Alright, decided to dig a little deeper into this. So without further ado, my interpretation of
the license:
First of all I couldn't find a copy of the license installed with the runtime (
edit: later found it on UDN), so I had to run the installer again. Now on to the possibly interesting part:
paragraphs 1 and 2 basically says "Hey, this is the license. It applies to everything in here, and anything you make with it." Then things start getting interesting.
3. Commercial Exploitation. You may not use this Runtime Software, any content created for it, or use the tools provided with this Runtime Software for any commercial purposes without the prior written consent of Epic Games, Inc. ("Epic").
The term "commercial use" seems a bit vague. For example, would the following hypothetical situation qualify as commercial use:
A city is preparing to build a new building of some sort. They want to allow the community to provide input on the building's layout and location before it's built, so they decide to provide a walkthrough to anyone with a computer and internet connection. The city decides to use the Unreal Engine to provide this walkthrough. The city then contracts with someone to create the Unreal map to use. Although money changes hands in the creation of the content, the actual deployment of the end result is done free of charge to the community.
Alternately, if a school teaches a class using the Unreal Engine, the students are paying to take the class. The teacher would probably provide textures, models, template scripts, template maps, etc. The teacher in effect was payed (by the school) to create that content and the students are paying to acquire it (assuming it is available exclusively to the students enrolled in the class).
4. Use Restrictions. We want you to enjoy our products for years to come, and we want to be able to continue to release awesome stuff, so you need to be aware that there are some things you cannot do with the Runtime Software.
Fair enough.
The Runtime Software contains copyrighted material, trade secrets and other proprietary material. You may not decompile, modify, reverse engineer [...] or disassemble the Runtime Software.
Of course.
now for the ...:
[...] prepare derivative works based on the Runtime Software [...]
What constitutes a derivative work? From the first above hypothetical: the map file is dependent on the Epic base classes. The data structures contained inside the package are derived from the definition of the Epic classes. Does that make it a derivative work?
You may not rent, sell, lease, barter, or sublicense the Runtime Software.
Yep, those would all be equivalent to commercial exploitation, except for the last one. Does the last one prevent me from redistributing the engine unmodified but bundled with additional content?
You may not delete the copyright notices or any other proprietary legends on the original copy of the Runtime Software.
What exactly is a "proprietary legend"? A brief googling indicates that this license might be what this is referring to.
You may not offer the Runtime Software on a pay-per-play basis or otherwise commercially exploit the Runtime Software or use the Runtime Software for any commercial purpose.
Wasn't that covered in the section 3? I understand you want to be very clear on that point though.
You may, however, use the Runtime Software for non-commercial and educational purposes.
I assume, however, that the explicit restrictions above have precedence over this provision. Also here the
and seems a bit ambiguous. Must the proposes be both non-commercial AND educational, or is one of the two enough?
The rest of section 4 essentially reduces to "It might be possible to break the law with this. Don't do it. It's your own damn fault if you do."
And thus the end of section 4 is reached, with nary a mention of interactive entertainment (game) vs. non-interactive (machinima) or non-entertainment use.
Sections 5-11 look pretty standard. Some notes though:
- The requirement that the licensee both "be naughty" and "fail to comply with the license" in order for the license to be terminated is interesting as the prior requirement is seemingly up to interpretation.
- Is crossing it out necessary? White-out works better btw.
- what is this "www.epicgames.com"? That's just a host name. Without an access protocol (http://) that's kinda meaningless.
- I didn't know you could enforce copyright with an army of clones.
- Section 11 is a nice touch .
Then again, INAL, so the above is likely complete hogwash.
*edit* Updated the EULA link to point to the official version on UDN. *edit*