What was building up to be a heavily blogged about topic, has now slipped under the radar thanks to the news surrounding LBP.

If your a fan of small print and all the the stuff that 99% of the population just tick ‘I Agree’ without ever reading, then you’ll know that Sony (SCEE & SCEA) have just updated their ToS (Terms of Service) and Privacy Policy, emails have been sent notifying users of these changes

Lots of websites (and subsequently their members comments) are getting their knickers in a twist over what these changes to ToS actually means

I’m no lawyer, (if I was I’d be Lionel Hutz) but I can shed some light on some of the rumours and untruths currently circulating and getting out of control, with websites and people saying Sony will have the right to sell your content, or use it in advertising etc…

Some forthcoming games (LBP, Far Cry 2 etc…) contain user generated content, Sony have realised they don’t have the legal rights to do what they need to, to get the games working as they should (sharing levels, maps & photos etc…)

One of the paragraphs causing these rumours is:

“You authorize and license SCEA a royalty free and perpetual right to use, distribute, copy, modify, display, and publish your User Material for any reason without any restrictions or payments to you or any third parties.”

So if you upload a LBP level (or anything you create in any game) then Sony will need to copy that level to their servers (now they don’t want you to make a copyright claim against them, so they require a licence from you to copy/host it) Now if somebody wants to download your level then then Sony need to make another copy of the level and distribute it to that user, (again they need a licence from you to do this) Now this needs to be a royalty free licence so you as the user don’t later try to claim against Sony for using your content, they simply need these licence from you to ensure the game plays the way it should. All user content driven websites like MySpace/Facebook etc… should have something similar in their ToS.

Google had this problem with their terms and conditions around their new Google Chrome browser and were forced to clarify those terms

So unlike what many websites are trying to claim, and make a story out of nothing, there really is nothing to see here

And talking of Lionel Hutz:

Well, he’s kind of had it in for me ever since I accidentally ran over his dog. Actually, replace “accidentally” with “repeatedly,” and replace “dog” with “son.”