Woah, looks like this one has turned into a bit of a discussion
1) Using stuff from other modders (without credit or permission) is not illegal "per sé", but it's definitely bad etiquette and behavior, and it will most likely have the thief lynched by the modding community (with all right) and the person will have a hard time ever getting back and becoming accepted. And if you wanna take things to the extreme, all creators of whatever it is actually have copyright (by law) if they can prove that they were the initial creators... This is however not pursued by any modder as far as I know, since telling people not to steal their stuff is usually enough, and I doubt a modder would take another modder to court over this. Hence the "not illegal per sé" comment... even if it actually is "on paper".
Stealing other modders stuff is NOT illegal (in fact, you'd loose in court if you were the modder, but it is rather rude/mean/foolish), but stealing/sharing/giving music IS illegal. So LotR music that's avaible for d/L is illegal...
@Clone: you're wrong, it IS (technically) illegal too, cause Copyright applys to eveyone, from a minor photograph on the Internet to a skin in a mod. It's just that noone would ever go through the trouble of prosecuting. Since I'm a journalist I do know a thing or two about Copyright ;p And it would also be loaded with discussions who has the original copyright since all things LOTRs is actually Tolkien Enterprises, as we all know, I mean originally =p
Just to clarify, seeing as there's a lot of contradiction in here, that last quote is pretty much the correct one. The moment a person creates anything that can be deemed
creative, be it the written word, a photograph, a piece of music or in our cases, maps, models, textures and such, then it's automatically granted a small manner of protection in the form of the owner's copyrights.
The real trick of course with copyright, is being able to prove that the content was actually yours in the first place. A good technique for that, if you have something important is to seal it in an envelope and post it to yourself - because then you have a date-stamped, and sealed piece of evidence.
Although I can't really see anyone doing that for mod work.
As for the last bit - Tolkien Enterprises own the rights to the names and likenesses (appearance) of the characters and locations in LOTR - but if you make a 3d model or something based on those, that model is actually yours. They own the copyright for the basis, you own the copyright for the mesh / textures etc. They can of course, actually demand you never distribute / display the model, but the likelihood of that is pretty remote, as it's quite a pointless thing to do.
2) Using stuff from the game you are modding is naturally the whole purpose of modding, but it's only allowed as long as you use stuff that is in some way included in the game, and then modified by you or your team, or not. Some modify stuff to the extreme, others only make some slight changes. It's all still modding though off course, and it's all allowed as long as the game manufacturer INTENDED the game to be modded and thus programmed the game in that way.
This isn't always true - you could for example take a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 and completely throw away the entire UnrealScript code basis, and all of the media, and start from absolute scratch using just the renderer, but that's a really minor point.
There is a bone of contention with that though, for example the propensity for 'Halo Trial' modding using the toolset provided and intended for use with Halo Custom Edition. Doing so is actually in violation of the demo and toolsets EULA, and distributing that content is a big no. Because of that, there are actually more players playing the damned demo online than the original game, because modders have ripped the content out of the original game and made it available to those without. I'm personally quite surprised that Bungie or Microsoft haven't put an end to that yet - although perhaps the game is reaching abandonware status and it's just assumed to not be economically viable to pursue the dozens of 'Halo Trial' modders.
3) Using stuff from OTHER games (in the series naturally) is not allowed, since it could interfere with sales of the products. If we would for instance use a lot of stuff from the expansion RotWK, it might interfere with EA's sales of the RotWK game, and that is naturally something that has to be respected. If not, in theory we could get prosecuted - and we would lose, BIG time!
It's not just sales, consider that by taking something out of one game, and making it available for download for another, you've actually just allowed someone content from something that they haven't paid for. There's also a matter of it being able to affect licensing, and there's the want for companies to protect their properties in matters of presentation to the public, and they'll behave like three year olds guarding a new found treasure in order to do so, or more often than not, in a way that'll seem completely illogical to you and me.
You'd be surprised just how much impact user generated content can have. Do I need to remind people of Hot Coffee, the Oblivion ratings scandal, or even the Sims 2 hamster virus?
It's just that I personally dont think that EA Games gives even the slighest piece of interest about the modding community! EA is, as far as I know, the worlds largest developer of games and they have a REALLY impressive track record with games such as the incredibly successful Sims-series. Usually I find 90% of their productions to be 100% good, but just in the case of Lord of the Rings, they made me incredibly disappointed. Hence the mod! 
