AI to voice the additional dialogue?

[BobT]

6 hours ago, lynx said:

The fact remains that this is taking work away from voice actors (original or not), so damage is being done regardless of any jurisdiction's opinion or actual enforcement. It might be a negligible revenue stream, but it is one.

What work is a FREE MOD taking away from voice actors? There was never any "work" for the VA to do, the modder is, and always was, doing it all, and not making any money from it themselves either. We're also talking about a TWENTY YEAR OLD game here lol.
There's not even any "damages" since mods encourage more people to play and continue playing the game, and every modder and user (as long as not pirating) has bought the game, therefore the VA has already been paid for the work they have done. 

 

And Morpheus, as to the whole "legal" side my female friend had a quick crack at Edwin here: 

Quote

I was talking about this with a friend and she had a go with a tool called "Mangio RVC", check out these examples: 

https://voca.ro/19y8OfnWt6zt

https://voca.ro/13wFCtt97vYZ
Of course it's not perfect, that's just a 5-min half-a-job and without any final polishing in audacity or whatevs, but it's a good start. 

Think her and vocaroo are going to be in tonnes of legal trouble from Edwin's VA? Think he'd even succeed if he tried? How does the above damage or defame or directly copy (in a non-transformative manner) from Edwin's VA (Jim Meskimen) the human being? Btw that VA also did the "Jebadoh, Khalid, Thaldorn" character's voices, do THEY all reflect on the human being, too? How could they ALL, when they're different voices? See how this isn't so simple as you're making out? 

Yes again, lawfare exists where large companies with deeper pockets can just drag something out, but as GTS says, it doesn't just jump straight into costs, there's a process before that. And I REALLY don't think someone using the "deeper pockets" approach if don't have a reasonable case will go down very well. Just look at the bad rep that Monster Energy is getting for what they're doing to other companies that simply use the word "monster". Is that really something we should want to encourage? 

Again I wouldn't personally just refuse to take anything down either, if I personally received a request from a VA or their lawyers, however it would have to be REASONABLE for me to do so, not just "I don't like it". 

Edited January 15 by BobT

[lynx]

6 hours ago, BobT said:

What work is a FREE MOD taking away from voice actors? There was never any "work" for the VA to do, the modder is, and always was, doing it all, and not making any money from it themselves either. We're also talking about a TWENTY YEAR OLD game here lol.

Voicing work, obviously. Modders do pay voice actors for that now and then. The fact that the product is available free of charge doesn't change anything in that regard.

[BobT]

6 hours ago, lynx said:

Voicing work, obviously. Modders do pay voice actors for that now and then. The fact that the product is available free of charge doesn't change anything in that regard.

Right, so there's lots of work for paid voice actors in the modding area, is there? 
Especially for 20 year old games? 

[mickabouille]

20 minutes ago, BobT said:

Right, so there's lots of work for paid voice actors in the modding area, is there?

There is some. Isn' that nice?

[mickabouille]

And I remember I had some user muted/silenced at a time but I don't remember how I did it. Can someone help me?

 

EDIT: Ok, I got it, sorry for the noise

Edited January 15 by mickabouille

[DavidW]

I'm mostly not following this now, but just on a couple of specific points:

On 1/13/2024 at 10:24 PM, zenblack said:

Just because you want Darth Vader's iconic voice to be AI generated because you like Star Wars doesn't mean that Disney could have done it without the express consent of James Earl Jones (which he gave)

My understanding was this was a legal gray area that hasn't really been resolved by the courts, but Disney thought it was safer, and better PR, to cut a deal with James Earl Jones than risk a messy legal fight with a beloved actor. (They had a similar issue with Peter Cushing's likeness in Rogue One, I think.)

On 1/13/2024 at 2:32 PM, Guest the_sextein said:

Every artist, voice actor, programmer and writer knows that the games they work on are legally modable. 

Modding is also in a legal gray area. You can gesture in the direction of fair use, but most IE mods I know are pretty clearly infringing at least somewhat on the copyrights of the game developers and/or Wizards of the Coast. IE modding is de facto safe, because the developers of the game have repeatedly said they welcome mods and clearly think the modding community is good for them, but I don't think there's anything close to a legal entitlement to mod. (That's even before you start asking what's in the EULA of a game.)

As a particularly egregious case:

On 1/14/2024 at 1:22 AM, Guest the_sextein said:

Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate literally takes a story from another game and all of it's characters and VA voices and imports it into the infinity engine with art from pillars of eternity and it all uses the 2nd edition D&D system with consent from nobody.

Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is flagrantly and massively violating the copyrights of Bioware, Obsidian, and Wizards of the Coast, and if any of them sued its developers wouldn't have a hope in hell. That's unlikely to happen, because Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is harmless to them and they have better things to do with their time, but don't confuse that with actual legality.

[BobT]

4 hours ago, mickabouille said:

There is some. Isn' that nice?

It is. But how much are we talking? 
Should they start paying writers and artists, too? 
Isn't the point of mods that they DON'T have the resources and funds of a studio, and are doing it as a hobby? 

[BobT]

15 minutes ago, DavidW said:

Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is flagrantly and massively violating the copyrights of Bioware, Obsidian, and Wizards of the Coast, and if any of them sued its developers wouldn't have a hope in hell. That's unlikely to happen, because Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is harmless to them and they have better things to do with their time, but don't confuse that with actual legality.

Can ya gimme a bit of info on this one? I keep just finding "Neverwinter Nights", or is that the same? 
I'm gonna guess here but is it one of those "mods" where they've essentially remastered a game in another game?
Are they selling it? I presume with that one the "fair use" stuff will be a stretch, if they've just taken an existing game and plonked it in another.

Most mods though add NEW or vastly CHANGED content, and for free, and require the base game to already be bought & paid for to use, rather than just redistributing the IP owner's work.

Edited January 15 by BobT

[DavidW]

14 minutes ago, BobT said:

Can ya gimme a bit of info on this one? I keep just finding "Neverwinter Nights", or is that the same? 

https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/37267-neverwinter-night-for-baldurs-gate-mod/

14 minutes ago, BobT said:

Most mods though add NEW or vastly CHANGED content, and for free, and require the base game to already be bought & paid for to use, rather than just redistributing the IP owner's work.

A pretty large fraction of mods distribute at least some unmodified IE game content from other games. (My and @CamDawg's autoconverter of the IWD spell system is ironically a fairly egregious example, and originally I'd intended to set it up so it required the user to have IWDEE installed, but for various reasons that got lost.) That's on shaky-at-best legal ground. (I salved my own conscience with the fact that IWDEE itself was largely built on work that Cam and I gave to Beamdog for free in the first place, but obviously that's not a legal defense).

Another pretty large fraction use copyrighted plots, characters, spells, items, classes, abilities, monsters or locations either from the IE games or from the Forgotten Realms (and occasionally other D&D sources). It's not impossible that that's legally protected under fair use, given that it's non-commercial, but the case law is, as I understand it, unclear at best (and no modding site is realistically going to fight a legal battle on untested ground against a large corporation). It's certainly in the space of activity that most companies and authors tolerate (cf similar discussions of fanfiction), but that brings us back to the fact that legal rights aren't really the crux of the issue.

[BobT]

Interesting! Thankyou. 

Hmm I guess the big test would be is the mod damaging in some way. 

I hope more of this stuff does get thrashed out (though it's rare any non-corpo side will bother / afford). Be nice to see a "right to modify" as with "right to repair" etc. Along with terms of no selling, fully transparent blablabla. 

[lynx]

1 hour ago, BobT said:

It is. But how much are we talking? 
Should they start paying writers and artists, too? 
Isn't the point of mods that they DON'T have the resources and funds of a studio, and are doing it as a hobby? 

Why do you keep moving the goal post?

And no, modding has nothing to do with the authors economic circumstance or fundraising skill. I guess the exception are paid mods, but that's out of scope here.

[Guest the_sextein]

5 hours ago, DavidW said:

I'm mostly not following this now, but just on a couple of specific points:

My understanding was this was a legal gray area that hasn't really been resolved by the courts, but Disney thought it was safer, and better PR, to cut a deal with James Earl Jones than risk a messy legal fight with a beloved actor. (They had a similar issue with Peter Cushing's likeness in Rogue One, I think.)

Modding is also in a legal gray area. You can gesture in the direction of fair use, but most IE mods I know are pretty clearly infringing at least somewhat on the copyrights of the game developers and/or Wizards of the Coast. IE modding is de facto safe, because the developers of the game have repeatedly said they welcome mods and clearly think the modding community is good for them, but I don't think there's anything close to a legal entitlement to mod. (That's even before you start asking what's in the EULA of a game.)

As a particularly egregious case:

Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is flagrantly and massively violating the copyrights of Bioware, Obsidian, and Wizards of the Coast, and if any of them sued its developers wouldn't have a hope in hell. That's unlikely to happen, because Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is harmless to them and they have better things to do with their time, but don't confuse that with actual legality.

