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Compo Pack TOS "Addition"


KhaineGB

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56 minutes ago, KhaineGB said:

Speaking of @zztong I think some of your POI's are in here so I'll have to see if you've updated and then request perms from you too

 

I'll send you a note, but for the public...

 

As of release ZZ008, the POIs in my modlet are covered by the GPLv3. My intention was for folks to be able to take them, use them, modify them, whatever. Because of the nature of the GPLv3, if you do modify them, your modifications to them must also be covered by the GPLv3. That doesn't mean your entire project is bound by the GPLv3, just your changes to my POIs, should you choose to distribute them.

 

I do appreciate it when folks notify me they're using them.

 

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What a way to kill the CP and give the middle finger to the Overhaul Creators.

We all LOVE to download several different things to make our game more enjoyable than Vanilla. We see people saying "I LOVE MULTIPLE DOWNLOADS" every single day...<Sarcasm-off>

Everyone knows whats going to happen. CP will be phased out, and a new collection of POI's will emerge in a new Combo Pack to take its place.  Do you honestly think the Overhaul creators are stupid??? As we've seen with the opening post, its already happening!

 

Players are loyal to the overhauls they enjoy and support. This slight will not be forgiven easily, if at all! This was a stupid move, and I for one cannot see the logic behind it other than vanity and ego.

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This will be the beginning of the end of CP.

 

If the TOS is too restrictive then other modders and overhaul creators will just collect it in a new package that doesn't have the "exclusives" and distribute that. CP has done this to themselves by not separating the exclusives into an add-on modlet, and that's the only way that CP can now stay relevant - if they immediately change those to a modlet.

 

I'm looking forward to Khaine's version. All I play is DF anyway.

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1 hour ago, LordCorellon said:

What a way to kill the CP and give the middle finger to the Overhaul Creators.

 

1 hour ago, forgebench said:

This will be the beginning of the end of CP.

 

I hope it isn't that bad. It really seems to me like a jumble of hasty communications and actions.

 

I don't personally see another CP emerging, or at least not one as comprehensive as the CP, mostly because of the volume of work involved. Stallionsden is an effective shepherd for a massive number of POIs. Bringing all those A19 POIs up to A20 was a massive effort. And, the CP tries to bring them all up, not just a selective collection.

 

I doubt the TOS are intended to be a middle finger to anyone. Its more likely that there are a number of interests to be balanced. Stallionsden is a reasonable dude, and I think should be given the benefit of the doubt until such time as he's been able to adequately explain his position and make whatever adjustments are needed to the TOS.

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Hey Guys! Just a reminder to keep things civil regardless of any anger or outrage you might feel. We would like to keep this thread open so that the official CompoPack thread doesn't become the place where people go to discuss and vent.

 

I want to take a few moments to clarify the guidelines we all agree to abide by in the modding forum for the good of the community as it applies to this particular scenario.

 

1) Terms of use are only effective from the date they are posted and when a dispute occurs we go by the "last edited" date wherever it is posted. If terms of use are not posted, then permission to use as open source content is assumed. 

 

2) Permission to use, once granted, cannot be revoked.

 

Traditionally going back almost a decade, prefabs have always been uploaded with the intent to share them freely with the community. I don't think it ever occurred to anyone to add terms of use to a prefab that was shared because of the intent of sharing it. Prefab authors predominately want to know that their creations are popular and highly regarded by the community. That isn't to say that someone cannot attempt to protect the asset they are sharing and adding a terms of use to their asset. In that case, the same rules stated above would apply. If a dispute arose between content authors over the use of CP we would go by those rules.

 

@Guppycur is concerned that we will have to add new rules regarding prefab collections that would make things more restrictive. I think as moderators (some of us modders as well) we are pretty united in wanting to keep the traditional convention of sharing prefabs without demanding express permission-- intact. Its kind of our culture. I wouldn't mind hearing from the community what you all think would be the best way to word things in order to help people resolve disputes but also to keep the sharing and building of collections of POIs open and non-restrictive. On the one hand, Stallionsden's choice is a driving force to encourage people to make new compilation packs. But on the other hand, as a community we shouldn't expect Stallionsden to do all the work of maintaining and updating hundreds of POIs for new Alpha releases and just benefit freely from his work. There has to be a balance.

