Soulfire

[Mazster]

My favorite story about Tiggles, here goes..

Tiggles streams GM's -VS- Zibzob exploit guy, holds grand RMT tribunal and QA in the name of justice and server sanctity. Then tiggles plugs the stream with an advert for a (soon to be) commercially available product from which he stands to benefit financially.

This rings warning bells immediately. Lets look at content streaming legality in a nut shell:

1.Game streaming is a public performance of a copyrighted work
2.Unauthorized public performance of a copyrighted work is illegal
3.Everquest original and Kunark are unauthorized, P99's homebrew content does not elevate it in any way, it's still all copyrighted.
4.The copyright holders choose not to enforce their legal rights because pursuing legal action would only result in a cease & desist.

Sony doesn't take P99 to civil court because there's no money to be made. P99 isn't profiting, so Sony doesn't care, taking P99 to court would just cost money and result in a cease and desist order. But as soon as money is made from the content without authorization, everything changes, now Sony has a reasonable basis upon which to sue all parties involved and collect as much money from the stolen works as possible.

So, P99 can fly relatively low with its strict no-RMT policy avoiding the legal banhammer.. but tiggles isn't flying low, he's breaking the law and generating revenue from it. He stands to potentially incur civil penalties should Sony catch wind of the money he's making, and could even drag P99 down with him. Corporations don't like losing money, and they don't like having a highly paid legal team sitting idle while people make money off of their property. Should Sony's legal team see fit, it would take about 1 serious email to shut down P1999 forever and ruin this experience for about 1000 people..

And don't think that just because it hasn't happened that it isn't on the agenda. According to proposed amendments of the criminal aspects of copyright law (http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s978/text) what tiggles is doing, in future, will be a felony resulting in up to 5 years in jail.

Basically, if we give them a reason to come sniffing around, we probably won't like what they have to say. I don't know what sort of contact P99 has received from Sony's legal team, if any, but I can promise you that anybody making money in any way will only speed up the process of getting this whole thing shut down.

If Tiggles truly had what was best for P99 in mind, he would stop generating revenue from Sony and the P99's hard work (and I mean that, Sony worked incredibly hard on this game, and P99 has done the absolute best job possible in recreating the classic EQ experience for our time period)

To Tiggles, there comes a time when every person must swallow their pride, keep their chin up and hold them self accountable for their actions, no matter how in denial they may be. It's not easy, but I promise that once you start down this path, your quality of living only increases in ways you probably never could have imagined. I'm sure when it comes down to the nitty gritty, very few of us actually care what sort of underhanded short sighted, troll-appealing, shock value/face saving response you can cook up if your actions are directly tied to everybody losing P99.

What you are doing is wrong, and you are jeopardizing a great thing that many people enjoy all in the name of personal greed. I implore you to reconsider your ways, Everquest after all is about working together and having fun, and just about everybody knows you're not here to do either of those things.

Like.. imagine doing something nice for somebody just because it would make them feel good, and not because there was something in it for you. How fucked up would that be?