Was your mod stolen?

[DarkRider]

Folks are complaining they have no protection. You only get protection if you ask for it.

We have no protection because legally Bethsoft owns all mods and we don't have a legal standing to enforce our copyright on their property. No legal agency would act on behalf of modders.

Well this, and the thread at BGS, aren't the first place this site has been mentioned. The "modders only" forum on Nexus has a thread that's been running for a couple of weeks now.

Too bad many of us have no access to that forum, would have been nice to know in a public venue a couple weeks ago.

[Arthmoor]

Folks are complaining they have no protection. You only get protection if you ask for it.

Indeed, but come on. Not trying to be a jerk about this, but, priorities. The FBI and the US Attorney's Office have FAR better things to be doing with our tax dollars than pursuing claims from modders who may not even HAVE a claim.

These are the things your congressman lives for. They all have a staff to write letters to federal agencies for constituents. Call him up and rag on his staff.

I think my congressman has far more important matters to be taking up than worrying about whether my mod for a video game has been stolen or not.

Besides, it appears Softpedia.com is willing to comply with a simple request from the author. So there's no need to create diplomatic issues over it

Too bad many of us have no access to that forum, would have been nice to know in a public venue a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, and in hindsight I suppose I could have raised the issue here or at BGS but the thread died down with not much coming of it. Not a lot of folks at the time had their stuff ripped and uploaded. When WhoGuru raised the alarm, it was clear the issue had gotten far bigger than before. Another Strategy Informer in the making.

[ub3rman123]

Huh. I'm trying to figure out now if it's worth trying to get them to pull my mods down. I might just list them as a mirror instead.

[Ed-VO]

We have no protection because legally Bethsoft owns all mods and we don't have a legal standing to enforce our copyright on their property. No legal agency would act on behalf of modders.

Actually, yes.

Mods are a 'derivative work' under the law. Since Beth gives permission—tacit or otherwise—as long as the mod only works with TES. They would not, for example, allow you to use TES resources in a mod for another game (or even another platform.

Because of this, your work is yours and you have a right to protect it

@Arthmoor

You are being pragmatic. However, Constituent Services is the largest part of what a congressman does. They send their staff out regularly, and often come themselves (remember Congressman Giffords?) A senator is a different story, since they represent a whole state, getting their attention is more difficult—except in states with low population like: Wyoming, Vermont, North & South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware and Montana which have so few people they rate only only one congressman.

Some might even find it a refreshing change from Medicare, Social Security and Veteran's complaints. Believe me, most of them have less to do than they would like you to believe. All his is what makes it so disturbing to me when some congressmen deign to speak "for the American People." They represent under 700,000 people and are elected by far less.

John Boehner, for example was elected by just over 140 thousand votes. When he says "The American people" want this, or "The American people" want that—he doesn't care what the 'American people' want, just the 66% of the 30% of the people in his district who voted.

[Arthmoor]

Just because I wanted to see for myself what the result would be, I called Congressman Miller's office and informed them of the situation. Their advice was what I fully expected going in - I should contact an attorney and file a civil suit. I explained that the offending party is in another country but they said the matter was entirely for the courts to handle and that it wasn't something the House had jurisdiction over.

Maybe they're just politely giving me the brush off, I suspect that they really wanted to just flat out tell me they had better things to do than try to stir up the State Dept. over a minor copyright issue.

[Khettienna]

We have no protection because legally Bethsoft owns all mods and we don't have a legal standing to enforce our copyright on their property. No legal agency would act on behalf of modders.

But not true in cases where made-from-scratch assets are packaged in the download, when the creator has stated that those assets may not be redistributed without express permission. That does leave some hope. And to add to Edouard's point, just because Bethesda automagically owns our CS work and assets derived from theirs does not give other parties the legal right to do as they wish.

Huh. I'm trying to figure out now if it's worth trying to get them to pull my mods down. I might just list them as a mirror instead.

That depends, do you like old versions of your stuff floating around in a venue where you don't get to choose how your "product" is presented or maintained? That's my primary concern in these situations, personally.

