Sorry – this is two months’ worth of games law news updates, since GDC got in the way of finalising the February update. Still, what a couple of months it’s been! Here we go… Continue reading Games Law Round-Up: February and March 2012
Category: Data protection and privacy
A quick guide to the EU data protection proposals
This week the EU proposed a major overhaul of its data protection. As the largest trading bloc in the world, what the EU thinks about data matters. Here’s a summary that my firm, Osborne Clarke, prepared:
All organisations hold and process personally identifiable data – not least about their staff, customers or suppliers, or all three. In Europe how this data is handled has been regulated by data protection laws since the early 1980s. Those already complex laws are set to be shaken up by the European Commission (EC) which on 25 January 2012 announced a radical overhaul of the Data Protection Directive.If adopted the changes will have a huge impact on all organisations with European facing operations, as will the suggested penalties for those who get it wrong. Large fines (up to 2% of global turnover have been proposed) are being lined up for local regulators to impose on non-compliant organisations.
Continue reading A quick guide to the EU data protection proposals
Gamer/Law’s ten 2012 predictions
You’ve guessed it: I thought I’d jump into the it’s-a-new-year-let’s-make-some-predictions business for 2012. And, like all forward-looking predictions, I’ve mixed a few safe bets with some slightly more “punchy” predictions (which FYI is lawyer-speak for taking a massive bet on something!) Here goes, in no particular order:
The EA Origins EULA is a non-story
UPDATE 2/11/11: this issue really isn’t going away – there are now stories of gamer rage in Germany about alleged anti-privacy stance in EA Origins and Battlefield 3 (not quite sure how that works together – I imagine it means that the release of Battlefield 3 has raised the concerns about Origins again).There has been a lot of debate over the last week about the terms of EA’s End User Licence Agreement (EULA) for its Origins download service. This is a post to explain why that is a non-story and unfortunately says more about gamers’ misunderstanding of EULAs and data protection than it does about EA (though in fairness EA could have done a better job to explain itself).
The story broke originally via The Escapist forums and then other sites including RPS. This is what the EA EULA actually said: Continue reading The EA Origins EULA is a non-story