What do you mean more of a sharing attitude? In my signature is a tthread explaining how I built my game step by step.
As for rights holders - ir someone makes a mod they have right to decide qhat to do with their own intelectual property.
I am only mod user, not mod maker but I respect the modders and their rights. Anyway, all major modders share between themdelves (look at projects like FCOM, UOP, UL, BC).
Hey, take it easy, this wasn't aimed at you at all. In fact, thanks for sharing your methodology, I'm sure it's gonna help a lot of people. What bothers me is that you seem to have basically a perfected game (in my own set up I never reach that point since I tweak endlessly), but the attitude of many modders in this community who emphasize control over sharing will prevent most people from benefitting from it. For the few who have the time and patience to do the same, it's all good, but we've probably excluded anybody who has kids and a day job, for starters.
As for "intellectual property", it's a made-up word that's a contradiction in terms. if you want to keep full control over something intangible such as an idea, a formula, or a digital work, you keep it safe and private in your house. What you release in the public sphere belongs to everybody -
except inasmuch as the community/country you belong to decides to set up rules (i.e. copyright or patents). But I don't believe in a "natural right to control what everybody does with what you just released to the public".
The overall goal of giving control to authors (cf. the founding ideas of copyright in the USA and other countries) over their publicly released works is to promote more and better works, but too often this is not what happens. In this community you see great abandoned mods that unfortunately have major technical problems; people willing to fix them abound, but they're afraid of sharing the result since they're gonna get bashed by the "community police" or copyright zealots, because the long-gone author said "don't redistribute this", or just said nothing on the topic. In short, everybody loses. I don't think that's right, and neither laws nor community rules should enforce this.
From the wider world, I could also give the example of big media groups sitting on the rights to some great works and releasing uninspired sequels, all the while shutting down awesome independent projects that have captured the true spirit of those same works. You really need to have a kind of religious fervor for drastic copyright to find this ok.
As modders (occasional modder/tool contributor myself) we of course have rights given by our countries' laws, but nobody forces us to enforce those rights. And I'd like to see the base attitude of this community to move away from control-freaking and ego-flattering to something more relax wrt author rights. Of course some modders already use very liberal licenses, kudos to them. But it will really be a collective victory when we can publish a 300+ mods perfect Oblivion mods pack for the world to enjoy, approved (or benevolently tolerated) by mod authors.
Now let's get back to the topic, i.e. celebrating your amazingly long gaming session. I need to learn from you and stop tweaking, start a new game and enjoy.
» Thu May 19, 2011 7:57 pm 
. Other gaming communities like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. one are much less reluctant to modpacks and the like, and some "stealing" between mods happens all the time, which can result in rude words exchanged but I've never seen DMCA threats to the ISP or similar stuff that has happened here.
) without having his ass sued into oblivion by "rightsholders". Or even for the foundations of copyright law when we still remembered that what is in the public sphere belongs to the public... barring a few exceptions to encourage creativity.
