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[Retropunch]

By my recollection of how the legal stuff works, you're missing the point. If you don't enforce in every case, if a single person manages to use your intellectual property for longer than that, you lose the right to enforce your ownership in future cases. It doesn't matter if that person never tries to claim your material as their own, merely distributing it without proper licensing or approval for that period of time can invalidate your rights, allowing other people to steal or claim it as their own without consequence.

This is exactly right. It's why there was that ridiculous case with Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. You HAVE to at least attempt to enforce copyright or it can make it difficult to enforce in the future.

Really, this whole debate proves why paid modding is a terrible idea. It's such a legal grey area, and there would be endless debates about who owns what, which would mostly end up with modders getting pissed off and completely kill development in a lot of cases. Think about the mods that get killed off all the time on copyright claims because of LoTR - then multiply that by a hundred.

Bethesda/devs recruiting modders to create paid content is a great idea.
Donations are a great idea (sans legal issues).
This is a terrible idea.

[BoredVirulence]

So Cathedrals are good, except when they're bad. And parlors are bad, but bazaar's are good.

Quick, let's throw a couple more kinds of structures in there, we need more diversity.

Comparing the two ideas is a bit difficult. Cathedral style modding has the benefits of the bazaar style for open source, but generally keeping with the tradition of GNU projects (Freedom good, freedom for all). Parlor style modding has the general structure of cathedral style for open source (my project, I do what I please with it, appeal to the ruler, this is a monarchy).

The movement from cathedral to bazaar is generally good, the movement's goals were strictly business and greed induced. The monetization of a cathedral style modding community is a movement to a parlor style for money. Its the same thing happening, in someways in reverse, in others identical. Except cathedral style modding has the best of both worlds in my opinion, it uses an open structure of inclusion (the bazaar in this case, all are welcome to share and contribute), but it maintains the moral high ground of the free software movement. Its no coincidence that the open source movement considered themselves like a bazaar, they're open for business, where the free software movement was adamant in their beliefs. See the symbolism for what it is.

Cathedrals are great, open-source is great.  It exists perfectly fine in the same market as closed-source, payed software.

In fact, people steal open-source software for their own projects all the time... Yet AFAIK never go back and claim sole rights to what they stole, even after three years.  Hm!

The open source movement generally is to get paid producing an open source product, having other people work on it for free, so that a business can profit off of it. I use a number of these frameworks (typically under the MIT license) all the time. They're useful, but if you contribute your work is being used for others to make money. That's part of it. If you don't want people using your code to produce non-free (free as in freedom typically, but that usually comes with no money) then you're using a GPL, and fall within the free software community. There is gray area, but that's generally the way it falls.

Edit: Also, the licenses used in open source (and free software) communities have weight. You can't claim you own rights to those works. Mods being derived works, derived from very heavily licensed software, have a different legality. Its also worth noting that during the schism between open source and free software, code did illegally exchange from one license to another, and that's a problem, but the communities diverged and it wasn't a permanent problem.

[Flying Dice]

By my recollection of how the legal stuff works, you're missing the point. If you don't enforce in every case, if a single person manages to use your intellectual property for longer than that, you lose the right to enforce your ownership in future cases. It doesn't matter if that person never tries to claim your material as their own, merely distributing it without proper licensing or approval for that period of time can invalidate your rights, allowing other people to steal or claim it as their own without consequence.

This is exactly right. It's why there was that ridiculous case with Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. You HAVE to at least attempt to enforce copyright or it can make it difficult to enforce in the future.

Really, this whole debate proves why paid modding is a terrible idea. It's such a legal grey area, and there would be endless debates about who owns what, which would mostly end up with modders getting pissed off and completely kill development in a lot of cases. Think about the mods that get killed off all the time on copyright claims because of LoTR - then multiply that by a hundred.

Bethesda/devs recruiting modders to create paid content is a great idea.
Donations are a great idea (sans legal issues).
This is a terrible idea.

That last is one of the things that a lot of people seem to miss. If Bethesda brought on the people who made SkyUI, the improved favorites menu, the improved world map, improved quest markers, &c. and paid them to build a comprehensive UI upgrade using only their in-house tools and content, designed to work seamlessly with vanilla Skyrim, I would gladly pay $5-10 for that at this point.

Now, if they released Fallout 4 with a shit UI and then released something like that a few months later, that would be a problem.

[Rolan7]

By my recollection of how the legal stuff works, you're missing the point. If you don't enforce in every case, if a single person manages to use your intellectual property for longer than that, you lose the right to enforce your ownership in future cases. It doesn't matter if that person never tries to claim your material as their own, merely distributing it without proper licensing or approval for that period of time can invalidate your rights, allowing other people to steal or claim it as their own without consequence.

I sorta thought so too, until I looked it up.  It's misconception 11:
http://sites.lib.byu.edu/copyright/about-copyright/basics/

That's how it is for *trademarks* and maybe other IP, but not specifically copyright.  You don't have to defend copyright.

[Retropunch]

Hmm..."However, if you do not actively defend your copyright, there may be broader unauthorized uses than you would like. It is a good idea to pursue enforcement actions as soon as you discover misuse of your copyright protected material."

EDIT: Sorry for the short post before - I thought I wrote more but must have lost it!

