They could try, but this is case law your dealing with, it would get shot down nearly immediately. An EULA isn’t legally binding either. If you make a mod for a game like natural selection did, the game you modded for doesnt actually own the idea of natural selection, thats why they were able to release a sequel on their own engine just fine, as do many other mod teams. Then there’s MW:LL which got a non commercial license to mod a game using a from microsoft with no word from crytek. Obviously by modding crysis under microsoft sanctions microsoft did not give the IP to crytek. Well, later they did, kinda, but thats besides the point.
Im sure there’s a lawyer somewhere that could make that argument sound reasonable but there are lawyers that could easily argue the opposite, for better or worse, law and particularly case law is quite flexible. Consider that depending on the specific mod’s implementation and the game’s mod system your not actually modifying the IP within the mod your distributing, but adding new scripts, models, and game modes. This doesnt really work for skyrim’s mod implementation since you often need to edit the world at some point but it’s true for some mods in games like mount and blade.
So, no, modders should not feel lucky for “getting anything”. Modders would just stop making mods if they could only distribute through a store where they got only 1%, what an absurd idea. It’s so completely detached from reality im not entirely sure what point your trying to make. You’re completely accepting anything a company could do but them also completely dismissing any actions individuals or a community might take in response. You are telling them that they should take whatever they get and feel lucky about it. Why, we have the power to organize and take just as much action in response. But your not ok with that?
Why is anything a company does to benefit themselves “within their rights” but anything consumers do met with “oh they should just feel lucky about what they have”.
It’s not in evrery situation. But modding is a good example of that.
Modding is a huge grey zone. And grey zones have benefits, but are fragile construct.
Now when comparing mods to a company product and talking about legal and buisness issue you come to a point where you realize that the company has rights that you can look up in law books … and mods don’t. Not to such extremes but the company has the clearer claims. In fact some mods could be taken down or crippled at any moment by the company having that power and that please to do so.
The answer to the question above is not always … but in this case pretty much.
What’s in the law is doesnt really matter when the consumer base is willing to raise such a huge amount of ire over the subject. It’s certainly a different kind of power than legal, but it does exist.
Sure it exists. But the wording: “within their rights”
Clearly indicates that it is looked upon in legal terms.
When we talk about moral on the other hand, it shouldn’t matter if you are a company or an individual. If people find things you do immoral and bad, no one or thing should have “leeway” because they are different, no matter being a legal or natural person. I agree.
Matt, my post clearly stated that the EULA was just icing on the cake. The IP holder has the rights to all and any derivations of a copyrighted work. They own the Skyrim IP, and thus any derivations of skyrim are also owned by them, regardless of any EULAs. That’s how copyright has always worked, and furthermore it is a good thing that is how it works as well. If it did not, any modder could take skyrim, mod a shirt into it, and then say that they now own that version of skyrim, which they obviously should not have any rights to do.
Also, your argument against corporations vs consumers is a bit flawed. First, you have to understand that Bethesda, whilst a corporation, invested years of man-hours and millions of dollars into the game to get it to the point it is at. They are entitled to any profits.
Look, its great that modders make content to improve the game they love, but that doesnt give them any rights to the game or any derivations of that game. They have to be accepting of what the company could do, because it is the company’s game. If they want to make money off of making game content, they can certainly try - By making their own game of course. As I said, Bethesda is the one that has invested in the IP, not modders, not even all of the modders combined.
You seem to have a “corporations are bad because they are corporations” mentality, when actually corporations are simply made up of people like you and me, and they are also the backbone of the free market society we live in today.
In legal terms, it is very within anyones rights to do what the community did here and cost them their money on the internet or anywhere else because you disagree with a company’s practices, legal or not. Ultimately this kind of action can influence a company to not exercise said “legal rights” because doing so would cost them more money than exercising them would. After all, it’s perfectly legal to make bad decisions. @lysktrevise, this is an example of the free market society at work.
There is a distinction your missing, between ownership of a mod you create and ownership of the result of applying a mod to an install of a game. These are different things, “obviously” im not suggesting modders suddenly own the IP of any game they modify. But the mod files they create, including scripts, new IP, models, textures, are all still theirs. Your right in the case of something like a song remix, it is a distributed standalone with derivative elements of the original included, but the mod files are distributed alone, the game is not included with the mod. Again, mechwarrior is not owned by crytek because a licensed mod was made for crysis. Natural selection 2 is not owned by valve because ns1 was a source mod. Killing floor is not owned by unreal because it started as a UT2004 mod. The idea that the only two options are that a game dev owns everything ever done with their software and that without that notion, modders own skyrim’s IP, is a false dichotomy and a rather heinous one at that.
