This is pretty interesting. GamingPays!, a website designed to help people become more efficient gold and item farmers in MMORPGs, is being threatened by Jagex (Runescape’s developer/publisher) for publishing information on how to farm in Runescape. From one of Jagex’s initial letters signed by Mohammed Khan (good name), who appears to be a random person within their Community Management team:

The file has information regarding how players can make money from RuneScape. This breaks copyright laws as RuneScape as well as everything within it is the intellectual property of Jagex. Therefore trading someone else’s property without their permission, or advising people on how to do so, is against the law.

That is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. Aaron Crow, owner of GamingPays!, had responded to their initial take-down request in a very reasonable manner (far more more politely than my response would have been in his situation), but then got in touch with Gregory Beck, lawyer with the Public Citizen Litigation Group in D.C. Greg wrote back to Jagex and explained why Aaron was not violating Jagex’s intellectual property, and nothing was heard from Jagex for a month, during which time they appear to have hired a UK law firm to do their bullying for them. Their next letter was, as Aaron puts it, a doozy. Here’s the important excerpt from Jagex’s letter of October 1st. The letter quotes from Runescape’s TOS, saying:

* “You must not encourage, or attempt to trick other players into breaking our rules.”

The letter then states:

Your client (assuming he is so) will undoubtedly have used our client’s site and become bound by its terms and conditions. Insofar as it relates to RuneScape, your client’s eBook clearly encourages other players to break our client’s rules.

So your client’s activities constitute a direct breach of contract by it as well as tortious inducement to other parties to break their contracts with our client.

Whhhhaaaaatttt?

Now, I realize that it’s slightly ironic that two posts ago I was defending EULAs, and indeed, I’m a big fan of adhering to them, but no contract allows one to sign away his or her fundamental rights. Jagex is free to tell people that they can’t talk about topic X in-game, and ban the person from the game for doing so, but there is no circumstance I can conceive of in which I’d consider myself obligated to follow a clause in a EULA that restricted my freedom of speech in any way.

I’d love to see Jagex get slapped down in court and ordered to pay Aaron’s legal fees, but I can’t see it going to court at all. Aaron states he’s never played Runescape, so isn’t bound by their TOS, and even if he had, I can’t imagine a case like this getting anywhere.

Even at our level (ie small compared to Runescape), websites pop up with information that, were it any of our business, we’d prefer not be made public (quest solutions, etc.) We even get our own players asking if there’s anything we can do to force people to take down websites that provide quest solutions (some of which reprint our help files and such word for word and are perhaps technically violating our intellectual property), but that kind of heavy-handed attempt at control deserves to fail, and does fail.

If Blizzard tried this, the MMORPG blogosphere would be all over them for it, and rightfully so. Runescape is the 2nd largest MMORPG in the West. Let’s give Aaron some moral support, if nothing else, by blogging about Jagex’s shameful bid to exert control over speech outside of their service.

(P.S. One of the letters from Jagex or their lawyers claims that Runescape has 4.2 million registered, active players. I wonder what their definition of active is?)