your own greed and misconceptions.
|
Um. Check the law. Copyright and Intellectual property to be specific. You can check the new laws which protect software from reverse engineering etc also. Specifically an author of software has his software automatically copyrighted the instant it is created. Practice states that a copyright notice should be included, but even the absence of that doesn't mean that the author forfieted any copyright rights. It means he/she hasnt granted any of those rights to a third party.
IF WI and Curse wanted to be totally correct with the law, they would get a signed license agreement stating that they had the right to redistribute the software. Without such, basically the sites run at risk of doing something they should not be doing, but a judge may look at it as general practice being acceptable. However, keep in mind if WI or Curse, etc get greedy - Blizzard may put in new requirements for addons that could impact those companies - and we have seen that Blizzard does not want people mandating money for addons.
AS SUCH curses new move to charge you up to 28% of the cost of a WoW subscription will unleash a strom from users of their client, to I suspect Blizzard. Blizzards lawyers I would think will think of some creative way of punishing or controlling such actions, perhaps putting in a clause that any addons can not charge for the addon nor for installation of the addon. In fact I think I will write Blizzard this day about such considering curses gross misconduct and unethical behavior (imho).
Now is a time for WI to shine if they choose to and can get out the client quickly. Lets hope they dont follow the greedy path of curse.