 

Lastly, keep in mind that we are getting closer to the day when TFP will flip the switch for Steam Workshop integration at which point the method by which people share and add community content into their games is going to change radically from what we are currently doing. "Compopack" will likely be a legend that old-timers make references to chats and forums but simply a myth for all the newbs who will be browsing and pointing and clicking whatever mix of POIs they want sorted by "most popular"....

 

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In either case CP won't go anywhere. We will figure it out. It's not all that hard to edit the poi list and drop what you want in it. Whatever the reason it's sad to see it in this position. If I was in Khaines shoes I would simply add links to contact Stallions team over every media possible. Same with ever other overhaul mod. Sometimes you have to make enough noise for it to be worth considering another solution... I'm sure with the combined base of all the overhauls it would be hard to ignore. Probably downright irritating?

1 minute ago, Guppycur said:

I've heard it's all settled.  

For better or worse?

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I've got a PM I need to reply to, but haven't had a chance. Been too busy.... ooof... what a day.

It appears the TOS was intended for CP specific POI's. As in, they were made for this iteration of CP rather than being community POI's that were contributed.

So... yeah. I am not sure how to react right now.

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Putting mods/prefabs etc behind a 3rd party proprietary launcher with a restrictive TOS is actually pretty messed up.

 

Do TFP really want this to be a thing? I'm surprised the their own TOS doesn't grant themselves rights to the mods and prefabs to keep them accessible to everyone.

Edited by Deedbix (see edit history)
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Had a look at the 7days EULA and any user created content already includes terms to give TFP license to them, furthermore you wave moral rights thus there's no need to even attribute peoples mods or prefabs back to anyone. I wonder what's stopping people ripping out the prefabs and distributing via this forum to be honest.

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I submitted my prefab (The Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil 1) in A19. To my knowledge, they made a few "balancing" changes that I was semi ok with.
My secrets that I dotted around the mansion were intact and players who found my secrets were rewarded for it!

In A20, they completely butchered my passion project, most of my secrets are either nerfed or removed. For example, one secret you were rewarded with 2 secret stashes, now you are rewarded with concrete blocks.
The loot room is another issue, for some reason, they decided to have the loot room in my super secret location where less than 1% of players will ever find it. This super secret originally lead the player to find signs to tell the player the location of a treasure chest, which was also nerfed to a large weapons bag.......


So, here's my ToS!
You're welcome to use my mansion on the condition that any changes that are wished to be made are run by me first, and if we can't come to an agreement to the desired changes, then I don't permit use of baby.
Translation: The current butchered version of my mansion in CP48 breaks my ToS :)

Any overhaul modders out there that would like the Spencer Mansion in their overhaul mods are welcome to contact me.

If you want to see the completed envisioned version of the Spencer Mansion, it has its own standalone mod on the launcher called The Spencer Mansion Incident.
 

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I really hope we keep all of this as simple as possible.

 

If content was originally openly shared by an author with full distribution and modification rights then anyone taking over the work should be bound by the original intent of the author.

 

It doesn't matter how much additional work was included in the modification of something original. You either accept that your additional work will be bound by the original intent or you have two options:

- don't do the work

- do you own from scratch and decide on your own terms

 

 

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9 hours ago, Roland said:

 

2) Permission to use, once granted, cannot be revoked.

 

 

 

This is not entirely accurate. There is a reason assignment clauses specifically mention being "irrevocable", as where they are silent the IP holder often can change terms and can revoke assignments. While this is up to courts ultimately, from my knowledge usually courts hold that where it's silent on the issue, they are revocable at will by the licensor.

 

 

9 hours ago, Roland said:

 

@Guppycur is concerned that we will have to add new rules regarding prefab collections that would make things more restrictive. I think as moderators (some of us modders as well) we are pretty united in wanting to keep the traditional convention of sharing prefabs without demanding express permission-- intact. Its kind of our culture. I wouldn't mind hearing from the community what you all think would be the best way to word things in order to help people resolve disputes but also to keep the sharing and building of collections of POIs open and non-restrictive. On the one hand, Stallionsden's choice is a driving force to encourage people to make new compilation packs. But on the other hand, as a community we shouldn't expect Stallionsden to do all the work of maintaining and updating hundreds of POIs for new Alpha releases and just benefit freely from his work. There has to be a balance.

