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?

[PIPBoy3000]

As sebastard on Evil Avatar [evilavatar.com] pointed out, cybercafes are a multi-billion dollar business overseas. Vivendi took a different approach to selling things like Counterstrike to these cybercafe owners (Valve uses Steam and a play-for-play approach).

I suspect that Vivendi will be paying Valve a fair bit of money in the near future.

Re:A good thing?

[Austerity Empowers]

It is a good thing when it comes to contracts. We have been able to keep quite a few people employed by selling rights to 3rd parties to distribute in limited geographies we won't go to anyhow. For example, someone wants to sell equipment in Turkey, we don't have any business or foothold there, it'd cost a lot for us to even try. We do have partners however who live there and can do business profitably, they just need our product to sell. More power to them, but they better not sell to anyone else. Thus limitation is a good thing. In this particular case it is good too, Valve made the game, they own it, not the publisher. The publisher in this case was given the right to sell the game to a specific market. Vivendi needed to be smacked for the old fashioned belief that they simply own anything they are chosen to publish. Bad doggie.

Valve's Cyber Cafe 'Agreement'

[SilverThorn]

After talking w/ a Valve sales partner, the cyber cafe agreement is that of a pay per computer agreement for the Steam application.

This is where the fun part comes out of it:

• It depends where you live for licensing rights to use the Steam application and its games.
• There is also a minimum of 10 computers that must be signed up for using Valve's Steam application.

After a quick inquiry, my rate (for living on the East Coast) was $10/per machine per month ($100/month for 10 computers -- quick math for you non-geeks). Comes out to around $1200 per year.

Noted that some places this would be a decent deal expecially if you have a large crowd of players, but if you are in a small town (like where I am), forget having any of Valve's Steam-based games if it means just breaking even on a per month basis.

-- M

I can see where this is going ...

[2TecTom]

I was involved with several cyber / gaming cafes that went broke largely due to licensing issues. In fact, if the full license fees had been paid, these fees would have been the single greatest expense, exceeding that of wages or lease costs.

It's been my experience that many gaming places don't have sufficent numbers of retail licenses nor do they pay extra for commercial site licenses, all of whom call for regular on-going payments. If they did, they'd be unprofitable.

Here's my prediction. The big corporate publishers will abuse licensing, eliminate mom & pop cafes and replace them with franchises.

This battle is only the first...

[mconeone]

Valve & Vivendi are in another legal battle concerning the sale of HL2 on Steam. Apparently the deal was inked back when Steam was still in beta, and Valve told Vivendi that they didn't expect steam sales to even come close to retail sales. However, with Valve's early release of Counter-Strike Source bundled with a to-be-released copy of HL2, and the midnight activation on release day, Valve has sold tons of copies of HL2 on Steam. Vivendi is suing Valve for misleading them on steam sales, causing them to agree to the contract under false assumptions. However, there was no specific clause limiting steam sales in any way. This is much different that the one in the article as Vivendi explicitly broke a clause in the contract, whereas in this one Valve did not.

Look at this case as the first blow in a legal battle... The next of which is due in court by December 31st.