This is for user submitted content; not items put up for sale by a developer.<p>From the linked document<p><i>In the event you are a developer who submits User Content to Oculus, you acknowledge and agree that our agreements with you as a developer may supersede this section of the Terms.</i>
Looks like Steam has similar conditions: <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/</a><p>"YOU AND VALVE AGREE TO RESOLVE ALL DISPUTES AND CLAIMS BETWEEN US IN INDIVIDUAL BINDING ARBITRATION."<p>"You grant Valve and its affiliates the worldwide, non-exclusive, right to use, reproduce, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, transmit, transcode, translate, broadcast, and otherwise communicate, and publicly display and publicly perform, your User Generated Content, and derivative works of your User Generated Content, in connection with the operation and promotion of the Steam site."<p>One key difference is which services this applies to.<p>Steam: "in connection with the operation and promotion of the Steam site"<p>Oculus: "in connection with the Services".
Where services are defined as "use of physical goods, platform services, software, websites, applications, and content"
And from their privacy policy <a href="https://www.oculus.com/en-us/legal/privacy-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oculus.com/en-us/legal/privacy-policy/</a>:<p><i>Information Automatically Collected About You When You Use Our Services: -Information about your physical movements and dimensions when you use a virtual reality headset.</i><p>So even if I play single player games in my home I have no expectation of privacy anymore.
This is pretty damning. It's pretty amazing how Oculus will lose the VR battle despite being "first". The HTC Vive and other more open solutions for developers that aren't behind a walled garden will win with gamers.
Alright, I'll bite. In practice, how does this differ from most open source licenses? Yes, I appreciate that there is a corporate entity which is reserving these rights for itself (non-exclusively), but at some level this writer's response seems a bit overdone. But really, if I license something, say, via an MIT license: Am I not saying in effect that I grant anyone that comes along a "worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content[...]"?<p>Don't get me wrong, if I want to keep something proprietary and under my control, I best not publish to the Oculus services. But "antidemocratic, immoral and plain evil"? Nonsense.<p>(note: I didn't read the Oculus terms, more than I want at 5am on a Monday, but am responding directly to what the author's complaint is aimed at.)
This is going to alienate the indie game (and content?) producers, but there's no way they're going to get big commercial companies to join with those terms of service. When press, it's going to be Oculus that capitulates to a more equitable agreement - Let's say it was Steam - I'd expect them to form an agreement that says in principle "You own the games you produce for our platform and we own the hardware. Working together, we might both sell more units."
So their definition of "service" is "physical goods, platform services, software, websites, applications, and content". Does this mean that if I wrote, say, a 3D modelling tool for the Rift, than anything that my users create could be grabbed by them (and given to others) for free?
The only thing that will alter this kind of behavior is refusing to support them economically.<p>If devs don't develop and gamers don't consume, it will stop.<p>Unfortunately, it requires things to be bad enough that a big sector of the consumer sector follows through, which is rare.
Seems to me legal departments get to own this stuff till they break the company reputation then the CEO snarls at the chief legal officer and says "what the fuck are you doing?"
You could make the same warning about writing open source software. Nobody calls that evil. As soon as you release anything under the GPL or MIT license, you're also giving Oculus a worldwide, ... perpetual, .. right to use, ... and distribute it.