Ties That Bind Revised - TTW 3.2.X

[wasdwasd12]

Roy This is not me Whinning, This is me being open and wondering why such limits exist for great mods. And People have moved on i saw many comments talking about it. and hey i wont force anyone to work for me Roy.

It not also against the rules to talk about it now and then if you look up in my earlier Post I open some ideas...asked some questions and pondered why this was that. also added some suggestions.

But isnt it True Just because The mod Works doesnt mean it far from complete?? (IT still does kinda make no Sense How amanda can get into the dlc??*


Roy if your gonna ban me for opening discussions about mods and what possibilities they could have. Also What i found that is broken, that not fair man that all i was doing. Not Trying to Cause any Trouble Roy...i found something that was broken and i spoke up about it????

[Lyndi]

Thank You, i love her but this.....all we not allowed to keep working and improving these mods when they have been abandoned is starting to piss me the hell off >/////> People move on to other projects...hell the fucking New California Mod Team is a fucking Prime example of this.


Who is going to Care if Someone just works a little bit on it and adds on too it. Hey Thanks for doing this man it meeans a whole lot I wish She could Get some Kind of Custom Weapon or have a Skill Progress Kinda of Menu So she can be good at whatever weapons we want her to use

This post looks like a bunch of whining to me Wasd. Next time choose your words more carefully and avoid the incoherent rambling if you wish to convey a different tone.

Addon patches can be made for most mods if people choose to do so. Most authors have no problem with people adding things to their original work via a patch. If you want specific things added, you can always do it yourself. All the tools are freely available and the knowledge on how to use them is abundant. People learned to use these tools in their free time and there's no reason you can't learn to use them as well. Every mod ever released is the culmination of hours and hours of someones spare time. Time they spent learning, creating, and testing. Time they have given to the community for free. If you wish to expand on some of these mods you can start by using your time to learn instead of making posts full of unnecessary expletives.

[Awestriker007]

Quick question, since I am getting crashes and I'm rather dumb when it comes to Mod Organizer 2.

Am I supposed to have the files like this in the load order:
Ties that Bind
TTB

or like this:
TTB
Ties that Bind

[streetyson]

"Peoples mods are their property"

@RoyBatty,
With respect, speaking as a former modder up to 15yrs ago, you (nearly almost) can't ever "own" your published mods:
Firstly, mods often contain non-original assets (such as altered vanilla or webscavenged textures and so on). Unless sold/licensed to the modder, these remain the property of the originator. Secondly, almost all mods contain non-original ideas, be it the game itself or also borrowed from elsewhere. Thirdly, most mods exceed the EULA and/or Copyright of the game. This has been tested in court a fair few times, but game companies usually tollerate freely given mods because they generate game purchases etc.

Unless your mod is entirely original in content, assets and ideas (and I've never seen one that was), you don't legally own the public publishing rights to it. And once put out there in the public domain you cannot legally stop someone from taking it and doing what they want with it AND PUTTING IT OUT THERE AGAIN. Certainly, artistic integrity of the Brotherhood of Modders should be followed in the sense that credit be given to a fellow modder's efforts, and I always at least tried to get a fellow modder's blessing, and always credited their efforts. That's as much as one needs to do - but frankly that's just an entirely voluntary nicety - unless the mod is an all-original piece and thus protected by copyright (and as explained above, 99.9% can't be).

In the case of Ties That Bind, I found it (in FO3) annoyingly glitchy in several ways and ultimately just a total waste of my time. But if someone were to take that mod and publish a free revision of it, there is nothing the original modder can do to stop it. As a published artist myself, I personally wouldn't use the voice files without express permission, but even those public rights are a grey area because they make heavy interactive use of the game's story, which is copyrighted by Bethesda.

[Risewild]

An interesting bit of information:
The FNV GECK doesn't have any Terms or Conditions or EULA to be used.

[RiceBomb]

I can't speak from the legality of a mod, but if the terms of a website say you can't upload another modder's work without permission, then that's that. Most reputable mod hosting sights, including this one, hold that stance. They don't have to allow the mod to be held on the website. Mod piracy isn't about who owns the assets, it's about uploading another person's work, or working on it then redistributing it without asking.

[RoyBatty]

Everything in the entire world is derivative work, argument invalid. There is no legal precedents for mods. DMCAs are enforced regularly by modders asserting their rights over their work.