[Ed-VO]

Just because I wanted to see for myself what the result would be, I called Congressman Miller's office and informed them of the situation. Their advice was what I fully expected going in - I should contact an attorney and file a civil suit. I explained that the offending party is in another country but they said the matter was entirely for the courts to handle and that it wasn't something the House had jurisdiction over.

Maybe they're just politely giving me the brush off, I suspect that they really wanted to just flat out tell me they had better things to do than try to stir up the State Dept. over a minor copyright issue.

Yes, they were giving you the brush off. Out of curiosity, was it Brad, Candice, Gerry, George or Jeff Miller? If it was Jeff he has a full plate, but he also has more staff than the others. He's chairman of the Veteran's Affairs Committee. Talk about complaints, whew! He's also on Armed Services and Intelligence; both busy committees.

Here is part of the official statement of the US Copyright office (Links omitted:)

If you believe that a criminal infringement of copyright has occurred, you may contact the Intellectual Property (IP) Program of the Financial Institution Fraud Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Two main FBI divisions investigate intellectual property crimes:

Cyber Division

-investigates intellectual property crimes involving all digital and electronic works (including Internet, CDs, DVDs, etc) www.fbi.gov/ipr

Financial Institution Fraud Unit

-all other intellectual property crimes

There are three ways a complaint made be filed:

Complainants may contact their local FBI field office, and the complaint will be properly referred.

A complaint may be filed online at the Internet Crime Complaint Center www.ic3.gov and, again, it will be properly routed.

Suspected criminal activity of any nature may be reported online at https://tips.fbi.gov and will be routed accordingly.

The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice is the federal entity that prosecutes intellectual property crimes. Parts III and VI of the Department of Justice primer provide further information on the prima facie elements of criminal copyright violations, both misdemeanor and felony, and the factors considered in determining when to charge. However, all criminal complaints should be directed only to the FBI.

Further, there are industry-specific organizations that monitor and prosecute copyright violations. Lists of copyright industry organizations and authors organizations are readily available on numerous sites on the Internet.

Finally, online service providers must comply with certain conditions if they wish to take advantage of certain limitations of liability when a user publishes infringing content on their systems. One of these obligations is the designation of an agent for notification of claimed infringement. To qualify for certain limitations on liability, online service providers must, among other things, provide contact information to the Copyright Office and through the service provider's publicly accessible website on “designated agents†who will receive notices of alleged infringement. The Copyright Office website includes a directory of agents for notification that lists “designated agents†for online service providers recorded with the Copyright Office. For general information on this provision of the law, see section 512. Also, see a summary of this provision of the law.

[DarkRider]

But not true in cases where made-from-scratch assets are packaged in the download, when the creator has stated that those assets may not be redistributed without express permission.

That's a different situation and not something I was commenting on.

I think this thread is getting off topic and rolling quickly toward our no politics rules so let's redirect and stay on topic kids or the thread gets the lock

[Arthmoor]

Yes, they were giving you the brush off. Out of curiosity, was it Brad, Candice, Gerry, George or Jeff Miller? If it was Jeff he has a full plate, but he also has more staff than the others. He's chairman of the Veteran's Affairs Committee. Talk about complaints, whew! He's also on Armed Services and Intelligence; both busy committees.

Candice, she was nice enough about the whole thing but definitely thought it best to pursue via a civil attorney.

The rest of what you're getting at with the FBI involves criminal complaints and that almost never happens unless you're dealing with something like a Chinese counterfeiting ring. Besides, as I mentioned, the damages threshold hasn't been met yet. The FBI isn't going to touch it.

The good news is, I contacted APY over at PES/IGN and he commented in the BGS thread that IGN may be interested in pursuing a DMCA complaint through their legal department. If that's the case, I've gained an enormous amount of respect for PES/IGN just for even considering the possibility.

[WhoGuru]

The good news is, I contacted APY over at PES/IGN and he commented in the BGS thread that IGN may be interested in pursuing a DMCA complaint through their legal department. If that's the case, I've gained an enormous amount of respect for PES/IGN just for even considering the possibility.

You and me both. I hope they do and give Softpedia something to worry about in future when they consider uploading the work of others without their permission.

[morerunes]

Not cool. Period.

[Kiteflyer61]

Hey everybody.

