Is it legal to trade my Aquazone Fish? No it is not legal. Here is a copy of the letter posted to a news group concerning Aquazones fish trading policy. Dear AQUAZONERs, It has always been our policy to stay out of the newsgroup discussions regarding AQUAZONE, mainly because we feel the newsgroups are a forum for the user to exchange thoughts, discussion, ideas etc., and the continued presence of the developer on the newsgroup might be considered intrusive and irritating. On the subject of trading fish, we felt that a few quick comments might clarify why trading AQUAZONE fish is not permitted under the AQUAZONE license agreement. The challenge of AQUAZONE is essentially that of keeping any real-world aquarium: raising and breeding healthy, happy fish in a beautiful environment! In El-fish, the challenge is creating new and unique varieties of fish with different and changable appearances. Indeed, the "genetics" of El fish are specifically designed to permit a user to create a specific unique fish and cross it with the characteristics of another created by a different user. This is similar to the ideas governing Creatures, with the predominant objective being to breed unique and specific characteristics into the creatures that can result in different emergent behaviors. Again, the program was designed for this type of trading. This is not done in AQUAZONE. While each AQUAZONE fish is unique in personality, characteristics and traits, they do not evolve or change (yet! future versions: maybe!). Currently you cannot breed a variation on the fish. There is no genetic gain (or need) inherent in trading the fish. The only reason to trade fish in AQUAZONE is to obtain a species you do not currently possess or have run out of. When you trade for fish, whether baby fry or adults, you are basically getting full access to the species and this is access that (if you have not purchased the fish) you do not legally possess. It is not our intention to sound draconian or try to hurt our users enjoyment of the product, but the simple truth is that trading fish is not permitted under the license agreement. Fish trading hampers our ability to make new species available at a low cost to our users. If we know that once we sell a fish in the AZ SHOP ONLINE, it will rapidly be bred and traded, we would have to charge a much higher price for that fish in order to recoup our costs and stay in business. That's all I plan to say on the subject of trading fish. If anyone has any comments or questions, please feel free to email me. Sorry if this is seen as an intrusion into the newsgroup discussion. P.S. For your information, we have finally worked out some of our scheduling and resource problems (we lost two developers) in updating the AZ Shop Online. Two new fish species are scheduled for arrival in the Shop in approximately two weeks. Updates will be carried out roughly every two weeks from this point onwards (alternating fish, accessories & other stuff, and Mekasia). Our apologies for the slow updates of the AZ Shop Online. We will try to do better. Happy fish-keeping! Sincerely, Dean Hamilton Marketing, 9003inc. Canada Corp. Back to Top |
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