[testudovictoria]

Interesting way to put it, but I'm still not sure that quite applies. The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people. Commercial endeavors change with movie viewing. It's implied that single entity can own a single copy while charging admission to profit from their single copy of the movie. Meanwhile, movie companies (mostly) don't care if I play _The Lord of the Rings_ in a private setting to a small audience of known people.

I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.

[gjsman-1000]

The law is fairly immune to mental gymnastics and mind games, regardless of what the dramas indicate.

For movies, it’s fairly simple and widely understood you are buying a license for private viewing. While there’s some room for interpretation, it goes without saying that if you are inviting strangers and/or charging admission and/or running advertising, you’re inviting scrutiny.

Also, let’s just be honest, the moment you run advertising for anything, it’s almost impossible to argue this is not a publicly available event. Public is also fairly broad - collages have to license every movie they want to show to a classroom, for example. My college paid over $2000 to Netflix for a single showing to Math Club of one movie for about 7 viewers.

> The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people

The law only cares about copyright. What it is, is irrelevant.

As for your point about how the participants must have bought the game - I don’t think that would work either. Imagine you ran your unapproved Lord of the Rings convention. You also had the movies playing on repeat the whole time. I don’t think arguing that “only people who have bought the movies have any interest in being here” would protect you.