Split from the "Consent" thread: Strange legal worries

[jcompton]

I'm starting a new thread here so as not to clutter up the slightly frantic permission thread.

 

Some of the people responding to the Yarpen/CD Projekt thread have had misplaced concerns about some sort of legal liability they might suffer from green-lighting the pack-in.

 

It is a customary and fairly well established practice for mods and other freebie add-ons to be bundled on "bonus" or "covermount" CDs, either in boxed reissues like this one or on magazines, etc. We've done it with PPG mods on a few occasions already. It's fun. It's good exposure and overall I recommend participating.

 

While it is true that there are documented cases of first-party publishers going after the occasional mod CD, I do not know of a single case when that product was not:

 

A. Being sold as a mod CD (in other words, buying the mods was the product),

B. Unauthorized by a duly appointed publisher or distributor of the core product.

 

What we're talking about here is the authorized regional publisher of a game doing a legitimate product reissue and wanting to toss in a bonus CD. Since we're not privy to the agreement between CD Projekt and Interplay/Vivendi/Avalon/Titus/whomever they got their license from, it's reasonable to assume that CDP knows what they are doing and are within their rights to offer this value-added bonus to their customers. If by some strange chance that was not the case, the issue would be between Interplay and CD Projekt, not Interplay and the author of the "turn all item icons into the Galvena's Festhall amulet" mod.

 

Now, if you object on some other grounds, fair enough. But if you're only worried that "the three guys who still work at Interplay might sue me," you can safely forget about that.

[cmorgan]

Thank you! Clear, concise, and on point. Solves my problems. Now i wish i had managed to get The BG1 NPC Project to a point where we could have had a Polish translation.

[jcompton]

Yeah, sorry I didn't address your specific question of "is it like the crazy-ass music licensing scene?" earlier. I am not a lawyer and only pretend to be a legitimate game developer so I'm really not anything remotely like an authority on it. We (and most modding communities, overall) enjoy a lot of benign neglect--as long as nobody gets out of hand or starts trying to sell "Kelsey's Baldur's Gate 3", nobody pays a whole lot of attention to whether or not our creations should actually, say, revert to the owners of the actual IP, in a similar fashion to how musical rearrangements are allowable but the ownership lies not with the rearranger but with the original copyright holder. (If they want the rights to Alassa, I bet I can get them a good deal...)

 

They all know we're out here, on some vague level. A project like this isn't going to rub anybody the wrong way and is no "more wrong" than giving away the mods on our websites.

[CamDawg]

Benign neglect may be a bit of an understatement given that (old skool) BGT essentially distributed the entire content of BG.

[cmorgan]

Just to make sure - I was thanking you, you answered the underlying question directly - I was not being sarcastic (not sure from your reply whether I was clear or not). The music industry is a stinky example to try to draw inferences from, since we all randomly break every rule in the book.

 

Fundamental truth = as long as no one gets paid for modding, and it helps sell copies, even a blatant rebuild like Wildfire on Jagged Alliance will be allowed without much comment. Wildfire eventually skipped to being paid content, as SirTech (?) whomever eventually paid the folks for the mod work and made it an official extension/revamp of the game.

[jcompton]

Just to make sure - I was thanking you, you answered the underlying question directly - I was not being sarcastic (not sure from your reply whether I was clear or not).

 

I did not think you were being sarcastic. I was just apologizing for not getting to it sooner.

 

The music industry is a stinky example to try to draw inferences from, since we all randomly break every rule in the book.

 

Honestly, I have no idea how anything gets done in the music business, with all of those rules which were ridiculous (if arguably occasionally well-intentioned) for their intended, turn-of-the-20th-century purposes, but are now so bizarre and arcane as to serve almost no purpose whatsoever. (Although the mandatory, "you have to take their money for X, Y, and Z--you can't say no" stuff is kinda neat... but it doesn't nearly go far enough, in my view.)

[cmorgan]

The joys of text only communication!!! I agree.

[Cuv]

Hey JC

 

Your argument makes alot of sense... however, I still don't think that I alone can or should authorize Ascension without DG's permission. I know that it was made to be freely available, but this feels different. It IS freely available. Since I am the only member of that team still around, I feel it is up to me.

 

What do you think with regards to my concerns? I respect your personal opinion. Or what does Quitch say? Do you still have contact?

 

Cuv

[jcompton]

Your argument makes alot of sense... however, I still don't think that I alone can or should authorize Ascension without DG's permission. I know that it was made to be freely available, but this feels different. It IS freely available. Since I am the only member of that team still around, I feel it is up to me.

 

I think it's reasonable to defer it to the lead developer (Gaider)'s judgment, yes. I think your fear about contacting him at all, lest the modding scene be crushed beneath the spiky heel of BiowarePandemic, is somewhat less well founded. But, again, the responsibility for contacting him (or anybody) is really more properly the people who want to do the disc, not yours, so.

[Cuv]

Thanks JC, then I will leave it to Yarpen to decide whether to contact DG.