 

 

 

 

I don't think TFP should be getting involved. TFP could claim that any content created within 7DTD belongs to TFP, which would be draconian. TFP could issue terms that creations made in 7DTD are freely available and shareable, which is also draconian, and simply opens up a huge headache for people as effectively it means whatever they create is no longer theirs.  Could I pop into a random server and demand to get a copy of a POI then? etc.etc.

 

Like any intellectual property, laws already exist. If people want to give non-exclusive, irrevocable licenses for others to use, they can. If they want to give exclusive, revocable they can. And if they want terms that whoever uses their POI credits them in the server MOTD, they can. People can freely enter into these agreements, or not as they choose.

 

In either case, MANY mod creators while allowing download and free use of their mods, do not allow re-distribution OR re-use of their modpacks within other modpacks. If CP wants to do the same, who are we to say that "this specific modpack" shouldn't be allowed to have such terms?

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2 hours ago, Deedbix said:

I wonder what's stopping people ripping out the prefabs and distributing via this forum to be honest.


There’s nothing stopping people from searching the forum and downloading individual POIs that people have created and posted. You could create your own “playlist”. 
 

Some of those may need to be updated to work in A20 if their authors haven’t done that themselves. You could do that work and have those prefabs in your world. 
 

Sounds to me like resolution of some kind is coming. Stallionsden has messaged me that he admittedly didn’t communicate himself well and things have blown out of proportion. 
 

Let’s give him time to communicate his intentions better and see what comes of this. Remember that the Compopack you are playing today is not the same Compopack Margoli left us. That Compopack would not be compatible with A20 and many of the people being outraged put zero effort into updating all the POIs to work with A20 other than to expect it be there for them to use. 
 

Stallionsden deserves some latitude here to clarify things if you’ve been enjoying A20 Compopack. 

3 minutes ago, Vedui said:

This is not entirely accurate. There is a reason assignment clauses specifically mention being "irrevocable", as where they are silent the IP holder often can change terms and can revoke assignments. While this is up to courts ultimately, from my knowledge usually courts hold that where it's silent on the issue, they are revocable at will by the licensor.


You’re mixing up laws and forum guidelines. Legally, all derivative work belongs to TFP. Period. 
 

on this forum the rule you quoted stands because it results in the least number of disputes that rise to the level of moderation. We have had less than a handful of large scale disputes since our forum rules were posted and all were able to be resolved quickly and none of it had to do with the law because— as you pointed out— if we are going to involve the law then it is TFP enforcing their ownership and either enforcing free distribution or locking behind their own download guidelines. 
 

So, legally, terms may be able to be renegotiated and permission revoked for failure to comply with the new terms, but if you want to be a member of this forum and be involved in our modding community then you can’t revoke permission once granted because that used to lead to sooooooo much drama and ever since everyone accepted that forum rule it has greased the wheels of better community collaboration.  

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2 hours ago, Deedbix said:

Had a look at the 7days EULA and any user created content already includes terms to give TFP license to them, furthermore you wave moral rights thus there's no need to even attribute peoples mods or prefabs back to anyone. I wonder what's stopping people ripping out the prefabs and distributing via this forum to be honest.

 

That is correct. However, granting TFP a license to the creations, doesn't mean others can also freely use. Now the grant to TFP includes the right to sub-license, so TFP would be within their rights to say "hey, we got a license to everything, so we're gonna freely sub-license to everyone too!" ... however while that looks easy on paper, there're a lot of details. Ie, how do you even distribute it? TFP doesn't have someones POI created in the game. Heck if I change 1 block, my world is now different than before. Do you have the game automatically transmit everything to TFP to store/process? That'd simply be unfeasible. You could require players to submit every creation within x days of creation. Which means we'd all have to auto-batch sending GB's of data as our worlds continually change. So not feasible.

 

And so on. It's not a simple thing to implement.

