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Quote: By entering, the entrant represents and warrants that they have the right to grant GameDev.net the rights set forth above and hereby warrants that (1) the entry material is original and they are the sole author of and owner of all rights including copyrights to the entry and that the entry is not subject in whole or in part to claims of ownership of others or (2) the entry is subject, in whole or in part, to claims of ownership and copyright by others but that the entrant has the right to grant GameDev.net the rights set forth above. The entrant retains any and all rights of ownership, intellectual property rights and all other rights entrant may have in and to the entry. Notwithstanding mentioned ownership rights, by entering, the entrant personally or on behalf of their company grant GameDev.net permanent, non-exclusive, world-wide rights and a license, but not an obligation, free of any charge or compensation, to use, edit, copy, distribute and publish all or part of the entry, and all rights subsidiary to and derivative from the entry, in any medium now known or invented in the future, for promotional, advertising or demonstration purposes for GameDev.net's products or services or for GameDev.net generally.
Gamedev have the rights to make a torrent, but not users. Have you checked with the entrants?
In theory anyone entering the contest has read that before hand. While GameDev does have a right to distribute the entry, the right is non-exclusive meaning the entrant can allow others to do the same. By submitting an entry they are signifying they agree with those terms.
The entrants have not been asked, so in theory my creation and uploading of this torrent may violate the rights of the entrants. As I am distributing content published by GameDev.net, I may be in trouble several times: once from each of the entrants, and once from GameDev (who may well have their own legal statements about re-distributing content from their site without express written permission).
To AP#2, just because GameDev.net has a non-exclusive right does not mean others automatically gain the right to redistribute - it simply means the entrants may make further similar agreements with any number of other entities.
I suppose the "proper" way to protect myself would be to get the blessing from each of the entrants. Another possibility may to simply transfer the IP ownership of the .torrent file to GameDev.net, so they become the "owners" of the torrent file and they are then fully within their rights to publish the games in this manner. This sounds like the easiest way to deal with it.
However, until I am contacted by an individual entrant or gamedev.net and asked to desist distributing entries in this manner, I don't see a need to take any action. I would imagine most entrants see a user-created BitTorrent as simply another distribution method, no different than a user-created mirror site. In any case, the entries haven't been modified by me (aside from changing some of the installer filenames from "468874.exe" to "LionsOfTheAtlanticInstaller.exe" for clarity). And I think Gamedev would probably enjoy the bandwidth savings.
