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;
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We sat down and drafted up a new Terms of Service to address the Content Ownership along with a lot of other outdated or poorly worded clauses.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
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
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.