Curse's terms of use deserve a closer look
by Eliah Hecht 
Feb 16th 2008 at 7:00PM
There's a storm brewing over in the UI & Macros forum, and it's about the terms of use for popular add-on site Curse. If you use mods at all, you're almost certainly aware of the site; I go there all the time. They're probably the biggest mod site right now. So it comes as something of a surprise to me that such a pillar of the scene would have what seems to be a pretty abusive set of terms service. According to the analysis conducted in this forum thread, Curse's ToU "specifically removes any and all copyright that we as authors have on our addons." Yikes!
There are other bad parts of the ToU language too, including that Curse can change the ToU at any time without notifying authors. Of course, the site is within its rights to impose any ToU it wants on the users, but it's not nice to take control of creations out of authors' hands. I am not a lawyer, so it's altogether possible that I'm interpreting some of this incorrectly. The forum thread, however, claims that lawyers looked at Curse's terms and agreed that the interpretation is correct.
Until these provisions are changed -- and Curse promises that they will be -- I recommend mod authors use other sites like WoWInterface or wowui.incgamers.com. In writing this article I read the terms of use for those sites -- or rather, tried to. IncGamers doesn't even have their ToU up! But they've been a pretty well-behaved site in the past (they used to be worldofwar.net), so I trust them. WoWInterface's terms of service didn't seem to have anything like what Curse has, and a source at the site assured me that "we never touch an author's zip file without their knowledge and consent, ever." WI has a good history of respecting the community and the authors. Curse folks, are we all reading this wrong? Is there something in this issue that's being missed?
Update: As several of Curse's employees have helpfully pointed out to me, the new ToU are much better. However, I still have reservations about them.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Add-Ons
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
LostOne Feb 18th 2008 12:44PM
I won't go to wowui.incgamers.com again. They have a addon autoupdater utility (which I fortunately wasn't using) that had a virus in it that infected users with a keylogger. They claim it wasn't anyone associated with them, but the fact that they denied for a week or more before admitting it had been compromised and putting up a virus free version makes me suspicious. Even if it was legitimately compromised by an outside source, their delay in providing a solution makes me very hesitant to ever trust their site again.
Rydolomo Mar 11th 2008 7:21PM
Sometimes developers get tired and drop the addon, perhaps this is Curse's way of say they can continue the addon even if you stop developing it?
Some addons I have used such as decursive have been dropped by the dev and picked up by someone else.
Remember you are not paying for Curse's services.
Rydo