Hacker News Reader

Fortnite's EULA [0] and virtually any EULA for any software produced in the past couple of decades includes the following bit:

The Software is licensed, not sold, to you under the License. The License does not grant you any title or ownership in the Software.

First sale doctrine does not apply. We don't own many things anymore. Books, music, software, movies—they used to be products you bought but now they are services you subscribe to. It is not a trend that I like.

[0] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/eula

There are myriad situations where contracts are written which aren't enforceable, but that doesn't make writing the contract illegal, nor does it make _trying_ to enforce it illegal either. That might be a shortcoming of our legal system, but that's how it works.

The EULA may or may not be binding in any appreciable way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

If they can establish that their EULA does bind then maybe they've got a case.

Toilet paper in EU, you can even resell preloaded OEM software.

It probably has something to do with the investment that would be required if the original item didn’t exist.

Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad? They’ve essentially found a low-effort way to make returns without taking any of the risk you did. Without you, they wouldn’t be able to do what they did unless they came up with the whole original item on their own and then built on top of it. Therefore, in essence they are profiting off of your investment.

The law may be significantly more complex and nuanced than this but it’s not hard at all to imagine scenarios where the original producer of a product does not want to enable profits of spin-offs from their work.

Edit: This is one reason patents exist. You are allowed to protect your massive investment for a period of time, no matter how much society may benefit from building on it immediately.

That argument never made sense. If a farmer sells some rice to someone else, who then turns around and sells it for profit, the farmer doesnt get to dictate what the trader can do with the rice.

Copyright has no legitimate economic or technological grounds.

Copyright refers to copying an innovation. First sale refers to reselling a product. You’re conflating the two.

Maybe you'd be mad, but would that anger be justified? We all benefit from each other's work in society. The person building on your work wouldn't be harming you in any way (except perhaps by competing with you, which we all agree is a good thing for everyone in the world except for you), and they would be beneficial to their customers by a significant $5M. Only a foolish society would subtract that from itself because for some reason a platform supplier got "mad."

I don't think it works like that, you can buy whatever you want and resell while adding value. Just like a printing press that buys paper and then makes millions from it by printing books.

Also, just because something cost you a lot doesn't mean you get to claim protection over it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...

> Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad?

That's a terrible analogy. Practically everything is built on using materials built from others. That's essentially specialization.

Your arguments come from a traditional point of view. With laws like the DMCA and it's successors, copyright is an entirely different beast when those copies are digital. You can't make more copies, but you also can't circumvent any copy protection in place.

Fortnite is a service, not a product you can own. It's very much the same as Netflix, Gmail, or Dropbox.

Given that, why should it be okay to hack Fortnite, but hacking Netflix or Spotify would be considered criminal behavior?

There have been lawsuits about re-edited movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-edited_film

Most re-edited movies are mostly composed of parts of the original movie, so there is redistribution. The most similar case here is ClearPlay, which only instructs the video player on how to skip certain parts of the video, and that was not considered copyright infringement.

> It seems pretty strange that they can do this. How does copyright even apply here, other than for the defendant? If I buy a book [...]

It might be significant that in this case it is not a book. Copyright is a bundle of different rights, and some of them usually only come up for certain kinds of media.

In particular, one of the rights in the bundle is the right to publicly perform the work. Perhaps broadcasting playing the game could violate the performance right?

> Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.

I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two cases, both involving a company that apparently buys works of art, mounts them on ceramic, and sells the result.

In the first case [1] they bought books containing good quality prints, removed the prints from the book, mounted each print separately, and sold the tiles separately.

The 9th Circuit found that this was a derivative work and was infringing.

In the second case [2] it was apparently again the same company buying and mounting art. This time the works they bought and mounted and sold were notecards and small lithographs. The 7th Circuit said that this was not a derivative work and not infringing.

[1] https://openjurist.org/856/f2d/1341/mirage-editions-inc-v-al...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/125_F3d_580.htm

Fortnite isn't a stand alone software product. Its a game with an online service that is required for it to function.

The modifications were only made to the software product installed on user desktops.

It's too much to paste here, but the reasoning they use for the copyright claim is laid out in the most detail on page 20, starting at statement 99.

https://torrentfreak.com/images/epic-golden.pdf

The lawsuit does also contain many claims of breach of contract, and goes beyond that, saying that they are also interfering with other peoples' contractual obligations since they have promoted something that has resulted in other people breaching the game's contract.