Terms of Service Content Ownership Clarification

[501warhead 1796]

Greetings LotC,

 

Sorry for the long delay on explaining what was happening with the terms of service changes. In a complete break of character however I’m going to communicate about something since there seems to be a bit of confusion about our ToS. We pushed out a small change to our terms of service about a week ago that covered a few updates to our privacy policy, which you can find here.

 

The Old

In the process of updating we then required everyone to re-agree to our existing terms of service and privacy policy together. In doing so several players rightfully pointed out their concerns to us privately and on the forums here about a longstanding clause that we had skimmed over and never really questioned related to Content Ownership on lord of the craft. It read like this;

 

Quote

Content Ownership

By uploading any content to The Lord of the Craft, you are handing the copyright ownership rights to us, and permitting us to use that content in other products and/or on the same product as we wish.

This includes, but is not limited to: characters, character names, biographies, lore, images created by yourself and anything created in the video game 'Minecraft. Any content not created by yourself, but uploaded by yourself should be fully credited to the original owner. We do not take responsibility for the content that you upload, therefore, any copyright infringement in your content is your own issue, not the issue of The Lord of the Craft

 

This had been a clause that had largely been overlooked for a few years and largely skimmed over. However, as anyone with a decent pair of eyes can read this clause is pretty terrible – especially for a server that is almost entirely based on creative works provided by players. We received ample feedback on this through forum messages, staff chats, and private dms by concerned (and not in the least frustrated) players. @Tythus Took a look and, as someone with a pair of eyes, also agreed that this isn’t right.

 

The New

We sat down and drafted up a new Terms of Service to address the Content Ownership along with a lot of other outdated or poorly worded clauses. The result is the new content policy as shown below

 

Quote

Content Ownership

By sharing, posting, or otherwise uploading content that is protected by intellectual property rights to LOTC service(s) you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content. If one does not own or cannot grant the rights to said intellectual property it is forbidden to share, post, or otherwise upload this content to LOTC service(s).

 

Under no circumstances will we transfer, copy, or otherwise provide you with a digital copy of any Content created, shared, posted or otherwise uploaded to LOTC service(s). If you wish to appeal to this, please contact us using the details on the contact us page. (https://www.lordofthecraft.net/contact/)

 

We have high hopes that this is the right policy for Lord of the Craft but also understand that with the constantly rotating TOS plus the legal language this has gotten a bit confusing for players, so I hope to shed some light on this.

 

Basically, when you create something you are the single copyright holder (assuming you did such by yourself) and no one else has the right to even host your image on a website or use a character you’ve made in a game. This is somewhat difficult as we allow players to upload images directly to our website as well as create characters for use on our server. In order to alleviate this we have a clause that states when something you’ve created is shared on our services, so forums or game, we obtain a license so that we can show the work on our services. There’s a few other things there that relate to us being able to edit your work and stating that we cannot be responsible for providing you a copy of your work, such as a build, but it doesn’t stop you from downloading stuff you find on our website.

 

The Confusing

Now, there’s one other clause that might be somewhat confusing when it comes to content ownership, as it seems like it covers the same ground. That is the following

 

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Use License

Permission is granted to download or copy any of the materials available on LOTC Service(s) for personal viewing only. This is the grant of a license, not a transfer of title, and under this license you may not:

   1. Use the materials for any commercial purpose, or for any public display (commercial or non-commercial).

   2. Attempt to decompile or reverse engineer any software contained on LOTC Service(s)

   3. Remove any copyright or other proprietary notations from the materials.

   4. Transfer the materials to another person or “mirror” the materials on any other server.

 

This license shall automatically terminate if you violate any of these restrictions and may be terminated by us at any time. Upon termination of this license, you must destroy any downloaded materials in your possession whether in electronic or printed format

 

However it should be stated that this clause applies almost exclusively to LOTC trademark material. These are things like the Lord of the Craft logo, the images we use to make our forums look the way they do, and so on. This doesn’t apply to works that you upload to share with the community.

 

Wrapping Up

So, hopefully that clears up the Terms of Service changes we’ve gone ahead and made in regards to content ownership. It should be noted that within the near future there will be a requirement to agree to our terms before you play the game, as these terms apply across our mediums. We have to do this so that we’ve done legal due diligence to require acceptance before allowing continued usage.

 

If you are still confused or you aren’t happy with the terms still and would like your content destroyed please send us an email at [email protected]. I can answer basic questions here but most I’ll have to direct you to the email for the best medium to communicate about ToS issues.

[IsaaKc 1225]

Property of Tythus Ltd™

[Demotheus 649]

Does copyright even matter when we've sold tythus our souls already? 

[Beordan 213]

Good to see a change. I know there were at least a few loreholders who were so disappointed by the old ownership rule that they skedaddled from LotC.