Legal drama – patching your law

The legal frameworks of the different countries around Europe contribute to the complexity of the territory. It is quite a challenge to establish a service and its rules and have them actually comply to all the different requirements of those various countries. When they don’t contradict each other, even in the same country, as it sometimes happens.

The other real pain, is, like for any proper persistent world, the fact the legal system is always evolving and it is important to keep an eye it. What was fine and perfectly legal yesterday might be forbidden tomorrow.

There has been quite a stir in France lately, around different laws and regulations considered, that are related to the games industry.

The first law, that actually got dropped before going before Parliament, was a requirement for some games to carry a warning against their addictive nature. It was part of a bigger set of laws on a reform on the hospital system in France and the French game lobby jumped on it before anything happened. It wasn’t supported by any study and the definition for the games that would have to carry the warning wasn’t phrased. France already is the only country in Europe that requires video games to carry a warning on the box against epilepsy (and the risk carried when playing video game to cause seizures). Neither case was actually requiring anything as far as the digital version (or the related website) requirement to carry similar warning though…

The second law, broader in its reach and very likely to go through is the anti-piracy law known as the HADOPI law. Under this law, any one caught downloading illegally a protected media is facing a three staged (or three strikes) sanction. The first and second time, you are given a warning. On the third strike, your internet subscription is automatically cancelled for 3 to 12 months. The law is creating a large outcry in the country (for many reasons, from the spirit of the law to the actual process by which it will be enforced) but will very likely go through. It didn’t pass the parliament vote that happened today, but another one will be organised later this month. Most of the discussion is focused on the illegal downloads of music, but it actually covers movies and video games as well (and books and any form of Intellectual Property you can digitally distribute). The principle behind the law however requires the IP owner to participate in the process and identify the infringed media. We haven’t heard of any game company actually expressing either their support or their opposition to the law, but it would be surprising that the biggest publishers are not keeping an eye on what is happening, even though they are very likely to let the music majors actually invest in tracking the illegal users for them.

This law has many elements on top of this that can be considered:

• One of the article actually specifies that IP-holders based in tax heavens can’t participate to the process (most of the biggest video game publishers have set their HQ and IP-holding entities in Switzerland in Europe)
• Another article, probably the one creating the biggest contestation, will actually rule on the use of free public wifi networks and will force them to limit access to websites on a white list. If your website is not on the list, tough luck.
• A label will be created, the HADOPI label, to identify websites that offer to download content legally.

With just one law, digital business in France becomes suddenly more complicated.

Similar laws have been considered in several European countries following a EU directive (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) . In the UK , a similar “three strikes out” text has been scrapped last January before going to Parliament.  In Sweden,  a similar law was actually  enforced last week and caused Internet traffic to plummet by 33% in the country.

And last but not least (and not about France), Quebec has apparently just passed a law banning the sales of games in their English version if a French version exists. While it might make sense for off-line games and in a spirit to actually promote the French language in the province, for online games, it present an interesting dilemna: most of the time, French version is exclusively offered to the French speaking players in Europe, with the rights to the North American territory given to another entity, or even another company. When dealing the rights of games, how to consider Québec? Will the NA operators be willing to support servers in French? Will the rights for Québec be associated with the ones on Europe (not necessarily for the best for the Québec players who will have bigger latencies and less players at their peak time)?

There are already strong communities on European French servers from Québec, but this law might actually force the way deals are structured.

As we are always interested in the evolution of the regulations around online games, we are likely update you with similar news as things evolve.

Tags: europe, France, legal, Québec

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