Corporate entitlement? Yeah, no. The end user and modder already owns a copy of the game, all those man hours and millions of dollars were already paid for with that transaction. What they were not guaranteed profit for is riding on someone else’s work and good will to pad those millions of dollars they’re already making.
And how are you going to clearly define mod if your a company trying to rip profits from other peoples work? What if instead of modding the ingame inventory UI directly i use an overlay with mapped inputs, it’s something you’d download like a mod, it acts like a mod, for all purposes it is, but if you declare it one suddenly utilities like voice attack, teamspeak and fraps are mods, giving extra voice command, communication, and recording than the base software. If you try to define it as something that targets only one piece of software you could package art assets that work in multiple games together to bypass that or use generalized script extension systems as sort of a master mod tool kit for many games. Any mods that integrate and launch through a tool like that cannot suddenly be mutually be owned by every mod the tool works on, if i write an autohotkey script for a game im playing is my script a mod? What about other third party software i just have running on my computer, are they owned by bethesda because i was using something on my other screen while the game was running? Obviously not, the middle ground is not only up for debate but legally undetermined, the specific scenarios like the ones we’re dealing in this thread have never gone to court.
lets look at some actual case law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v._FormGen_Inc.
In this case where user created levels using ingame tools were being sold and marketed, initially the court ruled that levels did not constitute a derivative work or copyright infringement. This was later reversed and it was determined selling game saves constituted derivative work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc.
This case cited the previous one, nintendo arguied game genies violated their copyright citing the previous case. Nintendo lost.
This entire situation is very much in flux.
That said, even if legally the end user is in the right, the one with the money to pay a large legal team usually wins. Law is money in our market society, there are only a few things that can circumvent that and you’re dismissive of one of those methods:
People clearly don’t have to be accepting of any situation, there are actions that can be taken (see, consumer boycots) to attempt to force companies to change policy regardless of the legal power a company has. Bad PR is real and can cost you millions overnight as valve has stated in one of their responses to this situation, you piss people off enough, you lose millions in no time at all. Its as if your pretending these things don’t exist or are somehow morally invalid or wrong, why?
My comment on what is or isnt the backbone of our free market society today is that many factors come together and could not work without eachother, no one component is the backbone(especially not the one which is a comparatively new development), i think you’ve exposed your biases through saying so. I have noticed you usually take the position that the corporation trumps and is to be respected more than all other parties in our past discussions. I disagree, i think that they are just groups of people like you and me that operate within a certain ruleset which shapes behavior and outcomes. I think it’s silly that you think a valid dismissal of my arguments is to pretend my position is something so inane as “corporations are bad because they are corporations”, let me enlighten you.
We know these behaviors and outcomes very well, namely enhanced collaboration in pursuit of profit for the individuals involved. There is no inherent morality associated with profit, i shouldn’t have to give a history lesson to point out that both great strides forward and atrocious have resulted from the pursuit of profit. The difference is the ruleset a corporation plays in. Back to our point, in the scenario that people dont mind if their mods are taken and resold by a developer, they can and will do that for the simple reason that it makes more money. In the scenario that doing that would result in mass outrage, and what amounts to a consumer revolt, it is not profitable to do that, so they will not. The name of the game is incentive, and the present rulesets are the incentives and disincentives that exist. And, those incentives really are up to the community in a free market system.
TLDNR the whole discussion, but just going on the “raw” steam news linked in the OP, I think that this is a good way forward for the gaming industry, indies and gamers.
Not sure how many of you have published games, but it is very hard to get any meaningful income as a indie game maker, visibility is a huge problem, marketing is a huge problem and access to customers is a problem too. I’ll stop here or I’ll be bitching till tomorrow…
As a gamer, I sometimes feel guilty about playing some mods and not giving anything in return, at other times I curse the kid that made some mod that is essential, but never works, crashes the game and causes other problems.
Throw some money at the modding community and you give devs a good reason to patch and maintain their mods and you enable higher quality work, maybe they contract an artist or some other specialist.
The challenge is in how the money reaches the modders. As the recent fiasco has demonstrated, when money is involved, people interested in money will game the system however they can. Up-front payments require trust in the single creator of the product.
In contrast, a donation model requires that the developer collectively trust in the community of consumers at large. I think that’s the way to go when there are no per-item manufacturing costs.
One great challenge with a donation system is making it effortless for the giver. When Wikipedia recently wanted donations, I was all set to give them money. Until I hit the donation system. It wasn’t a system that I wanted to interact with. If I had a trusted system that allowed me to just drag a 1, 5, 10 or 20 dollar-euro-pound bill-note from one window on my screen into the product that I was using, and I could trust that the payment was secure, I’d be much more likely to make small donations. Heck, give me coins as well so that I could do that too. If I want to give a dime to somebody who created a great paint scheme for my virtual car, make that painless too.