 

The specific EULA referenced I believe:

 

USER CREATED CONTENT: The Software may allow you to create content, including but not limited to a gameplay map, screenshot or a video of your game play. In exchange for use of the Software, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Software give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant Licensor an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Software and related goods and services, including the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions. You hereby waive any moral rights of paternity, publication, reputation, or attribution with respect to Licensor’s and other players’ use and enjoyment of such assets in connection with the Software and related goods and services under applicable law. This license grant to Licensor, and the above waiver of any applicable moral rights, survives any termination of this License.

 

https://7daystodie.com/eula/

 

 

 

13 minutes ago, Roland said:


You’re mixing up laws and forum guidelines. Legally, all derivative work belongs to TFP. Period. 
 

on this forum the rule you quoted stands because it results in the least number of disputes that rise to the level of moderation. We have had less than a handful of large scale disputes since our forum rules were posted and all were able to be resolved quickly and none of it had to do with the law because— as you pointed out— if we are going to involve the law then it is TFP enforcing their ownership and either enforcing free distribution or locking behind their own download guidelines. 
 

So, legally, terms may be able to be renegotiated and permission revoked for failure to comply with the new terms, but if you want to be a member of this forum and be involved in our modding community then you can’t revoke permission once granted because that used to lead to sooooooo much drama and ever since everyone accepted that forum rule it has greased the wheels of better community collaboration.  

 

Absolutely, forum vs other places would be different. I normally never download POI's (or CP) from the forum as such, so was more speaking to it in a general sense.

 

Overall, I think once the game is done and we have steam workshop, things as noted will change substantially and for the benefit of everyone :)

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12 minutes ago, Vedui said:

In either case, MANY mod creators while allowing download and free use of their mods, do not allow re-distribution OR re-use of their modpacks within other modpacks. If CP wants to do the same, who are we to say that "this specific modpack" shouldn't be allowed to have such terms?


There is no problem and we allow that starting from the date that those terms were posted and not retroactively applied. 
 

Honestly, the thing that made this muddy was doing it in the middle of A20. The best time to have done this was when he updated the pack to A20 compatibility the first time. Then he could state that A19 Compopack is the vanilla open source compilation that everyone is free to download and use. He could have released his overhaul mod that updates the POIs to alpha 20 and rebalances them- not as the new version of Compopack- but as a separate Stallions overhaul mod featuring Margoli’s Compopack and state his terms from the get go. 
 

If others ripped out his updated POIs to use in their own overhaul mods without his permission then the outcome would be clear. Now, people have already had permission granted to use them before suddenly these versions are no longer permitted to be used. If disputes arise it is too muddy to definitively say that the POIs were taken after permission was revoked since they are the same version as the POIs that existed while permission was still granted. 
 

Muddy, and all I care about is having a nice happy modding community and not who legally gets to do what. (TFP gets to legally do everything if they want)

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28 minutes ago, Vedui said:

Absolutely, forum vs other places would be different. I normally never download POI's (or CP) from the forum as such, so was more speaking to it in a general sense.


Exactly. At the time we implemented our rules for the modding forum we stressed that they are guidelines for remaining in good standing in OUR forum alone. 
 

If someone violates the rules and refuses to comply then we ban them and hide all their content on our site and they no longer have a presence here. That doesn’t stop them from continuing to do what they want to do using a discord channel or Nexus or a FaceBook page. 
 

A couple years ago a modder blatantly ripped off 90% of the assets and code of another author and wouldn’t reply civilly to the guy much less agree to stop stealing his work. We sent messages and finally banned him and hid his content. He went to Nexus who also banned him (since our community is prolific enough to get around to other sites). I’m not sure what happened to the guy or his mod but chasing him away from our community here was the extent of what we could do. 
 

For most modders who are fans of the game, that threat is bad enough. They don’t want to be removed from this community. Plus most of our modders are good people who want their work to be appreciated and out there. 
 

So, really, it does end up all being self regulated within the community without us having to get involved at all. Only if a party is hellbent on violating a rule do we get involved and that certainly isn’t the case. We aren’t involved yet other than making sure the CP thread is uncluttered by angry rants and that this thread stays civil. 
 

