I hoped we'd seen the last of this type of thread, as they normally end with ill feeling on both sides.

To put it nice and simply if a mod author has stated his/her mod should not be altered or redistributed without their express permission then that's the end of it, regardless if it was last week or ten years ago.
Alter it for personal use if you like. I've done it to dozens of mods.
But releasing it for general public use against the authors express wishes?

I don't think the debate needs to go further.

I agree that the author absolutely has the right to dictate the usage terms of their works. The problems always arise when the author doesn't state their terms. Authors that don't declare terms up front and then disappear leave their work in limbo. At this point we can only make assumptions about what they would want. There are two extremes;

1) Assume the authors are egotistical selfish fools who would rather strangle their own work into obscurity than have anyone else fix/expand/use their work in any way.

2) Assume the authors are totally altruistic and intended in giving their work openly to the community with no strings attached in thanks for all the help the community gave them along the way.

Most people assume that 1) is the safe choice, which follows copyright conventions and has less risk of offending the author. However, would authors really like their work to be permanently branded with "BROKEN: do not use under any circumstances!" and abandoned just because of a silly little bug they will never get around to fixing? If they really did want to hold onto their work with a strangle-hold, why did they upload it to the public in the first place? I personally would be more offended if people didn't use my work because they assumed I was a copyright nazi.

I think most authors fall somewhere in between the two extremes; they want recognition for their work, but they don't want to hold on so tight they kill it, especially after they have moved on and are not interested any more. This is particularly true of people that never specified their usage terms in the first place... if they really cared they would have made their draconian terms or extreme generosity public from the outset.

I agree the community is served by protecting modders rights, but authors that haven't clarified their usage terms haven't clarified what rights they want protected... the right to hold tightly onto their work, or the right to give it away. In the end, the community is more harmed by assuming authors would rather strangle their work than share it.

This would all be solved if sites like tesnexus allowed authors to pick their licence terms, and defaulted to a GPL-like licence for all the people who don't really care (GPL like licences seem to be in the best interest of the community). TES Nexus does include this credits and permissions stuff now, but unfortunately it defaults to the most draconian settings. IMHO this hash default causes more damage to the community than having no credits/permissions statement at all.

I agree, but I think you're missing an important 3rd option, which is where all the issues pop up from:

3) Assume the modder is altruistic, and intended on giving their work openly to the community...but only when they were done.

This is I think where most people lie. How much of a PITA is it when other redistribute "fixed" (whether it really needed fixing or not) versions of your mod, while you're still working on it? Then you end up either trying to support bug reports, etc from the fixed version(s), or just ignoring them altogether.

So at what point do we say that the modder is "done" with the community? This is why IMHO, it's best to just assume you have no right to redistribute without explicit information. You can never really know if someone is gone for good, unless they state otherwise, which rarely happens.

I know get annoyed if someone tries to distribute fixes for Wrye Bash, even if they've already contacted the current devs, just for this reason alone! Now, of course being the responsible (meta)modder that I am, I'd make sure that there was at least one active dev working on Wrye Bash if I was taking an extended leave of absence, otherwise I'd turn it over to the community.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Are you serious? This is most absurd false dichotomy I've ever seen. There are myriad reasons why one would assume strict author rights without assuming any such thing about the author. That is extremely disingenuous thing to say. Could we please refrain from the naked insults here?


Great: please let others know how you feel in your mods' readmes, and don't push your own opinions for your own works on others' own works.


I disagree but accept it as debatable. What isn't debatable, however, is that authors ought to have a chance, while they are active, to respond to this. Which means you cannot change things now, and expect those changes to affect mods made then. That is unfair, and patently not our right to do so.


I think you're very wrong, and of course TES Nexus defaults to those settings — those are the settings that preserve all of a modders' rights that they already have.

Here's the thing, and this is a benchmark of modern society: Your rights are yours, to do with as you please, whether you choose to waive them or 'draconically' demand strict adherence to them in every instance. They are yours, and no one else can take them away.

Who are you to decide that others' rights ought to be abridged 'for the good of the community'? And is it really 'for the good of the community' to decide, ex post facto, that those rights are no longer going to be honored?

