Legal and Moral Issues Relating to Modding

I (dcoshea) am not a lawyer but am interested in legal/moral issues related to modding. This discussion relates to taking ideas from one game and incorporating them into another game with a focus on the suggestions at Liberation in MOH:AA.

Legal issues

My understanding of Australian law (which I believe, in the area of copyright, is probably similar to the laws in the US and some other countries) is that copyright protects an implementation of an idea, rather than the idea itself (which I believe is protected by a patent). Hence, if you were to somehow take the implementation of Liberation mode from Breakthrough and put it into Allied Assault or Spearhead, you would be in violation of copyright, but since I believe the implementation is probably in the game DLLs, and most people would want to implement their own Liberation-style mode via map scripts, there isn't a copyright issue - you can't steal the implementation directly. I believe that if Liberation mode was patented, that would prevent anyone from copying the idea, but it's highly unlikely the authors would spend time or money patenting an idea like that (there aren't likely to be other games implementing the same idea that the authors might want to prevent from implementing it or extract licensing fees from).

Moral issues

However, there is still a moral issue that should be considered. By taking functionality from Breakthrough and making it available in Allied Assault, you are giving players for free functionality that they would otherwise have to buy (as a part of Breakthrough). If you released some multi-player maps that supported a Liberation mode, they could be downloaded along with some new weapons which would essentially give players for free the main component that most players purchase Breakthrough for - new weapons, skins and maps with Liberation mode.

While it's legal to do this, and it might not have a measurable impact (or any impact) on sales of Breakthrough, the authors may still be concerned about the impact and either cease providing modding tools to the community (in order to stifle the "competing" free products) or perhaps have less incentive to release new add-ons.

Comments by others

Bjarne writes:

Wow, this is an interesting turn in my Liberation game mode tutorial (:biggrin:). You answer the questions about legality your self above, so let me comment on the morality:

Why I made the MOD instead of buying MOH:BT:

The scripted version of Liberation that I created is indeed coming from me trying MOH:BT Liberation and liking it. My problem is that I find MOH:BT a bad expansion, not because it is a bad game, but because I feel the immersion and direct control of the gameplay that I like about MOH:AA, is missing.

Why I feel no moral question in what I'm doing

1. My scripted Liberation mode does not come near the MOH:BT version in quality. It lacks all the little details like miserable unarmed prisoners and cool movies at the and of each map.
2. To turn it around: If something one person created in one day would put a full priced product at shame: Dosen't that mean the customers of MOH:BT were ripped off? (:wink:).
3. Where is the line between what I can do, and can't? They released editors for modifying their game. I'm well aware that this MOD scene helps making games live longer. So if my MOD injects new life to this game, they profit. Should we demand payment for helping them make money? I don't think so. We do it because we like it. ( OK, this section got a bit confused, I'll stop here ).

Thanx for your thoughts dcoshea.

- Bjarne

Anyone else have thoughts in this subject?