this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
701 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
2122 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don't know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
There's nothing implicit about "opening the project in unity" that needs to be a trigger for terms to change.
If you make and distribute a game made in unity, then you are distributing some unity IP. You would need the license holder to grant you permission to do that. The terms you agree to with unity are what grant you the right to distribute this.
So this has very little to do with "have you opened the editor lately", and is more similar to when e.g. Dead By Daylight has to stop selling a dlc character because they don't renew an agreement with the rights holders.
That's because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren't talking of using someone else's likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?
Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?
It's not reasonable to just go "the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work", that's just being a chump.