Corner Talk about in Regards to PB's Announcement in Sharing Paid Contents
So, at this point everyone has read the recent announcement PrettyBusy has posted in regards to sharing ANY paid content. For the full announcement you can access it here but for those that just wants a sweet, small summary, it's essentially them taking legal action on anyone who:
Share any DATAMINE of PAID characters
Share any of the PAID characters FULL story, chats, etc.
So, they still allow players to share parts/bits and pieces of the paid content, just not all of it.
Though it seems like everyone can understand the whole business side of things, there's still confusion on the datamine aspect as in how is datamining is illegal, why is there legal action taken against datamining, etc.
First, I feel like people need to understand that datamining, itself, it NOT illegal. The problem is sharing datamines publicly on any social media. The reasons are for the following
Intellectual Property Rights: when companies release games, all of their contents are protected by trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property laws. When posting content that company didn't share themselves on their own social media page or to EVERYONE (both F2P and P2W), it's infringing copyright laws since the one sharing it wasn't the one to have produced/created the work or data (think of it reposting artists work without their permission but you're sharing a work that was put in by artists and game creators of the company without their permission).
Terms of Service Violation: Many software applications, websites, and digital platforms impose terms of service (ToS) that users must agree to before using their services. These ToS often prohibit activities like reverse engineering, data scraping, or extracting data in a manner that circumvents the intended use of the service. By datamining and posting content obtained in violation of these terms, you are breaching a contractual agreement between yourself and the platform, which can lead to legal consequences.
Security: there are certain codes and firewalls set up that many (if not ALL) game companies put in as a means to detect if there is any malicious activity happening within the system that could potential harm the players (e.g., hacking and extracting players' personal information). When datamining, most people aren't aware in what form these protective barriers are set-up, so when extracting contents from the game, rather than being seen as simply getting contents for one's amusement, it can be detected as a threat by the security system.
What I wrote are only snippets of the few reasons as to the legal concerns in sharing datamine contents. And despite for other fandoms, it's not as prevalent, game companies are starting to take up action in regards to datamining, some being obvious about it while others are being discreet.
However, if we were talking about solely on the announcement, it's understandable why it would bother players, especially F2P. For other games (not saying ALL or MOST), they do eventually make the paid content accessible at some point for F2P without having to make them wait for so long. However, PB isn't taking much initiative with that, where now they're adding characters from the Solomon Seals after 3 MONTHS while, for now, not letting F2P have ANY ACCESS to limited characters from Nightmare Pass. To top that off, previously PB had promised re-runs of events, which would've allowed newer F2P to have a chance to play the event and obtain resources/characters from it. But now they have their previous events accessible behind paywall, decreasing the likelihood for event re-runs to happen. As for P2W, players are literally paying to get the character and related contents related to said character so there shouldn't be much restrictions in sharing their paid content on public platforms in the first place (this is not to say they should disrespect PB and share everything though). This is without mentioning some of the promises that have already broken based on the announcement earlier this year and last month (?) (Main story drop every 2 months, Friendship System, Comics related to Cards being posted on their Social Media, etc.).
Hopefully PB will reconsider and address some of these issues with the upcoming event for Bethel and Belphegor dropping on 6/26.
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