What exactly does "does not infringe copyright" mean in this context?


Jaspo

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Considering that: "In the United States, the underlying source code, and the game's artistic elements, including art, music, and dialog, can be protected by copyright law" meaning that modding by nature often infringes game copyright.

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The general consensus in the modding community is this ...

You can add to the game, but you can't take anything out, modify and redistribute it. For example, you can add your own textures. But you are not allowed to rip Hinterlands original textures, edit them in Photoshop and offer them to others for download. Same for music or maybe even code (depending on how HL will handle this in the future).

But everything that happens on runtime is pretty much fair game. You could write a mod that changes the color of every original texture when the game starts for example. You distribute a tool for others to change it, so to speak. But you don't share Hinterlands assets.

And of course you can't add protected assets of other sources into TLD. So if you want the Masterchief running around after you ... that could be a problem.

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True, but what about things like level design, where you're using the game's existing assets to create new content? Or even something simpler like the mod that lets you move containers around? Hinterland's containers, theoretically "copyrightable" but with user altered/added functionality.

*soap box alert*

The more I research copyright law the more I'm personally opposed to it as a concept. Incompatible with human culture and stifles creativity and innovation. Also, almost entirely profit motivated despite its claims to protect creativity. It's not without reason the board game industry has unofficially done away with it to a large degree.

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Level design can be hard with these constraints. But Hinterlands plans on how that could (or would) be handled is still out. Let them take their time off for the holidays.
But there are ways to handle this. Make a mod that just has a list of positions and on game start it places a lot of happy little trees around the coordinates you've listed (and programmed the logic for).

Basically: If anyone digs into a mod and finds anything that is taken out of the game (and maybe modified), it's bad.

The moving containers mod is easy (content wise). Simplified: it searches for every container on game load and modifies it to "make it movable". No content redistribution. The key is seeing mods as tools to give out so players can "do it themselves". The mod just automates the modification. The user is allowed to do on his end pretty much anything (laws can differ depending on location). But is not allowed to make "changed gamefiles" available to others.

I give you the screwdriver, but you turn the screw. If the screwdriver got a button that you just need to push and it does the rest of the work for you ... even better.
 

 

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Guest jeffpeng
On 12/24/2021 at 3:10 AM, Jaspo said:

The more I research copyright law the more I'm personally opposed to it as a concept. Incompatible with human culture and stifles creativity and innovation. Also, almost entirely profit motivated despite its claims to protect creativity. It's not without reason the board game industry has unofficially done away with it to a large degree.

 

I could make a lot of good arguments against every single claim in this. But that's not really the point of this post, I guess. The point is that modding a game is perfectly possible in accordance to standard copyrightif done right, and it's not that hard to do if you follow @Digitalzombie's explanations on the topic.

In short: do not distribute something OF the game or derived FROM the game. Copyright is very clear that its scope is pretty much limited to distribution. This is a more complex topic with media such as movies and music, but with software it's pretty much cookie-cutter simple.

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