The act of creating something artistic and original is the genesis of production, and the result of such work is the very definition of property. Nothing could possibly be more intrinsically yours than that which you have created of your own time, skills, and effort.

If the authors doesn't stated his/her mod should not be altered or redistributed without their express permission in their readme, then in my opinion => :
"Qui ne dit mot consent" => "If someone doesn't react to a decision for instance, it means he/she agrees with it and should not complain afterwards" / "He who is silent is seen to consent" / "Silence gives consent".

And if the author appears and expressly tells me to withdraw its mod altered/redistribued by me, and well no problem I will withdraw it.


Because if really the author of a mod don't want that nobody alter/redistribute his mod, it with inevitably is written a note in the readme explaining it, left an address email validates, withdrawn its mods of the Internet, or it supervises its mods that it published. It's logic.

False, and thoroughly rejected by modern society as an acceptable assumption.

http://wryemusings.com/WML%201.0.html

Though it won't solve any differences in opinion, heh.

Wrye was by-far the most eloquent and convincing speaker I have seen for the opposite viewpoint.

But he didn't convince me.

I do think that using Wrye's licenses is probably a good idea. I do encourage all modders to specify how they want their work treated, especially if they are generous enough to waive some or all of their rights to the work. But I do not think it is anyone's place to ignore the rights of others. They are rights; you do not have to say or do anything to have them, they are yours. Only through the express permission of the right-holder may they be ignored.

When they've been gone for years, all known forms of contact have failed, and even some detective work on your part has failed.

I don't think anyone's talking about wantonly snatching up mods that haven't seen recent activity, and releasing modified versions of them with either A) no credit to the original creator, or B) not making it clear that it's edited and to not bother the original creator about it. It's about popular mods that people like using or like the concept of, but which have unfortunate bugs that makes it difficult or impossible to use, and which there's some people willing to fix those bugs on their own accord, and where you can only assume the original creator abandoned it (due to time since last update, loss of contact, inability to find where they are, etc).

My question would be, assuming the creator did not specify their wishes beforehand, would it not make sense to assume that they want the community to have it since they took the effort to release it to the community? Being that they released the mod and didn't say otherwise, I think it's safe to assume they didn't want the mod consigned to obscurity or unusability, else why release it?

One needs to keep in mind that copyright law comes in to play here. EULA or not, that does not change. The default position under copyright law is that only the author has the right to modify, distribute, display, etc their work. There is no "unless X" involved here. No assumption that because it's on the internet it's fair game.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Only a license from the author gives users any rights at all. For mods, that license comes in the form of the readme. If that file says nothing about what you can and can't do with the mod, then you must legally assume that means you can do nothing at all. Yes, even in the case of long abandoned mods sitting on Nexus for 5 years untouched. No readme file or other obvious document? No permission. Simple.

Copyrighted works only fall into the public domain 75 years after the author's death. By the time this takes place, every last one of us is going to be dead and buried.

Given the nature of this topic, I'm going to assume I covered all the relevant points

We've had this discussion time and again in the few years I've been here. Arthmoor's quite correct:Yes, sure, eventually these mods will become public domain and people can then do what they want. The mod was released 5 years ago? Only 70 more years to wait.

Yes, maybe the community would be 'better off' if older, dirtier, buggier mods could be cleaned up and re-released. But I think that's looking at things with rose-coloured glasses too. Cynic that I am, I think that's much more likely to lead to 20 different versions of older mods released by people who turn up, "attempt to contact the original author" and then do whatever they feel like doing with the mod. "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." I'm not particularly convinced that's really better for the community than having people make altogether new things.

The best thing for the community to do is to gently push *current* mod authors to put a clause in their readmes to clarify what happens to their work when they're gone.

Vac

Trouble is the authors aren't dead yet. So long as they have brain functionality, copyright still applies.

And put the shotgun away....



And I have just done that.

I was working on the assumption they were a "dead modder". :whistling:

Nope, just forgot they have to be really dead for that countdown to start, I stopped having to worry about IP issues when I changed career about 6 years ago; I'm a little rusty now.

