IA v6 Final

[Dakk]

You are wrong, Saros... If you buy a CD with a music or film, you cannot copy and sell or give them to free to all people. Geh4th and the thief both bought (with work or money) their copy for THEMSELVES, not to give them to everyone. Geh4th whole behavoiur since his left from BWL is quite opposite what I've learned from him, and I found the new Geh4th as a not trustworthy man, not that one who I can call a friend. I don't mention the thief, since I don't know him, I can guess his BWL identity only, but I've never knew him so far I as I knew Geh4th.

I usually don't like posting on forums, and I wouldn't post here also, just I was not able to step away after I saw this whole thing. Probably I will skip replies here, since I don't like flaming, I just wanted to know all of you MY opinion.

From a purely judicial standpoint, you are incorrect.

 

If the copyright owner of BG(2) gave explicit permission to modify their property, and then sell it (aka. add-on, expansion, and recently the well-known DLC) then you would be in violation of IP and copyright infringing. Example: downloading a pirate version of ToTSC.

 

But an un-licensed modification (technically illegal, in and of itself) of a copyrighted game can't really be stolen.

[JMason79]

As for the distribution of the mod - thievery is reported to the authorities, right? Copyrights and such? However, Sikret has no right over BG2, and modding it gives him no copyright either. So he has no legal base on which to protest.

 

Incorrect. With this logic, no one (except Micro$oft) would enjoy copyright on products written to be run on Windows. You write software for Windows and it's your intellectual property, regardless if you're the owner of Windows copyright or not. With your logic, only Micro$oft would be allowed to write any software to be run on Windows Operating System, because noone else practically holds the copyright. Your logic fails.

 

When you bought BG2 you also agreed that you wouldn't alter the game in any way, so all modders and mod players are all copyright infringers by that account.

This foolish argument is a weapon in every debate when BG2 copyright is discussed. "Anyway it's all illegal what we do", so consequently no one deserves any protection on his intellectual property because "everyone is a copyright infringer anyway". Very cheap and completely irrelevant, the_bigg.

 

Protection of intellectual property is general and everyone deserves it, without conditions. It can't be enforced in this case, true, but there is a thing called "common courtesy". You feel justified to steal IA just because you think Sekrit doesn't show any "common courtesy" as he charges for it. You know what, you're worse than the BWL folks, and much much worse than DeszoKovacs. IA isn't my type of mod, but from what I've read, it deserves to be given fair credit. Its author deserves copyright as everyone else.

 

You know, what you're doing has a name: VIGILANTISM.

 

I refuse paysites and I refuse vigilantism as well. You, on the other hand, say "they have no right to charge for their intellectual property, so let's steal it and publish it."

 

You feel the other side is unfair and doesn't show any common courtesy to you? Then be better than they're, set an example. Don't be a thief and vigilante, enforcing your own law /while hiding behind the mask of pseudo-legal justifications as Dakk does/

[Saros]

JMason79 - Sikret or Baronius, be a little braver and stop hiding behind that silly nickname. You wanna state something - let it be known it's you. I told you before on Bioware forums and I am repeating it now - I have the mod IA 6.0, I intend to share it with anyone who wants it, I have my own reasons, I don't violate any law by doing so, so I can do it whether you like it or not. Same is true about geh4th and isleepwithfuckinggoats. So the flame war ends here. Sorry. Let's keep the topic about the mod itself. Geh4th already posted a lot of the details, I will fill in the rest as my game progresses.

 

Edit: When I have good knowledge of the mod, I will most probably enter the no-reload challenge on the Bioware forums (whether solo or with a party, but will definitely try solo), and will post everything I learhed there too.

[the bigg]

I refuse paysites and I refuse vigilantism as well.

Am I the only one who misread that as 'parasites' and thought that guy was trying to quote Andrew Ryan?

[JMason79]

JMason79 - Sikret or Baronius, be a little braver and stop hiding behind that silly nickname. You wanna state something - let it be known it's you.

OK. Let me tell you somethin. I told you before on Bioware forums and I'm repeating it now: I'm not them. I've never met Baronious or Sikret personally. Nil. Nada. Hard to understand eh? You guys here think that anyone who've problems with your vigilantism may only be Sikret or Baronious himself. Ridiculous.

 

I have the mod IA 6.0, I intend to share it with anyone who wants it, I have my own reasons, I don't violate any law by doing so, so I can do it whether you like it or not.

Read your own text man. It's perfectly one thing. Yes, vigilantism. "I can do it, it's right because I think so, whether you accept it or not". Oh, you don't know what vigilantism is? Go get a dictionary.

[lynx]

Do not confuse material and moral rights. I agree with Jmason79 that the leak was a silly chaotic act. You can't fight crap with crap and expect things to get better.

[lroumen]

The problem with intellectual property rules and copyright rules is that they are not the same between different nations. What is acceptable in one nation can be inacceptable in another. This whole discussion will never lead to a consensus and can be completely moot if you live in the 'correct' country.

