Legal advice - Olivier Hugot 201007

The meeting was mostly dedicated to the legal risk attached to HackIt; and at the end of the meeting we discussed a few other topics; here are the minutes :

2 risks identified :

 * Fact of using real web sites in the game (and possibility of adding layers on top of sites (scan/hack animation, etc)) :
 * There is a possible IP issue with the violation of the terms of use, because we use the web sites for playing.
 * With the plugin, we are comparable to Adblock. It would be interesting to know if some company has sued AdBlock.
 * It’s also interesting to have a look at youtube, who lost some first trials a few years ago, but not anymore.
 * Fact of letting the user modifying the content of the sites. If the user changes the content of a site, for instance writes on a service web site that this service sucks… we have a libel issue.
 * Problem here for us is redistribution. The user should be responsible for his content, but we redistribute the diff to other users so we are part of the process.
 * Our position here should be that we only provide tools to the user, and these tools are not meant to denigrate/liber. On this, we should make sure that our position can be compare to the one of a hosting services, where we are in charge of removing offensive content once we are aware that a user adds it, but we cannot do more than that.
 * On this topic, the plugin solution seems less risky that the proxy solution, where we kind of distribute the modified content of web pages to the users (with the plugin, we only distribute the diff).
 * So, as long as we act as tools providers, it should be ok, but we must be vigilant when it comes to the editorial content we provide to players – not to give ammunitions to companies who could sue us on the basis of our non neutrality on the use of the tools.

Summary and next steps

 * There is always a risk of being sued, but according to Olivier, the risk of losing a trial is limited if we pay attention to the way we do things.
 * In terms of priority of risks, it goes the following :
 * The first risk would be the image (modifying the content of sites)
 * The second one would be the IP (use of web sites for playing, thus violating the terms of use)
 * How to behave in order to maintain an acceptable level of risk :
 * Editorial content that we give to the players : try to avoid making mistakes that would harm us, for instance being to specific about what we ask the players to do on a given web site.
 * Communication will be important to explain what we aim to do (take legal advice on that)
 * If we are informed of a user that damages the image of a company, we should react quickly. The best move might not be to remove the site from the game (creates a unwanted precedent) but to remove the offensive content quickly.


 * First step for development : layers on top of sites, less risky than modifying content.
 * Financial aspect :
 * Obvious but worth mentioning : the more our game is successful (the more pages are seen), the bigger the financial compensation that might be asked.
 * If trial, budget of 5-10k€ for the expenses of the first trial (TGI – tribunal de grande instance), not including potential financial compensation.

Licence

 * Data should be under double licence, creative commons but also AGPL.
 * The AGPL and CC licenses are incompatible (cf http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ), and it's hard to consider the data and the code as completely separated entities. To avoid issues, dual licensing allows to chose which license to apply on a given case, which means that the AGPL would apply when it is seen as associated to the code, but it could still be mixed with creative commons work.


 * The only issue I see with this is the fact that to use external work that is released under a CC license, we would have to obtain the authorization from the author to dual-license it. To check with Olivier.

Game design
If a features of ours is close to an existing one in another game or genre:


 * 2 risks : counterfeit and unfair competition
 * But let’s keep in mind that ideas are not protected, only the way they are developed.

Brands

 * Start by protecting 2-3 main territories (Europe/US at least), and then see how things go. Priority to game brand rather than company brand, if we have to chose.

Company

 * Place of company : at first sight, Olivier does not see major issues in starting in France and then moving to another place such as Canada, there are different ways to do this.