Vac

Edit: And good for you for putting in the clause.

I too have made intentions clear on what becomes of my stuff if I'm out of contact long enough. That's how it has to be done.

OK... I apologize... was presenting the two extremes and kinda went overboard on emotive words. They were meant to be the extremes, and as I said later I don't think anyone really falls into those extremes.


I absolutely agree the author has the right demand whatever conditions they want on their own works, and whatever terms they last applied before they disappeared have to be honored. The problem is when they disappear before explicitly specifying any terms. The vast majority of mods include no explicit information about permissions and terms, and I refuse to believe that this is because those modders assume and want their work protected by very strict copyright law. I believe that they don't bother specifying terms because they don't really care. They have made a cool mod that they want to share, the last thing on their mind is tightly protecting their intellectual property. The ones that really do care explicitly say so.

This is why I think the TES Nexus defaults are harmful... people that don't care about licencing terms will by default apply the most strict licencing terms. These authors, if forced to make an explicit statement about permissions would probably not choose those strict terms. Very strict licencing terms are harmful to the mod and wider community. Code that cannot be fixed is dead code, a waste of the authors time writing it, and a waste of users time trying to use it.

And sure, copyright law does make the assumption of strict terms, but that doesn't mean the law isn't stupid.

I never said anything about denying others rights for the good of the community, or retroactively changing them. I just think that it's a mistake to assume modders that don't explicitly specify permissions don't want people to use their mod, and doing this is definitely harmful to the community. For modders that do explicitly specify their terms, those terms should be honored.

For mods published when the default terms were clearly "strict", we unfortunately have to assume that those strict terms still apply, even though this probably violates the original authors intent. The questions are; how clearly were the default terms "strict" in the past, and should we be keeping the default terms as "strict" for new works? Right now the default terms on TES Nexus are clearly "strict", but were they before the "credits and permissions" settings were added? Unfortunately, I think they were. Should the default stay as "strict" for future works? I would argue that it's in the communities interests that they shouldn't be.

True... but surely then if you want to keep it for yourself, you don't upload it to a public download site

My personal view is that provided the modder hasn't stated that he doesn't want anyone to tamper with his mods, new modders are free to take up and improve the mod - after sufficient time/effort to contact the author. Just read ABO's post above for why.

For my own mods, I have tried to set in the permissions on TESNexus that if you ask me for permission, and haven't got a reply in 4 weeks, then consider it as permission given. If I leave the Oblivion modding scene and someone discover an important bug or two in one of my mods, I don't see any harm in this being fixed.

I dunno - it says a lot that a mod maker does not bother with any kind of license of contingency for their leaving.

As in they don't care. That not caring I think is translated into an impression that it is free to use - because they don't care.

I can see why people then will assume that something is free to alter and take over.

Not ideal, but then what is?

What about those cases when a modder takes it upon themselves to alter another person's mod then refuses to let anyone have permission to alter their version? Which may be minor alterations. That is a special kind of personality.

Please don't flame this - none of it is meant as flammable.

It could well be that you're right. After reading this thread I'm inclined to think that maybe there isn't as much consensus as I thought there was.

My statement earlier was based mainly on an experience I had a few months ago. A Morrowind modder decided to http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1147087-ok-ive-ignored-the-better-music-system-mod-for-long-enough/ When I brought up the fact that this used to be frowned on I was told that the community was more "mature" nowadays. What I took away from that exchange was that folks were far less fanatically concerned about this issue now than they used to be.

This attitude is very harmful too. I know a few currently active modders who are likely to get quite annoyed by this kind of attitude.

A good number of modders get a great deal of motivation from the identification of their work as "theirs". At the point where their work becomes "up for grabs" in any way, they're not just likely to stop working, but also to de-marbleise. People who take the time and effort to create something and then are kind and generous enough to share should be granted every respect possible; assuming their work is there to be tweaked and changed as you desire is not respectful (it may in fact be accurate for a given author, but the assumption is not respectful).