 

Digital rights are very difficult to define and enforce. There is a reason why download sites for things like torrents are forbidden in some countries, contested in some countries, and yet legal (not just tolerated) in other countries... although of course in those countries it is contested again to make it illegal.

 

Over 99% of the internet users regularly break copyrights or intellectual property by downloading pictures, music, product modifications, etc, etc, even if they do so unknowingly and many do so knowingly. If you copy a picture from the web to your personal documents on your pc, are you truly allowed to do so for that particular picture? Who is truly innocent these days?

 

And to come back to illegal distribution. It fully depends on where you live. In certain countries you are actually allowed to make a copy of a CD for personal home use because of possible breakage of the original (I'm not writing the exact legal catch phrases here). It is in some nations extended in sofar that you are allowed to give a copy to family members and you are allowed to lend the copy to friends for use, although they ought to be returned to the owner after use. If the friends make copies for use by other friends, then those first line of friends are at fault and not the owner of the CD/copy. Thus... isleepwith... may not be to blame, but the people if the people he shares it with keep a copy or distribute it further, then those guys are to blame. Then again, you are allowed to give an item away as a present as long as you have paid for it, but then you can only give away the original and not a copy nor keep a copy... etc, etc, etc... It is not as simple as any of you indicate (posters that condone IA distribution and posters that do not condone IA distribution in the discussed manner).

 

Whatever the case here, I don't care who stole what and who did what for whichever reason. I am mainly interested to see the developments of IA. For the moment I have not seen anything big enough to warrant a change from IA v5 to IA v6, especially if IA v6 is a beta version which requires $6/$30 as payment.

[Nominar]

I agree with Jmason79 that the leak was a silly chaotic act.

*Isleewithfuckinggoats' alignment has shifted 1 point towards chaotic.*

 

Anyway, the leak was nothing illegal. Perhaps it was immoral to do but so was the way BWL presented their payment methods on us unsuspecting people one day. And not to mention probably illegal.

[Ardanis]

Grim did delete the download link, didn't he? So you can't really call G3 community as openly supporting piracy in any kind of form. I don't approve of the leaking either, since doing is no different, in terms of disrespect towards whoever, from the endless waves of insults and trashing that come (well, not so much as of late) from BWL.

[Guest!]

I agree that distributing IA at large wasn't such a great idea, as wasn't trying to use G3 as a channel, like it were some sort of anti-BWL. Not because it was theft (Is it commercial content? Was Sikret licensed by Bioware? I didn't think so.), but for a more down to earth, implicit question of baseline respect for a modder's work. If Sikret chose to distribute IA only to a few people and went as far as protecting the archive with a password, then one should probably have the bare mininum decency of not trying to crack it.

[jastey]

You feel justified to steal IA

I feel obliged to stress that unauthorised downloads are not tolerated here, thus the removement of the link.

 

I think that this whole thread is driven by an urge of revenge and gossip, and do not agree to sharing of content of hidden forums. Anything related to BWL and/or IA seems to end like this eventually, for whatever reasons. It's just sad.

[Saros]

Just did the planar sphere. Met with Sikret's improved lesser golems (Gem and Coin ones). Bad news those now have the ability to dispel all illusions on successful hit. That, and the nerfing of Absorbtion potions (don't offer -10 AC vs crushing modifier anymore) now makes the solo fight with them very very hard. Still, there was no Spell Immunity scroll in the sphere. In addition to the usual scrolls, found inside in IA 5.0, there was a single one added - Giant Strength.

 

I think that this whole thread is driven by an urge of revenge and gossip, and do not agree to sharing of content of hidden forums.

 

I understand your position on the second part. However, you're wrong on the 1st part. There are quite a few people who actually want to try this mod (already 4 wrote to me in PM), and of course any info about it should come in handy. What I mean is that I and geh4th distribute info about the mod in order to be helpful to the players who wanna try it out, not because of gossip or revenge. The agenda about copyrights and distribution driven by BWL is simply an annoyance, and I personally don't pay any more attention to it.

[cmorgan]

Short story - G3 is an open forum, and admin stuff here is about as lax as the combined group of gibberlings can tolerate. We err on the side of "let folks hang themselves out to dry". If stuff is about the mod itself and playing it, that seems to me to be fine. If post content gets personally directed at the modder and his choices, then you folks are treading a very thin line. That territory is over-worn out - it was worn out years and years ago, in fact. It gets tiring.

 

[long form]

http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?s...st&p=174107 already covered awhile ago (and keeps getting repeated over the years), but I guess it is my turn for a mini WoT. I probably will screw this up and make things worse, but heck - I somehow feel I have to try. Hopefully, it will all burn out of me in one shot, and then I can merrily run along and build more badly-conceived and worse-implemented dialog structures for fun. Or do some work. Nah... mod.

 

Discussing a mod and its interactions with others is what we do here, and welcome others to do. So if the discussion is about a mod, how it works, what it is doing, how we can learn from each other and make things work better either technically or in playing, cool.

