Why did Fortnite get banned from the App Store? Recently, there was this conflict between Apple and the Fortnite devs, because Fortnite introduced In-App-Purchases that did not use the standard App Store payments, so that the fees did not have to be payed. But what were the exact legal reasons for banning the app from the App Store and how could have Epic Games prevented the situation?
Apples App Store guidelines (the rules for being accepted into the App Store that developers agree to be bound to via their developer account) says this: 3.1 Payments 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase. Epic Games breached these guidelines in their Fortnite game by enabling a payment mechanism in the IOS Fortnite app which did not use Apples In-App payment system. Their approach in Fortnite did not fall under any of the exclusions Apple allows in 3.1.3 of the above document. Epic Games could have avoided this conflict by not enabling their own payment mechanism.
Your description of the facts is vague enough that we can't offer an informed judgment, but to remedy this, I will paraphrase your account of the facts (you can decide whether this is what you were trying to say). I was sitting outside of the Sprint store today waiting for my step daughter to come out. While waiting, two police officers walked up to my car and asked me to turn off my vehicle and come inside. When I voluntarily went inside, the store staff said that they called the police because they had had some sort of problems with people applying for service and absconding with the phone to resell on the black market, and they thought that was part of some such criminal plan. Because of that, they refused to give her a phone or service contract. But then they also told us to never come back, threatening arrest for trespassing. I have never been in that store before. Were my rights violated? No, neither by the police nor by the manager. The police, or the store manager, can legally request you to come in for a conversation: what matters most is whether you were forced to come in against your will. By your report, you were not, so your rights were not violated. The police are irrelevant to the remainder of the question. What remains is whether your rights were violated because the manager told you to go away and never come back under pain of prosecution. The store is private property, meaning that the owner has wide latitude to grant or deny permission to enter. If they hate pink hair and your hair is pink, they can legally "ban" you. If they suspect you of involvement in a criminal activity, that can most certainly legally ban you. That does not mean that it was a righteous or justified decision on their part, or a good business choice, but it is their legal right. So, no, your rights were not violated.
My question is, because I am not making any income from the distribution of the game, would the use of the copyrighted music fall under Personal Use? There are some &quot;private use&quot; exemptions in Australian copyright law but they have some fairly narrow conditions. These exemptions are fairly narrow because the point of copyright law is not to prevent you from making money with someone else's intellectual property but to protect the other person's ability to make money with it. If Alice writes a song and Bob distributes it free of charge, Alice loses revenue. Similarly, it is Alice's right to decide whether that song should be included in a freely available open-source software product, and her right to decide whether to allow that use without charge or in exchange for a license fee.
Unless the game is out of copyright, e.g. chess, snakes and ladders, Go, or checkers, your software would probably be considered a derivative work of the copyrighted game and an actionable infringement. The fact that you do not monetize it is not a defense. You would need written permission in the form of a license agreement from the copyright owner to do this legally. The penalties for violating copyright laws in this way could be punishingly serious.
&quot;Any perceived compliance or non-compliance of other developers’ apps does not have any bearing on the compliance of your own apps.&quot; Could this mean that Google Play's policies are applied differently for different developers or apps? No, it means that you can't break the rules even if others are breaking the rules or you think they are breaking the rules. I think it is worth noting that those apps are for the Indian market. I don't know which one you are in, but google will have different rules for different countries to comply with various regulatory requirements.
All artistic and literary work has copyright at the moment of creation This includes things “built” in Minecraft. However, under the terms of the Minecraft licence you give a wide ranging copyright licence to Mojang: If you make any content available on or through our Game, you agree to give us permission to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display that content. This permission is irrevocable, and you also agree to let us permit other people to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display your content. You are not giving up your ownership rights in your content, you are just giving us and other users permission to use it.