Hey David, nice to see you in the chat.  The reason I mentioned Neverwinter in Baldur's Gate is for that exact purpose.  I was pointing out that it is a massive legal ball breaker that is much worse than any AI voice work could ever be and nobody cares.  Which is my point.  Nobody is paying VA's to do Baldur's Gate voice work and stating that the VA isn't involved covers the modder from any personal gripe with the VA.  An AI voice isn't an exact copy of a voice and nobody is claiming the actor was involved.  Nobody is making money off of it either.  The voice is meant to blend with a fictional character's voice that Beamdog owns.  The only law that is grey would be that the characters are owned by Beamdog  and they clearly don't care. If I can make Nalia have a sex scene with the player character then I can add a couple lines of dialog to the game that I created myself with the help of AI. 

 Beamdog doesn't care if you do that obviously given all of the romance mods and quest mods and expansions to the city using AI backdrops ect ect.  I just don't see AI voice acting to be all that big of a deal.  SCS violates more of the property than a similar sounding voice that was created by a modder and simply places after the original unmodified script.  People are scared of new technology and thats all this is about.  They see artists crying about it in Hollywood and now they think AI is the big bad wolf.  It's not and it's going to be used all the time so people better get used to it in my opinion.  David Gaider's Ascension rewrote the ending of the game and added powers that were deliberately cut from the game by Bioware.  It alter's the difficulty curve, adds roleplaying options, edits the epilogs and even has an option to change the official artwork for one of the characters.  It's been around for 20 years and nobody cares and of course they don't, he worked for Bioware and you have maintained it now for a good amount of time.  I doubt anyone will ever say anything because it's not worth bothering with.  It doesn't interfere with anyone's current business plans and the average joe doesn't have any accountability or money to make a court case worth while.

Stalker 2 dev team got hacked and the character models are available for download via a mod for Stalker anomaly.  Dev team would love to sue whoever hacked them but they are not going to bother with trying to take them down because they will always be re uploaded and they have no reason to sue random joes who are playing with them now because there are too many of them and none of them have any money.  Plus they would lose more money from pissing off the community than they would gain from any legal battles. 

The bottom line is, if Beamdog doesn't care then there is nothing to worry about.  If they did care then you wouldn't want to take credit for the mod or post it on a normal site but there is no way to stop it from happening and being distributed through discord.  The courts simply can't control the chaos of the public.  They can hardly keep business in line at this point.  The only case I have ever scene where a modder got sued was by Rockstar Games.  That was because someone was importing GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas into the GTA 5 engine and Rockstar wanted to do that and sell it as a remaster.  They contacted the mod maker and asked nicely.  Then they threatened to sue him and he still didn't stop so they sued him.  Every game I own has mods that break into the murky grey area of the law and I've never seen anyone get sued.  I'm currently running 460 mods on Stalker Anomaly and nobody cares. 

[DavidW]

Just briefly:

17 minutes ago, Guest the_sextein said:

The bottom line is, if Beamdog doesn't care then there is nothing to worry about.  If they did care then you wouldn't want to take credit for the mod or post it on a normal site but there is no way to stop it from happening and being distributed through discord.  The courts simply can't control the chaos of the public. 

If Beamdog objected to a mod of mine, I'd probably just take it down. (If they objected to the IWD spells being distributed in SCS, for instance, I'd definitely stop doing that.) That's not so much because they can legally enforce their prohibition but just because I wouldn't want to mod a game where the developers of the game objected to it being modded.

[Connelly]

22 hours ago, BobT said:

What work is a FREE MOD taking away from voice actors? There was never any "work" for the VA to do, the modder is, and always was, doing it all, and not making any money from it themselves either. We're also talking about a TWENTY YEAR OLD game here lol.

Beginning VAs who want some experience and practice. Hobbyist VAs who just want to do things for love to the art. Friends who like to help, and maybe discover a new passion. That's three situations that I can think of without any effort that do not need to involve professional VAs or money (not that you should skip on paying your VA just as a matter of principles), nor for which the age of a work matters at all. And I'd swear this was pointed out previously.

[Guest the_sextein]

54 minutes ago, DavidW said:

Just briefly:

If Beamdog objected to a mod of mine, I'd probably just take it down. (If they objected to the IWD spells being distributed in SCS, for instance, I'd definitely stop doing that.) That's not so much because they can legally enforce their prohibition but just because I wouldn't want to mod a game where the developers of the game objected to it being modded.

Yep and I respect that. Each mod maker has to make that decision for themselves.   Personally I would do the same if I respected the developers which I do in this case.  That won't keep me from using mods that others have made though.  If they are available and they will benefit me then I'll use them because it isn't going to hurt anyone to do so.  If they don't want people to download  them then they will have a hard time stopping it from happening from what I've seen.