One step too far?

[Will]

A EULA has never been tested in court. Current thinking is that they are probably worthless.

 

[rynnor]

EULA has nothing about it installing this third party software (it looks like a standard EULA probably used on all their games - a good fifty percent of it looks to be invalid in the UK .

So as it stands I think the situation is analagous to getting a cover cd with a virus on it except in this case the creator of the cd certainly intended the 'virus' to be present on the disk.

If its not mentioned in the EULA or other documentation it seems difficult to see how it could be 'authorised' by the user who doesnt even know it exists.

In my opinion it should have its own EULA prompt - the same as you get one for direct X when you install a game.

The more I think about it the more I think this situation is covered by the Computer Misuse Act...

 

[inactionman]

IANAL, but I do have to deal with an awful lot of legal stuff in my job, and in my opinion it's almost certainly is against the CMA, for the reasons you stated, i.e. no mention in EULA (which have yet to be proven to be a legally binding contract), so you do not give consent for the software to be installed. If it only ran when the game was running, it would probably be fine, but as it runs all the time...

Anyone thought about contacting Trading Standards about this? I have a friend who works for them, it's not his area, but I'll talk to him about it tonight, and see what he thinks.

 

[Xavier]

When you run it, there CD check on the launcher with a progress bar checking the CD. For me this process was taking over a minute.

I've just seen this for the first time this morning with Byms copy of Beyond Div... Every time she wants to run the game StarForce kicks in and checks the entire CD to make sure it's a legit copy. It took about a minute and a half and was using 100% cpu which of course means she can't do anything else while it scans.

Teh lame.

 

[TdC]

in a asside, the new cd by the BeastieBoys silently installs a DRM anti-copy/rip program that runs on both doze and mac. silently naturally means without asking the user for permission. (the beasties say they didn't want the software there, but nm)

thinking on this, I wonder at a few things: the installing will only work if you have 'autorun' active (true). you can circumvent the installing by holding down the shift key when inserting the cd (true). the driver can't install unless you're logged in as administrator (unverified).

register article here

 

[Xavier]

thinking on this, I wonder at a few things: the installing will only work if you have 'autorun' active (true). you can circumvent the installing by holding down the shift key when inserting the cd (true). the driver can't install unless you're logged in as administrator (unverified).

Heh, yep - didn't some guy get sued for pointing that out last year?

 

[Xavier]

Ah, yes, here it is:

SunnComm has threatened Princeton PhD student Alex Halderman with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for exposing a key weakness in the company's latest CD copy protection technology, MediaMax CD3.
The company said today it will take legal action against Halderman for revealing how MediaMax CD3 can be bypassed by holding down a Windows PC's Shift key when a protected disc is inserted.
Doing so temporarily disables Windows' Autorun facility - which many Reg readers have turned off anyway, they tell us - which prevents a small installation app from being launched off the CD. That software installs a device driver which detects the presence of a copy-protected disc and prevents attempts to copy such CDs.

here

 

[Shovel]

That legal action was later dropped. Reassuringly.

For those with a more techie interest in all this, Alex Halderman's write ups of the copy protection stuff was quite interesting (or maybe that's just me): http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/

 

[Vae]

One thing to bear in mind is that Game's 10 day return period excluding PC games does not affect your statutory rights. Therefore if the game does not work on your CD writer (due to the copy protection) it is not fit for the purpose for which it was sold and you have a right to return it. I believe the same thing will apply to the copy protected audio disks which won't work on a PC cdrom and don't have an alternative form for PC's. Of course this has no effect on the whole StarForce issue (which I probably have due to Prince of Persia).