Things like these are why people need to elect me as World Ruler. I listen to the people and their plights. :|

What exactly are you stunned with? With GOG doing this or with someone actually reading through the TOS and being concerned with this detail? It might sound some legalese gibberish, but it's not irrelevant.

See an example when anticircumvention laws were used for persecution. I'm not saying we should suspect GOG of being that nasty, but such thing in the TOS is not exactly in line with their DRM-free stance.

Or rather restrictions management. That better conveys the intention.

This could be interesting waiting to see what their reply will be , i am sure if they agree to this change some of the bigger gog partners will be very upset . Dont forget that the publishers and devs who are on here are already on the edge on providing drm free games.
Allowing This could have implications if gog does inform all its partners of any changes it makes to the agreements.

Nobody will be upset. Jesus, it is just a damn archive that has a script behind it. An installer is no more than a .zip file being extracted in a particular way with some additional scripting support.

You can make the exact same thing with a PowerShell script and a zip file, and you won't be forced to deal with all the additional crap that gets put in GOG's installers.

Shmerl. Give it a rest.
For some reason you always pick on GOG when they do something you don't agree with and go on and on about it (you keep banging on about open sourcing any potential client as well).
That type of the agreement is pretty much standard for most software out there from my understanding (im sure someone will tell me im wrong..but anyways). The content of the games do not belong to GOG --- i sincerely doubt like the poster above point out - neither devs nor publishers would likely allow *reverse engineering etc* of their software. Likewise GOG has NO obligation to allow people to modify etc their software as well.

DRM free has got nothing to do with this at all....Sheesh.Talk about stretching it. Give it a rest. Sorry.

Nope. If it doesn't bother you it doesn't mean it's not a problem. While you might think GOG doesn't need to stick to their principles, others came to GOG because of these very principles (and honestly GOG used them in PR quite a lot). So GOG giving them up is not something that should be ignored. It can as well be by mistake or oversight, so pointing it out to GOG is something that community can do. Who else will?

No, only for the DRM inclined software. Since such kind of language reinforces anticircumvention laws (which are the second side of DRM). So yes, if GOG claims DRM-free high ground, such kind of language is questionable. GOG made those DRM-free claims, it was their choice. Question is are they ready to live up to them or not?

Content doesn't belong to them, but user agreement is with GOG. So any rules they set there is their voluntary choice. Agreement with game owners is a separate thing (you see it when you install the game for example). This is different, so it's irrelevant whether GOG own those games or not.

No, they have no obligation. But they as well have no obligation to make it forbidden when it's fair use (i.e. to go beyond the copyright law itself). I don't think you red my first post in detail. DRM + anticircumvention laws make forbidden what is normally not forbidden (such as reverse engineering / breaking DRM for legitimate purpose, etc.). GOG delegating this to "local laws" and saying they don't allow it either means that they as well forbid something that copyright law itself allows (and what's forbidden because of DRM).

Did you even read my first post? You might think this is not a problem worth focusing on, but it's definitely related to DRM, you just didn't pay attention when reading.

For those who want some references to the historic background on anticircumvention provisions and DRM, here is another good brief overview (it's in context of TPP, but they discuss general background as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQPfntJm0_c&t=4m20s

You can watch the whole video in general, it's very educational.

I can't say for sure, but here is one part of the agreement: Does it refer to cheating in single player games? I guess it might, the language is generic. Would GOG care? You better ask them. I suspect however that it's mostly targeted on multiplayer games, where cheating has more noticeable impact. Some companies which run MMOs are actually very aggressive about this kind of thing.

that part sounds more like it's intended to be against cheating in online games as well as maybe things like cheating achievements for games which may give bonuses or points or something.

Basically, anything to 'game' the system beyond what GOG intended.

I hate to burst your bubble bro (in fact, I like it...) but if you feel so self-righteous, why didn't you start your whining when the new EULA was out? Everybody has read it and more or less complied when it was out and now the pro open-source crowd has only learned to read and understand a document properly? Gimme a break ;)

Interesting reading, Shmerl, thanks.

Sounds as if section 9.1 would cover any greasemonkey scripts written for the forums, too.

I reckon you have a difficult task, though. Consumers will agree to (i.e., click away) pretty much any legal document without much thought. At this point, we just expect them to be unreasonable, and hope they'll never be strictly enforced.

Do you follow every single thread on GOG forums? Or may be you read this TOS / EULA on daily basis to see if anything changed? You guessed it. I simply had no clue such change was introduced. And I bet a lot of other GOG users didn't know it either. So don't be so surprised that this subject is being discussed now. Thanks to immi101 who actually brought attention to this subject.

Also this coincided with this whole RAR password business which kind of highlights the problem. I.e. TOS only sets the potential for these anticircumvention issues, but what instantiates them is this kind of thing like RAR password and etc. We are discussing the bad potential set in the TOS here.

Frankly, I think the whole change is related to Galaxy and it's multiplayer capabilities, more than DRM in any shape or form. Considering that it likely will connect to the servers maintained by game devs, or even steamworks, it is likely there as typical measure of making game hacks/cheats illegal, and would likely be made mandatory by any game dev that wants to use galaxy as mp platform.

As a modder (and a professional programmer) I fully support OP's request, but I doubt it will happen. Considering the amount of people that don't give a damn about what's stated in EULAs, as well as the mentality/what's considered 'acceptable', soon we'll keep signing up on organ donations and giving up newborn, and noone will notice... going the easiest/most common path possible is likely going to get them more/easier deals with other companies, and not significant enough backslash to care about.

Perhaps I'm just too much of a pessimist, just my 2c

Perhaps this just didn't seem to matter, since surely there would not be any digital restrictions on a DRM-free store that needed circumventing for fair use through means of reverse-engineering or disassembly. This language would then be a no-op. However, it was recently discovered otherwise.