It's been a long time since I dropped in, but this thread caught my eye.

These idiots did the same thing to me a couple of months ago. It took more than two weeks to get any results, but I finally got them to remove a couple of my mods that they were hosting.

Now it seems I'm going to have to go back and make sure they haven't gotten sneaky and grabbed a few of my others. They sent me e-mails announcing that they had posted them for the first two. I'm hoping they didn't stop sending the e-mails so that I wouldn't know.

As far as where they're getting them from, I'm pretty sure they are getting at least some of them from Filefront. One of the mods they grabbed was an older version that wasn't available on PES anymore. The only places to get that version are filefront and TESNexus (which has all three versions of my mod).

I can understand trying to build up a website, but is it so hard to ask first? Had they asked *before* they put the files up, I would have said sure, go ahead. Since they didn't, I'll flood them with removal requests until every file I've even been a part of is removed from their site.

KF

[Ed-VO]

Candice, she was nice enough about the whole thing but definitely thought it best to pursue via a civil attorney.

The rest of what you're getting at with the FBI involves criminal complaints and that almost never happens unless you're dealing with something like a Chinese counterfeiting ring. Besides, as I mentioned, the damages threshold hasn't been met yet. The FBI isn't going to touch it.

The good news is, I contacted APY over at PES/IGN and he commented in the BGS thread that IGN may be interested in pursuing a DMCA complaint through their legal department. If that's the case, I've gained an enormous amount of respect for PES/IGN just for even considering the possibility.

That is good news. I'll try to keep it within the limits set by DarkRider. I'm actually not making any political judgements here.

If one person stole one copyrighted work, that's most likely a civil matter. What we have here is a group of people taking thousands of works from hundreds of authors. That is most likely criminal. While the loss is negligible (although put a price on one's reputation) the gain could be considerable.

What a lot of folks don't realize is that a large part of federal enforcement actions are civil, not criminal.

[ub3rman123]

A new site is making the rounds doing this, GMod.com. You can read the Nexus thread about it here.

The gist of it: They upload some popular mods without permission or anything, then take the credits etc. out of the ReadMe, then put up a little notice that says "We're looking for the author (They aren't). Click here to claim your account if you are!" Then according to some users, to claim your account you have to pay them money. Ugh.

You can also read a thread on a different forum which features the CEO of the company trying to claim he got permission for everything.

Edited July 6, 2011 by ub3rman123

[Arthmoor]

Something like that where the site claims they're going to make people pay to download stuff needs to be reported to Bethesda since that's illegal and they WILL act on something like that.

OH! THESE GUYS. I thought the site name sounded familiar. This "gmod.com" place went around on Nexus not long ago spamming PMs to people about their new site that was going up. I reported them for spamming and hadn't heard much out of them since. Seems they decided they're going to go ahead with their theft ring after all.

Edited July 4, 2011 by Arthmoor

[WhoGuru]

Well they've nabbed AWLS and WillieSea's mods, Kvatch Rebuilt and even UV. And I especially love the requests for the author to contact them. Wow. Suddenly I'm glad they couldn't grab my mods off Nexus. Means I don't have to go another round of arguing with idiots who've rehosted my work without asking.

[Metallicow]

By now they must be wondering where this parade of complaints has come from

It probably came from someone like me who wrote a simple little python program to bug the #$% out of them with emails and spam and whatever else I can conjure up(good thing I save some stuff) and threaten to continue to do so every 3 days until they remove what needs removed. Many people will be bugged all at once. It gets real tiresome having to do all that by hand sometimes.

I bet all involved sure likes the look of their in boxes and everything. Waste my time, I waste yours ten fold. They'll have fun tracing it also, as it changes daily.

Noticed a few M.I.D.D.L.E.F.I.N.G.E.R. oblivion mods on GMOD. I think they are the best on the site.

I think it would be rather enjoyable to take all their logos and make a mod that places nice BIG billboards stating that sites like these are a bunch of thieves. Then have 100's of people register and upload the same mod over and over with some cool name. Billboards, posters, notes the whole lot. Maybe user's of the site will get a bit mad also. Opps, forgot to ask first.