[Risewild]

It's also worth noticing that even Bethesda doesn't tolerate people uploading mods without the permission of their authors. This happened a lot when Bethesda first released the Bethesda.net mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. A lot of people were uploading mods that didn't belong to them over there and Bethesda found out and removed all of those mods and banned the uploaders.
So even if someone says that Bethesda owns the mods instead of the modders who make them, so modders can't legally enforce their copyrights, Bethesda can and will do it anyway.

But there's a thing about mods, if someone makes a new texture from scratch, that texture is legally owned by whoever made it, some for new models, new quests (writing), new scripts, new animations, etc. Because those things were not already in the game, they were made by the modder and they have the right to not want them distributed. So even if someone says that "the assets belong to Bethesda, not the modders. So the modders can't say who uploads their mods or not!", this doesn't apply to custom assets.

This is kinda new in terms of legal stuff, but there are precedents of companies and even distribution platforms (like the nexus, Steam workshop or even file sharing sites) reinforcing the rights and will of modders. I already mentioned Bethesda not allowing mod theft in their Bethesda.net platform, Nexus also doesn't allow it, Paradox Interactive and Steam have removed stolen mods from Steam Workshop in the past (when the real authors reported those), and even the first Mod Piracy subreddit was banned because of getting too many "copyright infringement" reports.

This is because modders do have some limited copyrights, because of being derivative works. They can be considered infringing the copyright owned by the game companies, but in this case it's not.
Bethesda gives it's permission for modders to make mods for FNV, which means that the modders still have some copyright over their own mods (because Bethesda doesn't consider mods for FNV a copyright issue by part of the modder). So unless Bethesda says that your particular mod is breaking the copyright they hold, you have rights over your own mod (even if Bethesda's terms say that they can own your work if they want to).
This can be different if a modder is making mods for other games, owned by other companies that might not allow mods.

Here's what a couple law sites say about this:

SpoilerShow

Copyright laws

At their core, game mods are derivative works. A modification needs to run on the original work in order for the mod itself to work. As a game modder, you own some limited copyrights in what you created but what you created is likely copyright infringement.

The easiest way to think about how game mods fit into the copyright scene is to think about an art gallery. Creating a game mod is similar to going into an art gallery, pulling a painting off the wall, and putting a painting inside of the painting. You own what you created but your creation is infringing on the original artist’s copyright to do it unless they’ve given you the right to do it.

https://odinlaw.com/who-owns-my-game-mod/

Why do Skywind and Black Mesa get a pass?

A copyright-holder has the right to enforce the rights in their work, but they also have the right not to enforce as well. Therefore, a mod is “legal” only for as long as a rights-holder chooses to let it exist. There are good reasons to do this depending on a developer’s goals.

On one hand, Valve Inc, gave Crowbar Collective an unusually generous license for their remake of “Half-Life”, likely because Valve had been seeing such success with their digital storefront, Steam, and had not foreseeable plans to remake their game themselves. Again, this is exceedingly rare. If you are a modder, relying on this example to acquire a deal at a later point is negligent, to say the least, as you will most likely have created a mod in vain and may fall victim to litigation if you try to profit from it without a license.

Bethesda Softworks on the other hand encourages modding in an apparent strategy to foster and keep a community around their games beyond the games’ typical market lifespan. They even release dedicated modding tools for players to use with their single-player games. Many think that Skyrim owes its continued 9-year success at least partially to its vibrant modding scene. Given Skyrim’s success with modding, condoning Skywind (but which requires proof of purchase of both Morrowind and Skyrim) could be a no-brainer.

I’m a modder! What does this mean for me?

Well, the harsh answer is: either don’t mod at all, mod only for works where the rights-holder has condoned the practice, or keep your mod private instead of releasing it to the public (which is still infringement, but without anyone noticing it). If a rights-holder does not like your mod, then they can and will strike your mod down (via a cease and desist letter and a DMCA Take Down Notice most likely). Once that happens, there is not really anything you can do. If you want to release a mod of a game you do not own any copyright in, your best bet is to ask the rights-holder for permission.

https://www.koburgerlaw.com/blog/2020/7 ... -they-make

[RiceBomb]

Right, and even with all of that said, there's no one stopping someone from fixing whatever issues they might have with a mod. The problem here lies with complaining that it's not being fixed by the original author or by someone else. If you have a problem with the mod, learn how to fix it yourself, but you still can't go just tossing someone's work around wherever you please. Like Roy and Rise said, modders do own their creations.

[Thorne67]

Will this still work with the updated version of the Ties that Bind mod? The original author updated it after you made this.