Woah! I leave for a few days and come back to this, oh boy!

I figure it will be best for me to briefly comment here rather than to anyone specific since this is the discussion for it. Obviously this is illegal, obviously it needs to be stopped. I don't want Falskaar (Or any other mod) being sold as DLC, and I'm sure Bethesda will be irritated to hear this. Hopefully Gstaff can help us out.

Due to the misspellings, and website URL it looks like someone outside of the US has decided that they could make a quick buck off of unknowing individuals. Who knows if the 'shipped' product is even legit, or if they just take your money and run. Weird.

Anyway, hopefully we can get this shut down...

I believe it's totally wrong, and definitely legal. I hope it gets taken down soon, but in weird twisted way It's kind of a compliment to you. Comments not the right word, but maybe someone can find the right word, I'm trying to express.

I'm both pissed off and sort of flattered at the same time. I'm a little bit surprised Bethesda hasn't shut them down already. I wonder how long it would take me to get shut down if I tried that with my own mod?

You mean "definitely IL-legal."?

Yes, I was trying to think of how these guys at co.za could hope to get away with it and why they would even try.

I am in London, UK, and have only a mobile dongle that costs me ￡25.00 for 7.5 GB and there are a lot of mods I cannot use because they are too large to download reliably without taking absolutely ages and possibly being corrupted or the connection being lost towards the end, using up my allowance and leaving me with no downloaded mod. I even bought a premium membership at The Nexus to try and overcome that problem, as well as to support the Nexus site.

I am not supporting the South African site, just trying to understand it. And it is clearly dodgy as they are touting it as an Official Bethesda product when it is obviously not and is a collection of stolen mods. But they are almost all very large mods. There are graphics mods that amount to 3 or 4 GB in total and other large quest and overhaul mods that are hundreds of MB. But, generally, anything larger than 100 MB is lost to me.

But at ￡7.26 for a 4 GB DVD, it seems they are not making a huge profit. That is LESS than HALF of what it would cost me to download from The Nexus! I know how expensive computer-related things are in Australia, so I cannot imagine it being much better in Namibia!

If Steam, Bethesda and The Nexus could get together with mod authors to do something like this, but legal and official, I am sure there are people who would snap it up. Everyone with super-fast, cheap connections will carry on downloading.

There is obviously a gap in the market that could be filled. Shame it's been filled by thieving pirates.

~.~

Lol it seems strange to me, I am not sure they are selling mods , I do not read anywhere the cost of the mod , perhaps are just sugesting the mod as it was a dlc but then when u login and order they give u gratis as well?

I think it is pretty clear Prometheus. The title is "Reborn DLC 25 in 1" and the price for it is 120 South African Rands, which isn't a great deal of money but there are some posts with the conversions up above. It describes Falskaar and then has a list of the 25 mods that are included on the disc. It is blatant copyright infringement and probably a violation of the Bethesda EULA.

This happened once with Silent Hunter 3 too.

Packing Community-Made content and selling it for the quick 'n dirty dollar.

It's one thing if some individuals offer to pack big mods on DVD/Disks and ship it to users with low-bandwidth or such and charge a small sum for the trouble.

But repacking mods and content and selling them as official DLC...is well fraud.

I just love how that website thinks it'll get away with this.

It's bootlegging; unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons something like this could slip through the cracks. Faulty copyright laws, never having enough of an effect to get noticed (although the sum of piracy is far more noticeable than one crappy website's contribution), etc. Hopefully something will be done about this, efficiently and painlessly.

It is a violation of Bethesda's EULA, because Bethesda own every content that's made as mods and used for commercial purposes.

Bethesda doesn't owns mods , owns the ck , the tool and their content , any extra content made for the game is compatiblemwith skyrim not part of it and remain property of the respective authros.

For example there are mods that implement witcher 2 models in skyrim , this doesnt make those models then owned by bethesda but still are owned by the CD Projekt.

Still the mods are property of the individuals that created them , if contains any new content , while vanilla content is of bethesda ownership . Anyway any modification created with the ck is not allowed to be sold .

Do what I did when I was stuck on a 25K modem, pay a friend to use their broadband and just download a bunch of mods, burn them to a disk and then your set. You won't be able to use the NMM this way, but there are other tools. I would give my buddy a 6-Pack, but lunch could work too. Or, buy them a game or rake up their leaves.

If you download the mod as zip, you can "import" it into the NMM , or Im wrong?

Thanks to everyone that's brought this to my attention. I've notified folks within the office.

You're not wrong. NMM is set up to do that.

I've now seen everything in my life.

I said "probably" a violation of the EULA because it may be problematic over whether the bootlegger actually agreed to Bethesda's EULA or not. If they took the mods from Nexus for example, and then never actually used the game, they would have no opportunity to be confronted with the EULA. It doesn't really matter because they are redistributing intellectual property that belongs to others without consent. It is possible the disk is only available in South Africa and Namibia because their laws make it less likely to be prosecuted.

The whole game of competing copyrights, with or without consents, is a complex proposition and not something you can explain by simply saying you own your stuff. By using the game and the CK to create a mod, you agreed to the terms of the Bethesda EULA. It has been some time since I considered the EULA, but as best I recall, it is possible that Bethesda does take ownership of the mods themselves. You might be able to maintain ownership of a copyright to any unique material you created outside of the CK, but the mods are created with a great deal of Bethesda intellectual property and they will always own the copyright to that material. That would give them control over distribution of the mod regardless of "ownership." Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you own your mods and can sell or distribute them without Bethesda consent.

As best I recall, any mod that implements models or content from another game also violates the EULA and many mods have been banned for that from the various distribution sites. If the owner of the copyright for Witcher gets wind of it and doesn't consent, they can probably shut down any mod with their content and any site hosting that mod after notice. You are right that using that content in a mod doesn't give ownership to Bethesda since the owner of the content probably didn't consent to its use. If they do consent without an agreement with Bethesda, they could lose control of the copyright to their material. That is a major hurdle to getting other content owners to allow their content into our mods. Using it without their consent violates their copyrights and prevents the automatic transfer to Bethesda, but they have to take reasonable action to protect their copyrights or could potentially lose them.

There are better mod installers out there than NMM, if your not using it to download the mods, then why use it to install them?

I never use the NMM to install mods, and I get all my mods from the Nexus

Thanks GStaff !