Valve Wins Summary Judgment Against Vivendi

ShamusMcGee writes "Valve today announced the U.S. Federal District Court in Seattle, WA granted its motion for summary judgment on the matters of Cyber Café Rights and Contractual Limitation of Liability in its copyright infringement suit with Sierra/Vivendi Universal Games." From the judgement: "...based on the undisputed facts and applicable law, Sierra/Vivendi, and their affiliates, are not authorized to distribute (directly or indirectly) Valve games through cyber-cafés to end-users for pay-for-play activities pursuant to the parties' 2001 Agreement."

Re:what does this mean?

[Datasage]

As far as i can tell its not. The legal judgement is over cyber cafe distribution. Basically it states that valve cant be cut out of any cyber cafe distribtion deal.

Re:what does this mean?

[fireduck]

the backstory can be found here [gamespot.com]. Valve was suing Sierra because they were distributing HL to cyber-cafes, seemingly w/o Valve's authorization. sounds like cyber-cafes weren't in Sierra's distribution pervue, and Valve was annoyed that their games were given away (?) to cafes.

Not sure what this means, except Valve has control over their games in cyber-cafes now. Given their community friendly stance, I don't see this as a bad thing (although if Sierra was just giving the game away previously, I don't see that as bad for the community either.)

Re:what does this mean?

[Tobias Luetke]

Caffes pay 10$ a month per computer for steam. Other than blizzard games ( which are 5k per year for all their games on up to 20 computers ) and ea games ( 850$ per year license for all ea games ) other games just require buying them.

Re:Cyber cafes in general

[chrismcdirty]

I believe the whole thing about games being banned in Greece was a step to curb illegal gambling, and the law passed included pretty much any type of video game. But it was later modified in order to just include gambling games, not all games.

Re:what does this mean?

[unclethursday]

Given their community friendly stance

Right, which is why Valve has helped out in expanding the community by wanting millions upon millions of dollars in licensing fees in order for someone to license Half-Life for Mac, right?

Valve is only 'community friendly' because without those user made mods, no one would still care about Half-Life this long after its release. Half-Life was semi-popular, and a decent game, but it wasn't until a small team of users made a little teensy mod called Counter-Strike that Half-Life really took off. Team Fortress Classic was popular for a while, but when Counter-Strike really hit, it completely took over the Half-Life onlne world.

Seriously, almost no one plays Half-Life itself, but Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and such are still popular.

Valve pretty much owes its popularity to the community, not from their actual Half-Life game, which is basically a Quake 1 engine game with some Quake 2 features hacked in with a pretty decent story.

Without the community making those mods, no one would have cared about Half-Life enough to have made Half-Life 2 possible this long after the original.