lol, didn't realize you opened a can of worms did you? :biggrin:

Its been a good debate and quite well behaved really considering the subject, your going to have to open a new thread soon

BUT, where is this enforceable? General agreements within the community as a whole, but what about those communities that don't look at this as an issue? I think it's been stated that copyright really isn't able to enforce this and this issue is highly unlikely to see court, but that only that it's a good way to self-rule and is a good outline.

This type of question always leads to a heated debate since those on both sides have strong feelings and all things considered this one has been very civil overall !!

I'm pretty sure the heat has died down substantially, though. There's no fighting going on, if there ever was; there's no need to worry!

BUT, where is what you are saying, enforceable? How will we force modders to accept that their mods are public property, and quickly, before they whip their mods off the internet altogether or stop uploading.

Communist revolution?

:rofl: Though I am interested seeing the progression of this discussion. It's like common courtesy seems to be the obvious option, but there are always exceptions which make the rules exponentially more difficult. That said, I welcome our new Communist overlords.

Works for me. :rofl:

And that's not what you were saying when I initially said you were wrong. I've never said it was anything but an assumption, I merely stated that it is the only assumption that one is allowed to make.


Does it matter? This is a matter of etiquette and courtesy; you should do so because it's the right thing to do, not because of whatever consequences may come your way if you do not.

I don't think it has to be enforced if the other issue isn't enforced. Or am I reading that wrong....

Still there are a LOT of communities out there that openly take resources and use them at their discreation, even including other game materials in their works, which is of course explicitly enforceable because that material is being sold as a property right. IE pirating. Some of my mods are included among them and I'm not very happy about it. However, I think that's an entirely different topic, this topic being about abandoned mods and using said mods for an update, it's resources, etc. Sorry to somewhat sidetrack there.

I'm sorry but this is absolutely nonsense. Fact one: Waalx can develop and host his mod wherever he wants. Fact two: Many others (including me) have worked on WAC alongside Waalx, just because it isn't on the gamesas forums doesn't mean there's no colaboration involved. Fact three: Waalx allowed usage of his work as long as the esm and BSA was used. I find it very disrepectful on your part to treat a modder that has given so much in this way.



No worries and no need to apologize, I realised that you were aiming at the assets instead of modders later on as well. I still believe that it shouldn't make any difference though as far as the modding etique goes. I do believe that patches are justified sometimes (simply by using esp dependency), but a fixed version of an ESP would still need permission from the original author, as it's still his work that's being directly modified. And yeah, if we all would agree on everything it would be a boring forum. :yes:

I'm just (pleasantly) surprised with the debate here; regardless of my own opinions. This debate seems to be split into two camps, one more concerned with modders' rights than the other. But even the latter group would STILL expect due diligence from anyone planning to in any way alter another's work. Pretty substantial due diligence. How cool is it that our community is mature enough for these to be the opposing views?

Bravo, guys. I, for one, am impressed.

Need a stick? You're beating the horse with me now. There is no "right" in assumption. There's a "safe", but not a "right."

Yes it does matter because you've been stating that it does and now you don't? Yes it is etiquette and courtesy, and I think all of us, including myself, follow this ethics, but it's still a shame that good mods don't get updated/add on because of this. That's what several of us are against.

Did you see http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1193878-if-a-author-can-not-be-reached-you-can-not-release-a-fixed-version-of-the-mod-right/page__view__findpost__p__17740019?

I feel like you're taking a nuanced statement I made and trying to make it black-and-white. I'm not arguing he hasn't done a great deal for the community, and I should have been more specific--the isolation I'm speaking of is his decision to keep everything confined to his own forum. What if every mod author did this? I'm talking about the spirit of collaboration, that's the context for this. And it's possible to think something's wonderful and be appreciative of it while still critiquing what one might consider a poor decision in this context.

EDIT: Waalx might be a bad example simply because he's done so much, and I don't know the history before I joined here, obviously. I was basically saying though that any mod author who releases a mod and treats it as if it exists independent of the rest of the community, or who abandons it without giving permission or lack thereof for others to work on it, is being disrespectful to the spirit of collaboration. I know that sounds like a pretty radical and unappreciative thing to say, but I'm trying to be nuanced here. It's not about whether I appreciate their work or not. Think of it as kind of a fundamentalist Cathedralist view of things, but at the same time I'm not trying to say what's right or what's wrong morally or whatever, it's about appreciating what can be accomplished in the mod community through collaboration.

Its threads like this that make me smile.....this thread broke records on posts ...it remained civil, respectful. Even has a post from another Mod upload site that states it is taking efforts to help with this kind of thing. There have been mods that I have had to pass on because they are not updated to work with what we have.

I am of the Belief that we all use one particular word...."Created". IE: it was created using the CS, it was created using Gimp, it was created using Only Tes4edit.

The creation makes it just that. Something that is yours. So if not given permission, then one would have to Take permission. Take is not an acceptable thing.

AS this debate has gone back and forth , please don't Take this the wrong way. I feel all Modders deserve the respect the community gives them. The OP Showed a lot of respect posting this in the first place. IT went back and forth about legal this and that ,but in the end it all comes down to respecting the original author.

