Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 mod cancelled due to voice acting copyright

Which makes me wonder "Why?" Beth is not exactly mod unfriendly as they pretty much need them to make their games playable.

Surely because the end user bought both games clears things up a bit? If there's no intention of letting the resulting Franken-game off of the PC it's generated on, what outcome beyond more money for the games company could come from that?

> distribute the resulting new work

There are several mods of this sort in the Elder Scrolls community that work because they explicitly do not do this. You basically take an open-source engine and point it at an existing install of the game. It knows how to read all the original data files but does not do any modification or redistribution of them. AFAIK Bethesda explicitly gave them a blessing for this approach.

There is some legal area around creating modified version of licensed copyrighted work. In US there is an explicit right called Adaptation Right and it has a few prior cases, like the one I recall where a person bought a physical painting and cut it into pieces only to reassemble into a mosaic to be resold. The court judged that case as infringement since the purchaser of the physical painting did not get the Adaptation rights. In EU there is a similar concept in the moral rights of the author where the integrity of work is considered an inalienable right.

But the prior cases are not all like that. There are for example cases where a company produced a physical modification to a game console and got sued, and the supreme court siding with the defendant that such use did not modify the original work but rather was interfacing with it. Similar argument was made during the Oracle vs Google API case from 2010.

When it comes to GPL, there has also been quite a bit discussion on the subject when a user combine the kernel with non-free modules. Is it the user that do it, is it the company that released the module, or is it the distribution that make the two easily combine-able? This became a rather heated discussion when Ubunutu made the module available and Debian had to decide on what the best approach was.

I don't think that legal guidance actually exist since there is prior cases pointing in both directions. I would lean onto the question if the copyrighted work in question is being modified or not. Voice recording itself is very distinct from the rest of the work, so I could easily see that it is permissible for a project like this to pull the intact files from one game to an other, but its a very uncertain what the court would actually decide if it ever went to that. We also have to consider fair use rights, as they did with the Oracle vs Google case.

Here’s a precedent: a MIDI file doesn’t break copyright just because it could be used with a soundfont you don’t have rights to, to generate an audio file you don’t have rights to (because it’s a derivative work of the soundfont).

Or, even simpler, a text file doesn’t break copyright just because you could print it using a copyrighted font you don’t have rights to.

A game-modding program is exactly the same thing, here, as a MIDI sequencer or a printer; and the mod itself is exactly the same thing as the MIDI file or the text file.

In both cases, you’ve got 1. a high-level description of a thing you’d like to make, and 2. a program that renders that high-level description using a supplied asset library. Presumably, there’s nothing stopping you from using an entirely public-domain asset library. Some unscrupulous people just happen to want to use a copyrighted one. (Just like some unscrupulous people happen to feed BitTorrent clients torrents that point to copyrighted material!)

In both cases, there’s nothing inherent in the software that leads to it being used in that manner. It’s the user’s choice to point the software at an asset library—or a torrent—which contains content they don’t own.

Of course, by this line of argument, a page with instructions for how to use the software in combination with the game’s copyrighted asset library, would be breaking copyright in about the same way The Pirate Bay is. The site hosting the software itself would best refrain from doing such. (And better yet if it comes with such an open asset library, such that it can’t be argued that breaking copyright is its only purpose in practice.)

It seems like a poorly constructed argument to suppose that creativity is a required element to be the party responsible for creating a copy. Its very nearly the opposite of real. It is 100% unambiguously the customer who is creating the copy. Else bic and xerox will be sued out of existence shortly.

Essentially the act of copying is totally without creative merit however the buyer of the game arguably has a fair use right to make use of the work in a different context not terribly dissimilar from format shifting.

The only argument that could be made in this universe is that the customer is responsible for copyright infringement and that the modder is acting to enable copyright infringement. While its clear that say exist only to facilitate obvious piracy could be found to be enabling piracy its not obvious or even reasonable in this case.

EULA's are of questionable utility not because they are legally invalid although I think they are trash but mostly because people don't care and its difficult to persecute your customers without losing them.

So what I'm hearing is that it's time to improve execute-in-place support.

(Though OpenMW isn't a mod. It's a reimplementation of the engine.)

Bathesda also had some very strange requirements for the OpenMW folks when they were in contact[1]. Namely they didn't want them to show OpenMW working on Android (because Bathesda wanted to port it themselves?) nor did they want them to support the XBox version of the game. I doubt that Bathesda actually had the right to add those requirements to a project that is a from-scratch reimplementation of their game engine, but that's the current status.

[1]: https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Bethesda_Emails

They did a 5th anniversary release of Oblivion, so we know anniversary editions are something on their radar. I would not be surprised if this was indeed the case.

"idea was rejected by (offended partys') legal team" should never be the conclusion of something like this; but I can understand not wanting the trouble for a work of passion.

In fact, working on a mod for a game -- and then getting legally threatened by the owning company of that mod platform -- would entirely drain my enthusiasm or passion for the game/company/platform.

I hope the mod-makers feel similarly.

I could be wrong but it sounds like Bethesda don't own rights to the voice acting. They only licensed it for the purpose of FO3. Outside of that they can't grant or deny anyone permission to use it. Presumably there is either another corporation who owns the VA rights or the individual artists own the rights. There were some big names involved so I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

If they can't make a better outcome than the mod, why should anyone buy their update in the first place?

I really wish they provided details on why they had to go to the legal team in the first place and on what grounds they were rejected. Among other things, I would imagine the developers would not be liable for end-users violating the EULA, so it's kind of head scratching why they would interact with bethesda at all.

I don't know if Skyoblivion ever managed to write a robust solution for translating the codebase from the old scripting language to Papyrus, and I can see why it might be a huge hurdle for modding teams.

Yes. But you can prove "uber for cats" doesn't work with 5 people. Not 100 people, 3 years later. Canceling a game is more like a funeral.

Hmm, so a game developer is like a startup factory?

I think the real reason he/she's hinting at is that men tend to be more passionate about games than startups. (I know several dozen young people who play board games regularly, and they include about 1.5 women).

In a start-up you usually get a significant payout on success. Do game developers also get up to a few million dollars bonus when the game is a success? I doubt that. And that is where the devs are cheated. You are paid like a normal job, but you do a start-up.

Agreed. I'm not a game developer but looking in, it seems to resemble the tech industry. You have the AAA studios which are like the FANG companies in that they have relatively stable well paying jobs and then there are a bunch of indie studios which are like startups.

What hours do you work? I've had a 2-year project cancelled before (in non-games tech), but my job doesn't dominate my life the way I've seen it do for friends in the games industry; I put in my 40 hours and walk away.

Putting it this way creates the impression that a lack of IP laws directly results in political instability and danger to people's lives. That's incredibly disingenious.

The reason South Sudan is such a horrible place is that it only recently gained independence and has been caught up in its own civil wars pretty much constantly. The reason its IP laws are practically non-existent is probably that it just hasn't been a practical concern for the young nation yet.

In that case, could we just take strong Trademark protections without copyright and patents? I also like to be able to trust that the widget I'm buying is made by the company it says it is, and won't burn down my house, but that doesn't mean it should be impossible to copy the internals.