And I keep hearing from key people to just stay the hell away which I’m more than happy to do. 😂

Edited by Roland (see edit history)
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For keep Compopack alive each new alpha, I find it logical all prefabs must be updated to avoid any compatibility issues. IMO if POIs are not updated, they should no longer be part of the latest version of CP unless they have been rework by their authors. And I'm aware that would cut off the CP quite a lot of good POIs from the penultimate alpha.
There are other exceptions: when i played with CP48, I went through a lot of prefabs in order to clean up "out dated" creations even if these are compatible.

 

Otherwise I also think a huge job is necessary to recover the latest versions of the POIs scattered on different websites. I publish mine on NexusMods, which does not mean that everyone here have heard of the latest updates. So I cannot blame the team for correcting my POI A19 to A20 concerning missing blocks, if I don't communicate my updates outside of Nexus.

 

There is a lot of time involved in this compatibility process.

 

I think if some people want to guarantee their creations shared in CP without unauthorized modifications, they should also help and save Stallionsden and testers from spending time making their POIs compatible and playable.

Edited by SG1-09 (see edit history)
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11 hours ago, FranticDan said:

I submitted my prefab (The Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil 1) in A19. To my knowledge, they made a few "balancing" changes that I was semi ok with.
My secrets that I dotted around the mansion were intact and players who found my secrets were rewarded for it!

In A20, they completely butchered my passion project, most of my secrets are either nerfed or removed. For example, one secret you were rewarded with 2 secret stashes, now you are rewarded with concrete blocks.
The loot room is another issue, for some reason, they decided to have the loot room in my super secret location where less than 1% of players will ever find it. This super secret originally lead the player to find signs to tell the player the location of a treasure chest, which was also nerfed to a large weapons bag.......


So, here's my ToS!
You're welcome to use my mansion on the condition that any changes that are wished to be made are run by me first, and if we can't come to an agreement to the desired changes, then I don't permit use of baby.
Translation: The current butchered version of my mansion in CP48 breaks my ToS :)

Any overhaul modders out there that would like the Spencer Mansion in their overhaul mods are welcome to contact me.

If you want to see the completed envisioned version of the Spencer Mansion, it has its own standalone mod on the launcher called The Spencer Mansion Incident.
 

 

The current butchered version does not break your ToS since your ToS does not apply retroactively. A new version of your mansion could fall under a ToS though

 

I can see boths sides here: You want your baby to work in all its glory. And that works fine as a seperate mod where anyone downloading it could read in your description text that it has ramped up its difficulty and rewards.

 

But a collection of pois should be uniform in difficulty and reward. Last week my group played a mod that had a tier4 POI that was miles above in difficulty compared to other tie4 or even tier5 pois. Frustrated the hell out of my co-players. And I can remember some POIs in previous compopacks being ridicilous loot bonanzas. Sorry, that doesn't work well, such POI's either have to be balanced or removed from a collection.

 

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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1 hour ago, SG1-09 said:

I think if some people want to guarantee their creations shared in CP without unauthorized modifications, they should also help and save Stallionsden and testers from spending time making their POIs compatible and playable.

 

I wonder if it might be necessary for the CP to insist on Terms for a contribution. That is, by contributing a POI to the CP, the designer agrees the CP folks are able to modify a POI for any reason. To me, something like this expresses a practical impossibility of tracking down hundreds of creators each version.

 

I say "any reason" because coming up with an exact list that stands the tests of time would be super difficult. Various reasons I know of would include: compatibility with new game versions, loot balancing, game performance, and adjustment of building materials. (A "wooden" shack built entirely of steel blocks.)

 

I venture to say most folks who contribute a POI aren't aware of the changes necessary. I know the first several POIs I threw at Stallionsden had issues, and he was great at explaining to me what the issues were, and the CP Testers have been super-effective of telling me all sorts of things ... specially missing textures under doorways. Grrrrr.

Edited by zztong (see edit history)
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So is there a list of authors that want these restrictive terms in the cp tos which we can just remove from infinity,  from what I am reading the list of authors wishing to be restrictive is smaller than the number of non restrictive authors.  So could someone post a list or could the authors own up to what they want envision for their poi's.  

 

Additionally

I understand this has prompted several overhaul mod authors to rework updates instead of working on something they (and we) love.

 

If you make a labor of love become a labor only, people will not continue their efforts.  That would be sad.

 

Perhaps discussion and communications before stating TOS EULA etc with folks that may be affected.

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