The thread has over 160 posts, so excuse me for not reading each and every one of them.

I just read this quote, which doesn't seem very nuanced at all:



It's still not fair to accuse Waalx of being disrespectful towards your vision of the community spirit. Like I said: not all modding takes place on Nexus or the Betsoft forums....

Well, it's just a thought. With that original post I was just trying to go a different route than the absolutist kind of debate about copyright law and morality. Waalx wasn't really even the focus of it, and probably a bad example.

It is indeed my vision of the community spirit, and I'll reiterate what I said about the mod community impressing me most due to the spirit of collaboration that seems to permeate things here.

I do want to repeat, though, if every mod author had their own forum to distribute their mod it would definitely have a negative effect on both the quality and quantity of Oblivion mods produced. And if all of those folks who don't join in here on the forums actually did collaborate here it would likewise have a definite positive effect.

I'll leave it at that though, unless you've got any real argument with those last two sentences, but I don't really have a point to debate. Like I said, just a thought!

Some things that have as big a scale as Waalx need their own forums. I think he has a thread that's several hundred pages long, and wants that kept/archived. That is not possible here, as the post limit for threads is 200 posts, and the forums get purged every so often. Likewise large scale mods such as MERP and Mesogea need their own forums due to the amount of work and organization involved, all of which is not possible here.

Yeah like I said it's probably a bad example. I mean, I use WAC and Waalx has answered a few of my posts over there specifically and was very helpful. I am most definitely a fan! But I guess my initial exposure to it kind of shaded it as "isolationist" to me as I hadn't ever come across a mod that's so hard to find if you aren't specifically looking for it. I still remain puzzled as to how he can put so much (great) work into the thing yet not want to make it as available as possible, heh.

I'm a real nut about not treating a single critique as if it's an indictment of an entire person or project, though. Maybe some of my statements weren't all that nuanced, but nuance is like my favorite abstract concept ever!!!! This is what happens when the first Internet forum you participated in 15 years ago was the [Star] TrekBBS! Where everything is absolutist!

We'll just leave it at that than. Just a few thoughts on your collaboration musings:

Sure, there are lots of collaborations with great results here. However the bigger colaborations (modding teams) need (and have) their own forums to manage all the different things involved. Sometimes they maintain a central thread here just to post updates or keep the attention alive, but many times they don't. I'm not sure if mods would be better if everybody would colaborate all the time in one centralized place. I like being able to choose from three different combat mods which treat the same subject in a completely different way. Also, a modder needs creative freedom to bring out the best, without people constantly telling him about potential conflicts.

I just think, that mod users are selfish in this regard. They only think about the mod and not the modder. You know? "Finish the damn mod, I'm tired of waiting >_>", etc etc. That's not the say the same kind of selfishness isn't displayed by the modder, however, they created it, they spent their personal time on it, therefore they can drag on as much as they like. And gosh people disappear for reasons unknown(heaven forbid) but you better finish the mod, or I'll make a thread about it and insinuating finishing what you started without permission!

Edit: for you way-too-serious posters, please adjust your sarcasm detectors before reading this.

All I want to say on this contentious subject can be summed up http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2011/5/23/6393d721-c1f2-4c9a-8235-e2eeb2508d52.jpg.

"Right" in terms of "the right thing to do" not in terms of "correct". Just clarifying what I meant there. It's what I've always meant, though I now notice there's this ambiguity in the word that could be really confusing.


Define 'against,' please. Do I think it's a shame? Sure. Do I think a better way is possible? Yeah, sure, all modders should always leave instructions indicating their personal wishes on the matter. Do I think we can 'do anything' about this to make that happen? Well, there's awareness, there's things like what Darkrder is doing by giving TESA a section for this, etc. Those are good. But ultimately, once it has already happened, there's nothing to be done aside from hope that the original modder gets back to you and allows you to use it.

I brought up the law and copyright as a comparison, not as an assertion that we ought to be going to court or any such things. As such, the actual legal minutiae are not, as stated, important. What is important is the concept of the copyright, which should be honored even if not legally required, for reasons of etiquette and courtesy. And as such, whether or not it's enforceable is not important, either: I was stating how everyone should behave, which is a moral argument, not a legal one, and does not depend on anything beyond everyone's own conscience for enforcing it. If someone violates it, we'll do what we can — the moderators will lock the thread, TES Nexus and PES and TESA will take down the mod, etc., but ultimately we're limited in how far we can go to force someone to obey. All of which is inconsequential to the argument that everyone should.

But you can't really be right with an assumption. It's a guess at best, and the only real "safe" solution is to assume author meant no usage. It's still an assumption though. It's like putting words into peoples' mouths when they never said it.

Not going to rehash everything that's been said for definition of "against." You can re-read the previous posts for it.



*And just for clarification in reference to some of the new posters above. I do not support taking rights away from modders. I do however think there should be an acceptance to being able to use abandoned mods so long as due credit (and diligence) is made to the original author, and only if there is no explicit instruction stating otherwise, and if the new modder is willing to take down the new update/mod if said original author asks for it to be taken down.