Now, considering how incredibly BIG they are, and how insanely many titles they have, I highly doubt they have the time or interest to care about mods, even if the mods reach very high in popularity, I think that what matters to them is:
- Keeping deadlines!
- Raising sales and keeping them up as long as possible!
- Produce new titles that fills the sales chart when the older titles die and fade away...
EA's stance is like most PC games stance on mods. They claim they don't want modders in their games, but they support them. Most want modders because certain mods (SEE and RA are great examples of this) bring people who don't like the normal game, but do like the changes.
This is kind of a very unfair (and perhaps a little misconceived) comment to make, because EA Games isn't one big development team frittering away endlessly to produce enormous quantities of games - it's a large company who have a number of smaller subsidiary companies under their payroll, some of whom are entirely owned by EA Games, some of whom are partially independent, and some of whom are completely independent but have publishing relations with EA Games.
EA Games is in fact for the most part, primarily a publisher and not a developer of games, although they are certainly developing a lot more than they used to.
EALA (CnC Generals / CnC 3 / BfME Series) are by no means the same as Maxis (Sim City / The Sims) and are by no means the same company. Even if they're both published by EA Games, they're produced by different developers, who will have entirely different stances to modding and user generated content.
As it happens, EALA aren't enormously protective of their content, and they have a fair track record when it comes to providing for their respective modding communities. Did they not release a toolset for use with all of their released games thus far? Did they not release a number of high-quality models for use by Renegade modders to use in their work? Did they not allow Red Alert: A Path Beyond (originally a total conversion for Renegade) to release their work as a fully downloadable standalone game? Sounds like very good support to me, and a lot better than many other games and developers.
However it should be noted that it's the developer that cares most about its properties, and they don't have the multitude of titles to look over that the publisher does - EALA has only four released games under its belt (and an expansion pack), so they don't have to look very hard to find things they don't like. Generally, they let the mod community be.
A company like Blizzard however is a different story - they
will actively pursue people who even use names and locations in their mods, let alone actual content. A StarCraft mod for a game like Generals for example, will definitely see legal action, even if they created all the content themselves. Blizzard are pretty aggressive in their property protection policies.
So, if we take BFME1 for instance, that game is no longer available. It's gone/obsolete/expired/discontinued or whatever you wanna call it. In other words = no longer buyable! Still, some people are saying that this falls under category 3 anyways. I have no idea if that is so, but logic sorta tells me it can't be. If a PREVIOUS game that is no longer in production, is used for material, I personally fail to see how that could be illegal in any way. Why? Cause EA wouldn't loose sales of BFME1 since it can't be bought any longer anyways? It would instead improve (for some) the current title that is being modded, and since you can't run the mod without the original game, it should help them sell even more games of the modded title? Right? 
I'd like to use some stuff from BFME1, like other mods have, but when I started by using the ShellMap and Intro Movie from BFME1, I got some hard reactions. I'd also like to use some minor stuff from RotWK, but I wont off course cause logic tells me it collides with Copyright and might affect sales of RotWK. BUT it would still be VERY interesting to see some kind of document from EA stating the obvious and not so obvious concerning these matters... It is ALL based on logic and forum members views and posts, and it would feel a lot better to have a real EA document that tells us the REAL rules of modding EA games
It's still available in places, but it is hard to get hold of. In any account, it's not yet abandonware so that just means don't touch it. EA Games might not lose sales, but they still have all manner of other reasons such as those I briefly skipped over above that they'd uphold. At the end of the day, it's all about asking for permission. If you'd tried to make them aware of what you're up to, they can't do much other than say 'No.' After all, you wouldn't want to be the next Halogen, and be forced to remove the mod from the web and cease distribution entirely on account of a simple content swipe - and they likely wouldn't allow you to just remove the offending material either.
EA's stance:
NO PART OF THIS FILE OR THE SOFTWARE MAY BE COPIED,
REPRODUCED, TRANSLATED, OR REDUCED TO ANY ELECTRONIC MEDIUM OR
MACHINE-READABLE FORM WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN CONSENT OF
ELECTRONIC ARTS.
And yet, EA is entirely aware of our modding activities, and even supports The3rdAge (Apoc wrote about us a while back in the BfME1 Newsletter!) as well as the rest of the community (as proven by the Mod SDK).