Edited July 5, 2011 by Metallicow

[ub3rman123]

The guy who runs that site, Kreisher or something, showed up on the Nexus (Or at least a troll with the screenname, I'm being skeptical). Go read the thread again to see Dark0ne tearing dude a new one.

[Arthmoor]

Wow. Those guys are just digging themselves in deeper with every post. Can they not see that this has already ruined their site's reputation in two large gaming communities?

[ub3rman123]

And a lot of people are going around spreading the word of this site... Bad PR. Someone on the RG forums said it perfectly. If they want to fix this, dump everything and start over. Waffling over it won't help anything.

[DarkRider]

I'm not sure that what GMod is doing is theft just yet. According to their "About" statement:

Let’s face it: a modding site without mods is just sad. Not to mention, it’s impossible to judge its quality. So, for the time being, we’ve pre-uploaded several mods whose authors have not placed restrictions on where their mods are hosted. We have reserved the authors’ names for these mods to be claimed if the authors decide to join Gmod.com beta. Once Gmod goes live to the general public (no invite required), any unclaimed mods will be REMOVED.

Which to me sounds like "Hey we needed something to test our software with if the authors claim them they'll stay with their authors, if no claim is made we'll be taking them down before opening to the public." So I'm likely to reserve judgment until they launch and see if they make good on that promise. Though they're definitely not going about it the right way courtesy wise. I take it back, looks live to me and with content I know wasn't approved for hosting there

Charging for mods is a horse of a different color, since it's invite only right now, it's hard to tell what they are charging for. The mods may be free access while other features require a paid script. Their licensing agreement seems to reference a downloading software, probably a torrent type downloader that they are charging for, that may violate the EULA if it's required to use files on the site. Should definitely be watched since its clear they do intend to move forward. I was not asked to pay for anything and was able to download content.

[EDIT] Updated after registering a bogus User ID.

[ub3rman123]

The guy on the Nexus says that they have no plans to make any money off the site, whether it be subscriptions or advertising. Dunno where it came from.

[Metallicow]

Fact Remains. They have not removed what they did not get permission to upload.

........

EDIT: actually by unregistered apearences, they may be making an effort. We'll see.

Stay tuned....

Edited July 7, 2011 by Metallicow

[BootySweat]

in case it's helpful, here is a sample cease and desist email language you can use.

As of [insert date]

[insert website, company name, address etc, if you have it]

[email address]

To Whom it May Concern:

It has come to my attention that the game modification XXXX (the "Work") has been posted on ______

I insist that you immediately remove any files from your website containing the Work. I am the copyright holder for the

Work, and by posting any portion of the Work on your website you are infringing upon my copyright.

Here is a link to your web page which contains the Work posted in its entirety:

[insert link]

The foregoing is not intended to be a complete statement of my position and should not be construed as a waiver of any of my rights

or remedies, all of which are expressly reserved.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter. Please provide written confirmation once the infringing files have been removed from your website.

Sincerely,

Edited August 4, 2011 by BootySweat

[Lanceor]

Robin Scott has posted a poll in the Mod Authors forum at Nexus. For those of us who don't have access to the forum, here's the message and the poll options he offered.

I want to create this poll in order to ensure I have figures, if I do perform an action, on the opinions of the mod authors in this community. I have no anti-competitive agenda with other sites, and don't want to come off looking as though I do.

The options are supposed to be unbiased, so if you think there should be different options then let me know.

Your mod may or may not already be on their site. It might be on there later, but vote how you would if it was on there without your permission.

1. Traffic should be blocked completely, with a notice informing visitors from GMod why
   
2. Traffic should be allowed, but a pop-up or similar notice should inform the visitor of why we think GMod is not good
   
3. I should be allowed to choose whether to block the traffic or not, this should be opt-in (so all files are open to GMod unless the author says otherwise)
   
4. I should be allowed to choose whether to block the traffic or not, this should be opt-out (all files are blocked unless the author says otherwise)
   
5. Nothing
   

At this early stage, voting is overwhelmingly in favour of a complete block (option 1), but a few have chosen block with the ability to opt out (option 4).

Here's the link to the poll if you have access and want to vote.