united-states There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It depends on the game. The difference between modding and cheating is largely a matter of semantics. In some cases, cheaters can use facilities which are deliberately built into the game, without modifying it (e.g. cheat codes, console commands, etc.). However, it is difficult to see how making use of such facilities could possibly violate any law, regulation, or agreement, and so the rest of this answer will focus on modding. I think it would help to walk through two specific examples, to illustrate the broad range of possible answers to this question. Here are the examples I chose: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for PC (&quot;Skyrim&quot; for short) Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch (&quot;SMO&quot; for short) Both of these games are single player (although SMO has a minor, optional multiplayer component), and both have been extensively modded by their respective communities. Skyrim Skyrim's Creation Kit EULA expressly authorizes modding, and the wording implies that mods are the intellectual property of the modder (because it states that the modder automatically grants a license to Bethesda). Bethesda even permits modders to sell Skyrim mods for real money, which is practically unheard of in the video game industry (even under the very restrictive terms which Bethesda sets for such paid mods). Bethesda's open authorization of and acceptance towards modding, and the fact that they deliberately provide modding tools in the first place, makes it very difficult to characterize Skyrim mods as anything other than legal. However, if you try to circumvent Steam's DRM, or sell mods for money without going through Bethesda's paid mods program, then you are certainly violating one or both of the EULA linked above and the Steam EULA. Such violation could subject you to civil liability under a variety of legal theories, but in practice, the most likely outcome is that Valve terminates your Steam account (as the Steam Subscriber Agreement says they can) and you lose all the games you previously purchased. But they're not going to waste their time suing you, unless you somehow make a nuisance of yourself. Paid mods, outside of Bethesda's system, might even be criminal copyright infringement, although I would be rather surprised if it were actually prosecuted as such (the DOJ generally has more important things to worry about, and copyright infringement can't be prosecuted at the state level). If you're willing to call civil liability and unlikely-to-be-prosecuted criminal liability &quot;illegal,&quot; then Skyrim modding can be illegal if you violate the terms and conditions. One other thing: The terms linked above also say that mods (&quot;New Materials&quot;) can only be distributed &quot;to other authorized users who have purchased the Product, solely for use with such users’ own authorized copies of such Product and in accordance with and subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and all applicable laws.&quot; In other words, you are not supposed to distribute mods to users of pirated copies, which is probably impractical to enforce in any meaningful way (modding sites generally make no effort to verify that individual users have actually purchased the game, although in theory it might be technically possible to do so). In my experience, modders are often quite hostile to users of pirated copies of Skyrim, because such copies are nonstandard and more difficult to support. Bethesda evidently views this in-practice hostility as &quot;good enough.&quot; SMO SMO is a completely different ballgame. Nintendo does not provide modding tools for either the game or the console on which it runs. Furthermore, Nintendo has repeatedly updated the console to prevent people from modding it, and to break or render ineffective existing techniques for such modding. Their stated rationale for this activity is to prevent users from running pirated games on their consoles. Therefore, this brings the whole thing into the scope of the DMCA's infamous anti-circumvention provisions. 17 USC 1201 provides that: (a) (1) (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter. [...] (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to commit piracy or not. It only matters that: You &quot;avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure,&quot; and The technological measure &quot;effectively controls access to a work&quot; as defined above, and You did it without Nintendo's permission, and Your action doesn't fall under one of the permanent exceptions listed in 17 USC 1201, nor under any of the 3-year exceptions which the Librarian of Congress is authorized to temporarily grant. So by breaking the DRM on the Nintendo Switch, which is a prerequisite for modifying SMO, you necessarily violate 17 USC 1201, unless you fall into one of the exceptions. Of those, the only one which is even colorably relevant is subsection (f): (f) (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. (&quot;This title&quot; means Title 17, which is the entire copyright law of the United States.) This is basically saying that you can bypass DRM for the limited purpose of making &quot;an independently created computer program&quot; interoperate with &quot;other programs.&quot; The problem here is that most mods are going to be derivative works of some kind, and just creating a derivative work, even if you never distribute it, is generally copyright infringement under 17 USC 106. And the exception-to-the-exception is that it doesn't apply whenever you infringe any copyright, regardless of whether the DRM was intended to prevent you from committing that specific act of infringement or not. There is some room for debate over whether mods can or should be considered fair use, which is beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to say, it's a complicated, fact-specific inquiry, which is not compatible with sweeping &quot;modding is legal/illegal&quot; statements. We also don't have much good case law for it. Regardless, the Switch's EULA expressly prohibits modding, and so you would still be liable for a contractual violation anyway.
Unfortunately, the "but everyone does that" (BEDT) argument doesn't hold water as evidenced by prosecutions of looters. Would uploading this video be a copyright infringement? It would be hard to answer this part of the question without knowing where and from whom the clips had come from. If the clips came from a company like ESPN or a YouTuber that doesn't give you permission to be able to use their clips then yes this might be a copyright infringement. If you use video/clips that are labeled as creative commons then nt it wouldn't be an infringement. YouTube has a feature for this. Would my actions be fair use? First, we'll need to understand what fair-use is. Fair use is the ability to use copyright material under certain circumstances without permission. To best determine if using copyright-protected material in your work you should weigh it against the four factors of fair use. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; The nature of the copyrighted work; The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. More information about fair-use here Youtube outlines their fair use guidelines here