I meant to say - while it's not strictly necessary so far as losing it completely, it is harder to claim and there can be consequences. It's due to derivatives. For instance, if you let x use your copyrighted material, and then y uses x's material, and then n uses y's material...and so on and so on. There have also been cases where there is a thought that it is implied.

Really though, the legalistics don't matter, what does matter is that there would be ENDLESS disputes over it, which would just ruin any forward progress.

[Rolan7]

Necro, since Valve is trying again.
Replying from the WTF thread:

Then just don't buy it.

Wow! You mean it is a free market? I had no idea! I am overreacting by bringing up any criticism...

Ironically, this is an overreaction

That will only affect those who make mods as a business, nobody else is going to be affected. Nothing is to stop existing modders still making the same mods they make now, and paid modders will have to compete with free mods which are just as good as free mods are now.

Well, except you know... the system.

Well, no.  The system just doesn't do anything of the sort.  It's literally as easy to post free content (unless you include content that someone else wants to charge for).

No, because that can't be copyrighted since it's an idea, and you can't copyright ideas. If it's a particular image or sound, then you could. Copyrights only apply to things that can be seen or heard

Actually the way copyright works with videogames is that you can copyright the process. It isn't that "Unlimited ammo is copyrighted" in this case, but the specific way it is achieved is.

Video games copy elements of each other all the time, so I think that's clearly incorrect...
Pretty sure it's subject to clean-room reverse-engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
If two games have health bars, the latter doesn't automatically have to pay royalties.  It has to be proven that the concept was copied.  And if you can recreate it in a "clean room" through your own development, it can even be a straight copy of the end result.

Like how that company was able to sell SNES (NES?) cartridges without licensing them from Nintendo, because they supposedly reverse-engineered the handshake protocol.
(Turned out they were lying, though, they had access to the source code.  Got caught because they copied it lazily, including artifact code)

Valve was also offering refunds and a decent reporting system

Neither of which were up to the task.

*shrug* Yeah, they were.  No-questions-asked refunds by themselves solve the problem, the reporting system (despite being flooded with... faithless protest votes) is just gravy.

[TheBiggerFish]

Honestly, I don't see what makes paid mods such a big deal.  If you don't like it, you really don't have to do anything of the sort.

Especially bugfix mods - they're practically entirely scenes a faire in their entirety.

Also, yes, independent creation is a copyright defense.

[Neonivek]

No-questions-asked refunds by themselves solve the problem

And what were the conditions again? 1-2 hours of playing the game... within 2 weeks of buying it.

Well, no.  The system just doesn't do anything of the sort.  It's literally as easy to post free content (unless you include content that someone else wants to charge for).

If you been in a two tier system there is always pressure to charge AND your worth has a content creator is measured in how successful your product is in terms of sales.

Not to mention, to my knowledge, Valve scrapes money off the top.

If two games have health bars, the latter doesn't automatically have to pay royalties.  It has to be proven that the concept was copied.

Videogame copyrights are quite a bit different and are right now being strongly contested in court.

You don't copyright videogame ideas... you copyright videogame processes.

THAT is why minigames during a loading screen was copyrighted for so long. Not because they could honestly copyright the idea of doing so... But because they copyrighted the process that would allow it to occur.

[Flying Dice]

And people steal your work, sell it as their own, then exploit the system to stop you from doing anything about it.

[forsaken1111]

Yep, in the short time they tried this before we almost immediately had people uploading other's free mods as their own paid mods, claiming full credit. This should be entertaining.

[Neonivek]

As I said I have no issue with paid mods.

But Valve's attempt stinks of them trying to make money off the communities mods while screwing over the community... fully knowing that...

Then fixing it little by little along the way because they aren't the ones who are paying for it.

Instead of making a good solid system from the start.

A Broken system is far worse then no system in this case.

--

As well WHAT you can monetize and what you cannot... should also be part of the system.

[TheBiggerFish]

So complain about how they're doing it before they actually launch the thing?  So they fix it?

[Dorsidwarf]

Someone brought up work-for-hire earlier saying that work-for-hire means that commissioned work is automatically owned by the contributor but the wiki article they linked explicitly says a written agreement between the worker and commissioner saying that t is "work for hire" has to exist for it to apply. Implicit or mutual verbal agreement doesn't count, it has to specific and written.

[Zangi]

Such necro.

It'll be hilarious to see all the free popular mods get uploaded for sale by unscrupulous people.  Again.

[Rolan7]

No-questions-asked refunds by themselves solve the problem

And what were the conditions again? 1-2 hours of playing the game... within 2 weeks of buying it.

That's for games (and it's 2 hours in 2 weeks, yeah).  For mods it's apparently a straight 24 hours from purchase.  Which is sorta better and worse, of course, but I think appropriate.

Well, no.  The system just doesn't do anything of the sort.  It's literally as easy to post free content (unless you include content that someone else wants to charge for).

If you been in a two tier system there is always pressure to charge AND your worth has a content creator is measured in how successful your product is in terms of sales.

Not to mention, to my knowledge, Valve scrapes money off the top.

Oh they scraped a LOT off the top.  It was like... a third I think?  Though I think most went back to Bethesda.  That's the biggest complaint I agree with, they were going for much too large a percentage.  Though again, purely opt-in.

Yep, in the short time they tried this before we almost immediately had people uploading other's free mods as their own paid mods, claiming full credit. This should be entertaining.

And people who bought those and didn't refund them were throwing money away carelessly.  Then got refunded *anyway* without having to ask.