 

We get stuck with the backwash because we allow/grant an incredibly wide lattitude - the bigg has CamDawg's reference in the same thread. Basically, once something is up, it is reflection of the speaker. Forum-divers can judge whether a poster knows something/is worth listening to based on the content they post.

 

We don't have a "chief admin" or a huge list of rules and regs. Open site, open ideas, open forum. Strictly from my point of view - the same basic consideration we expect as modders we expect to be extended to others, regardless of their actions or behaviors (either positive or negative, from any point of view). So, some feeble attempt at describing what it feels like from my perspective:

• talk about any i.e. mod in concrete terms and giving opinions = cool. +1 if the opinions are reasonably backed up with "why I don't like this is...", +2 if the attempt is made at an adult level, understanding that there are differences of opinion on just about everything, +3 if the opinion comes with bug reports and feedback that show the modder that they did something you liked. After all, praise is nice to have. No one wants to be kicked for no reason.
  
• talk about repair of bugs in any existing mods, here or elsewhere, that makes it possible for folks to complete a game using the mod = way cool, +1 if you provide code, +2 if you provide both code and documentation, +3 if it is actually a G3 mod (because if it isn't we are going to ask you to report it to the mod author's site so hey know about it and can credit you with the fix).
  
• talk about the actions of other communities = not so cool, but we all are human, and even Gibbs have posted about frustrating (to us) situations at other communities - and it is to be expected that most i.e. communities at one point or another have commented on others, even if it is just in "is G3/CoM/PG/BWL/TaTW/TeamBG down again?" threads. This is the "grey area" where we end up with a bunch of crap spread all over our nice clean discussions.
  
• picking fights for no reason = not cool - go play a game and chill, or bug someone else.
  
• picking fights for a real reason = not cool - go play a game and chill, or better yet, ignore the whole thing - instead, mod your way out of it. Don't think something is great in a mod? Build A Better MouseTrap, and heck - we will help you do it. Always wanted to see the game do X, or Y? Now you are getting to the heart of why this site exists in the first place. Pull up a chair, grab a keyboard, load up that triple-shot espresso (a dash or two of Scotch or Vodka is not out of place) and start kicking ideas and code around. Welcome home!
  
• 'publishing' another person's mod under your own name or ripping people's work off without permission = not cool. And any mod hosted here has been approved by looking at both code and text. In general, we tend to err on the side of giving credit to anyone who did anything.
  
• hosting an unauthorized "mirror" or copy of a mod without the author's permission = really uncool and just plain not what we do. Heck forget "right" or "wrong" if you don't want to follow that line of thinking - think Pragmatist. We don't want our stuff dealt with that way. So we don't want other folk's stuff dealt with that way. Ditto, ripping pieces out of a mod and calling it "mod lite' or cracking someone else's attempts at copy protection etc. - yep. A double standard. We will rip off BioWare but not eachother. Hey, every subculture has its own oddities...
  
• there are a bunch of us who consider this a cool adult place to hang out, where we can pretty much say what we want without looking over our shoulder. That being said, just like the Wild American West, sometimes a Gibberling or two will have to poke and prod and even delete stuff that is so far off the community ideals that it is just bloody obvious. Then sherriffing takes place, to a minor extent. Sorry about some of the posts that get kept - it is a high price to pay for open creative discussion, but so far we have been willing to pay it - even when it makes us very angry, or very sad, or just plain sick to our stomach that such ugliness follows us even into this place that we care about.
  
• It is a measure of the freedom of this place that everything I have posted here is just my interpretation of "the way things work", and if you piss off enough Gibbs, things could be very, very different. We work as a kind of very loose blanket democracy, or a Society of Friends meeting. We get a general consensus, and try to do the right thing with a minimum of intervention. CamDawg set the example, set up the site, and gave us all a place to kick back and be involved in some really awesome creativity and fun. I'd generally like to keep it that way, and I think most of us do.
  

 

Dunno how clearly I put it. Dunno how representative it is of the consensus of Gibbs - though I think I am relatively mainstream for the group. But this is G3 - I get to post this. Then if I am way off the mark, another gibb will come around, laugh at me in a friendly way, and say "well, some of that yes, some of that no. Let's discuss this." Because that is how we work together as a community - by friendly collaboration, negotiation, and willingness to see the other point of view.

[/long form]

 

We now return you to a discussion of a playthrough of a mod, (hopefully focussing on) the relative likes/dislikes, strengths and weaknesses of playstyle and coding choices, uses of/walkthroughs of help to other players, avoiding ugliness and namecalling and poking fun at other modders from any community... or not. In which case we all get bored with the cat-and-mouse-game of lock-thread-unlock-thread-repeat-until-the-heat-death-of-the-universe.

[jastey]

Saros: I meant the first page(s), not your discussion about the IA content.

 

And yes, what cmorgan said.

[Dakk]

Awesome post big Gibb.