The community largely adheres to strict, draconian interpretations so that those mod authors who absolutely do not want their work tampered with feel free to release and share their private work, and then create more and more that they also share. These people are often some of the most motivated creators; I personally think the mod community does very well from their contributions.

Seriously, the best thing to do is to try and get mod authors to clarify their position while they're still active; once they're gone, it's too late.

Vac

I know from contacting a mod author that had done a mod in the "early" days (2006) that often the thought of someone else wanting to modify their work doesn't even occur to them. I'm referring to Oblivion mods here. They had an idea, decided to release a mod and that's it. They're done. Now I'm referring to the cases where there is no license specified at all. I agree with some of the other posts in this thread, if the mod author did not specify any license terms at all, it is quite likely that they don't care. If you don't want somebody using your work, you are quite likely to say so. Now that doesn't mean you want somebody plagarizing your work. If somebody releases a mod based on somebody else's work, they had better credit the original author. I think that's the greatest fear in letting others modify your work - the time and effort you put into the original idea is lost.

Honestly, I don't really see how there can be a consensus on this issue. It is simply two opposing viewpoints.

Personally, I modify mods I download to suit my purposes. If they have errors or something I don't like, I "fix" them to suit my purposes. I then use my version for my own private use. If someone were to post a problem online for something that I addressed, I would then PM them regarding how I resolved the issue. This circumvents the entire problem of releasing a modified version of another's work that they might take offense to.

If you want to release a mod, design it from the ground up or get permission and become a co-author. Otherwise, just use if for your own personal enjoyment or share it with community friends privately.

I really don't agree with the interpretation about the absence of a license part. Because "back in the early days" (just as is the situation now) if there was no license part it was comon practice to assume that permission was needed. That's why many modders didn't put up a license in the first place. Sure, some modders maybe didn't care or didn't even think about such things, but a lot of modders relied on the "draconic" rules the community layed upon itself to keep things in line.

What you believe is irrelevant. The law doesn't see things your way. By necessity, it sees things the opposite of your assumption that people just don't care. It is not legally tenable to assume intent without it being specified, so the only logical way to handle it is to start from the strictest set of rights possible: That only the author has any.

An author may not think of it, and may not care, but we have no way of knowing this. Yes, they wanted to share, but the only right that gives you is the implied right to download the mod and play the game with it installed. Uploading something to the internet doesn't give people the right to come along and modify as they see fit.

The Nexus defaults are the way they are for legal reasons. They can no more assume intent than any of us can, and given their position and popularity, encouraging people to violate modders' rights could lead them to being sued if someone were determined enough.

I don't know what other form of protection you'd consider not-stupid but copyright is what we have right now and until that changes, we all just need to learn to deal with it.

Really?

Relied on the self imposed rules of a group of people that are rarely, if ever, met in person? How trusting.

Well as Arthmoor has pointed out - the laws are what they are. The question we have here then is not any objective truth to the argument but the subjective reaction the group is going to stand behind. That seems to be the real debate here - do we as a group shun or support the taking up of abandoned mods without permission.

If one wants to pursue legal or site regulation moderators to remove such offenses - they can and should, but that won't change people's minds and it really seems a separate issue (to me) than the response a group should take. That is what most of you seem to be debating anyway.

That link from Pseron about the Morrowind Better Music System mod was a fascinating read - what turned into a "how dare you" became a cooperation. I wonder if the Oblivion mod of the same name were edited (it needs improving) that its author would be so gracious - I think not.

So as I see it one camp wants the draconian rules and the other is more pragmatic (for lack of a meaner word).

I don't see a consensus any time soon. Sometimes it will work out - sometimes not ... I predict no resolution or agreement on this group think issue.

I'm not so sure it's that cut and dry.

The laws being what they are, what one side or the other wants has no meaning. Mod sites have to deal with these things from the legal perspective.

That said - if legalities were not in the way - I'd certainly love to see older mods being taken up by new caretakers to clean them up, fix any bugs, and polish things up. A good portion of my own project collection is composed of exactly that sort of thing. None of it came with redistribution terms, other than one which had a "do whatever you want" clause in it. I sought (and obtained) permission before acting. There wasn't any other way to approach it.