![]() ![]() Else bic and xerox will be sued out of existence shortly.Įssentially 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. It is 100% unambiguously the customer who is creating the copy. It seems like a poorly constructed argument to suppose that creativity is a required element to be the party responsible for creating a copy. We also have to consider fair use rights, as they did with the Oracle vs Google case. 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. I would lean onto the question if the copyrighted work in question is being modified or not. I don't think that legal guidance actually exist since there is prior cases pointing in both directions. 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. 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. Similar argument was made during the Oracle vs Google API case from 2010. 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. In EU there is a similar concept in the moral rights of the author where the integrity of work is considered an inalienable right.īut the prior cases are not all like that. The court judged that case as infringement since the purchaser of the physical painting did not get the Adaptation rights. 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. There is some legal area around creating modified version of licensed copyrighted work. (I have opinions, but they are incomprehensible until you first understand that there is a problem at all.) And please note I'm not in this message trying to advocate either way I'm simply discussing the situation. I remain unaware of even the slightest hint of legal guidance in this area. It can be easily argued that in a legal sense the program is still the responsibility of the original combinind developer, and that the developer is still as responsible for the output as if they were directly distributing the output, what with the end results being (potentially at least) literally bit-for-bit identical. It is also in a very real sense arguable that the user, who is putatively putting these two works together, can't really be said to be doing so when the sum total of their contribution is "the user clicked a button" how can they be said to be responsible? It's pretty obvious that button-clicker can't be said to hold any copyright rights over the result, because "clicked a button" certainly doesn't raise to the level of creative input. This is generally frowned on by the common law legal system, cynical comments to the contrary. ![]() On the other hand, if these arguments are accepted, then it allows a clear path to completely circumvent the aforementioned clear legal result that the end product could not be distributed. (Though I will say the most obvious error they make in general is to grossly overstate the degree of ownership the end-user has over the content, and, again, that's even before considering EULA clauses.) ![]() On the one hand, there are certain arguments that this should be OK I'm sure in the next few hours a few dozen of these will pour in. (And what EULA have you ever seen for a AAA game that would explicitly permit that?) It is completely legally unclear whether it is OK to release a tool that the end-user nominally uses to do the work themselves. Even before we consider EULAs, it is legally quite clear that they could not take the two copyrighted products Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and distribute the resulting new work. I've examined this problem and been keeping track of it for nearly two decades now, keeping an eye out for legal resolution of it, and to the best of my knowledge there is still bupkis on this front legally. "I don't see what claim a copyright holder has against either the user of the mod or developer of the mod." ![]()
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