We are playing on a very gray area here. Clearly, no BfME or CNC mod has ever received EALA's disapproval (AFAIK), so we should consider ourselves free to play with their creations.
However, I would personally never go and fiddle with different titles without EA's consent. Should they not express their discontent, then I would consider this as possible. That being said, I'm modding for the pleasure of modding and would therefore attempt to recreate what I'm after myself 
(leading to miserable failure I'm sure).
That's pretty much the jist of it, although there's nothing wrong with distributing 'Third Party Software Components' that are all your work - EALA can't actually touch people for making, distributing or using them, although in terms of BfME, I'm not sure it's possible to actually produce a mod without distributing files based upon the originals.
I've always wondered if...say, RA comes out next year, and suddenly the retired BFME1 community explodes with players. U ever think EA would try to "buy" a mod, or is that even legal? Technically, anything they added doesn't belong to EA. Still, the world of production is a danegrous place, lemme tell ya.
Welcome to what I like to call 'Valve Theory'. Yes, a company can merrily buy a mod for one of their games if the developers are willing to sell it. In fact, Valve has done this many times in the past - Valve themselves have only ever produced Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (and Episode One) - all their other released games are in fact mods, and remakes of mods produced by mod teams that they've bought and sold as a Valve product. Yes, that includes Counter-Strike, Portal and Team Fortress amongst many others.
If they decided to find a illegal flaw in the modding process and try to "flush" to modders, they would spend millions of dollars on laws, protection software in video games, etc that they would rather keep.
It's all about making money. If EA could profit from a lawsuit, or reduce damages to their sales, they would do it.
But. Modders usually don't have much money, unless they run their own company. Also someone would need to collect all the sales data and identify a negative correlation between raw sales numbers and (hard to quantify) game modding numbers.
Generally, a company isn't willing to expend money to squash fan made productions that are otherwise promoting their products, but it can happen, especially when it may be considered that a project is in bad taste. I recall a Half-Life mod a while back that had an incredible amount of racist content (the objective of the game was to persecute 'Niggers') and was offered up with a cease and desist order. Whilst the mod itself was in very bad taste, they hadn't stepped on the toes of sales - but a mod like that would have been terrible for the image of the company had it ever gotten anywhere.
Usually, an official looking email with a cease and desist warning is more than enough to get modders to stop their mods, and they don't cost anything. If those warnings are ignored, then legal action really ensues. It has happened in the past, and a company will spend money just to make sure their warning shots are never ignored.
The moddability for games exists only for the purpose of keeping up the interest in the game, either to stabilize current sales, or to keep buyer interest for further titles in the series.
Big companies are naturally not big on the 'Information is free' front. They try to keep it to themselves and maximize profit. If they DO make stuff accessible, believe me, making money is what is driving this.
User generated content has driven the sales of a fair few games. The Creatures series is one in particular that I can think of, as well as to a lesser extent Unreal Tournament 2004. Such content vastly improves the shelf-life of the product, so it's often worth the developer investing in.
But it's not always the case that money is driving companies to allow third part development. iD Software is a big example of this - they've made three of their engines completely open source for non-profit projects to dive into and explore. Not because there's a financial investment in there, but because of the nature of the company. iD Software was partially founded by John Carmack - who has a vested interest in open source software, and started out into programming as a hacker.
@ GN: Just as a side note... and reply to what you was saying:
- If I was an EA producer, I'd keep my eye on the modding community REALLY hard! Why? Simple - cause we represent the DIE HARD fans of their products. And even though we don't like them enough to not mod them, we still like them enough to buy them AND take the trouble of modding them 
...
I know this is silly and they would never do it. I'm just saying I would consider it 
I would even consider hireing people like Cahik, Ched, Celeglin, Sûlherokhh, Nertea and similar talents if I was a top EA producer... That's the way to find the righ man for the job
We return to iD Software again - did you know that a large part of their staff are in fact people that stood out in their modding communities? iD took them on board when they had vacancies to fill and jobs to be done, and there's no better place to look for people familiar with your tools and workflow than your hobbyist modding community. iD are by no means alone in that policy either, Epic and a number of other companies work the same way.
Whew. That post took a good few hours...
Edited by ambershee, 24 July 2007 - 05:59 AM.
