Context: It's a paid mod but doesn't appear the guy was in it for profit, rather to support the time spent which covers multiple games.
The precedent here I find a little weak, a mod isn't facilitating piracy nor is it a replacement for the original product. You need to own the game, the mod is a layer that adds additional features.
When mapping the context to the real world it's more worrying, you don't get car makers suing accessory makers for selling phone mounts advertised to fit their vehicles.
At $10/mo for access even if he's not doing it for profit he's absolutely making bank. Verge in 2022 estimated about $20,000 a month [1].
CDPR has an explicit policy allowing free mods with a tip jar, but not mods that are pay-only. Whether or not you agree with that policy it's CDPR's right to make that decision, and you can't complain when they enforce it.
This is taking the whole 'you don't actually own this game' to a whole new level when trying to dictate what mods you can use with it. The digital world needs a major reboot in terms of consumer rights, and this should happen sooner rather than later as companies are increasingly trying to take this into the real world by attaching software to hardware and then seeking to gain both rent and control due to nonexistent state of consumer rights associated with software.
But they're not going after people who use the mod. They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP. Someone else said upthread that CDPR doesn't go after people who make free mods (or donationware) so it's clear they don't have a problem with mods per se.
I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
Depending on your age the term Game Genie [1] probably brings back some fond memories. If it was before your time, it was a hardware device - a mod, you could attach to video game devices that would enable you to tweak the memory of the game in real time enabling you to do all sorts of things, mostly it was used for stuff like infinite lives or whatever but you could also do neat things like tweak the gravity in games.
The neat thing is that the device was completely unapproved by the device IP owners, most notably - Nintendo. It required the creators to reverse engineer the NES, crack their anti-pirate measures, and then finally enable a nice interface for users to 'hack' games at the end of it. And then for the icing on the cake they then bought copies of every single NES game, 'cracked' them, and published, and sold, books with codes for specific games precisely profiting off players of these games.
Nintendo tried to sue, and lost. They appealed, and lost. The Game Genie wasn't violating Nintendo's IP, they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything. And so it was a pretty much open and shut case with all the legal wrangling lasting mere months. And the exact same is true here. As a fun aside this even set the precedent for legally selling games on consoles without the approval of the console IP owner.
The point is that a derivative work has to be a derivative work, not just something that works with your IP. And this just sounds like a mod that hacks in VR capability for dozens of games that don't otherwise support it. I imagine they'll comply simply because going to court against just one of those companies is going to be a lot easier than fighting it, but it's a shame. Mainstream success seems to have turned into a terrible curse for CDPR.
> they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything.
I would like an even stronger precedent, to say that even if sales are harmed, it's non-infringing. E.g. a car aftermarket customization that improves performance so that it is equivalent to a more expensive model of the same brand, thus harming profits of that car brand. Or hell, just plain old regular repairs, so one can keep an old car for longer.
We don't owe it to corporations to protect their business models.
> I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
I don't see any difference between a paid or free mod. Were CD Projekt losing out on sales of the VR DLC?
> They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP.
They are going after someone who is making their IP more valuable. I missed Cyberpunk the first time around due to the initial bad reviews and then not having time after they fixed them.
With Valve coming out with their VR headset I am considering getting one, and looking at VR games, Cyberpunk with the mod was going to be a purchase.
How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content or require any particular feature of a base game (the "mod" supports many games) and is actually primarily meant for interoperation with a novel input and display method?
If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
> How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content
Adding a VR mode to the game is definitely adding content. If you mean storywise, okay, I agree with you. Still, he's profiting off it in the fact that you need to pay a monthly fee to access the mod.
Even if he claims he's not, he indeed is profiting off it, because there is no way you can use the mod without paying first.
> If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
The difference is that Valve would have asked for permission first from CDPR if they could sell their software, or even then, work together with CDPR to have the software be implemented natively on the game. Plus, Valve has the same stance on paid mods on Steam, so it's not really a good comparison here.
It's their game, it's written in the EULA, which everyone accepts blindly without reading. You have accepted the EULA before playing the game.
This is the same as the Steam Subscriber Agreement saying you CANNOT make paid mods using Valve's IP unless given permission to do so.
There's nothing wrong with CDPR going after someone who thought they'd get away by making an important mod paid-only. It's a totally different story if the $10 fee was optional.
I agree, that do not(should not) have a leg to stand on here.
They might not like the fact, but the dev is selling his software, not theirs. It would be akin to MS sending a take down request to software running on windows.
I wonder how much "strength" the tos really has in this case.
The term "derivative work" covers a lot. For example all fan translations are one and all content stored on movie subtitles sites is by definition illegal. I don't know about those particular VR mods but in general case it is easy to show that game mod is not a standalone work and counts as derivative work, so game developer can limit the distribution however they want.
I think it's more a dependency and less a derivative (there isn't any source code/game objects being distributed via the mod as far as I can tell.)
I would be very interested to see how a court would rule on this, as AFAIK such as Lexmark v. Static Control Components, you can modify products you purchase, but how much weight would the TOS really hold?
It shouldn't be CDPR's right to make this decision. A mod is just software that runs on top of other software. Microsoft doesn't get to dictate what I do with Windows. Apple does try to dictate what I do with my iPhone, but even then, if I manage to jailbreak my phone there's nothing they can do about it.
Question is, as long as he's not using their assets, what leg have they to stand on and enforce this? He's selling his software, not infringing on theirs.
On the money, had not spotted how much he was making from this. Given he's been at this for several years and the quality of the product I'm quite happy he's been able to devote the time to this.
AFAIK DMCA is such a strong law that you just have to circumvent any kind of access mechanism to violate it. I’m not a lawyer.
“No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
“to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;”
I’m not sure how modding works in the case but usually this is why companies can come after folks.
> “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
This wording always bothers me. If a person were to circumvent a technological measure that tries to control such access, then the circumvention itself proves that this measure was not effective at doing what it is supposed to be doing. Therefore the person is not circumventing something that _effectively_ controls anything. They just showed that it is ineffective, and therefore the law does not apply to them.
Of course, no one who actually has to interpret these laws shares my opinion.
Question for people who are lawyers or lawyer adjacent: would you be able to reasonable argue against this in court, assuming you do not use any Cyberpunk assets or content directly, and instead just offer a dll mod of the game that writes memory at specific addresses and modifies code (i'm assuming that's what this mod is doing)? To me, if you're not using any of the actual game's content CDPR can't reasonably claim that you're infringing on their copyright, but ianal.
Very unclear about the reasoning behind CDPR decision. Unless he was redistributing code or assets from the game, how is this any different from any library emulation/wrapper like Wine/Proton or the multitudes of libraries like DK3D? Are they gonna sue Valve once their game works on the Steam Frame?
(I can only assume they're planning a specific version for the Frame and they fear this mod would offer a superior experience for a lower price)
Meanwhile thousands of modders make some money on nexusmods from their Cyberpunk mods. My Cyberpunk mods get me like 200 USD/month in passive income. Why is this guy getting singled out?
CDPR's policy is you can have a tip jar but you can't put it behind a paywall. Dude was asking $10/mo on Patreon for access. I imagine he does quite well because he has the same mod for a lot of other games.
Pretty sure he could rerelease it for free and ask for donations.
"he has the same mod" is downplaying it. He's adding VR for games with widely different engines. Same functionality yes, but vastly different codebase.
Like it or not, mods should be free. Unless you want that scene to turn into another shitshow, just like what happened with Youtube. The moment you open the floodgates on that, the modscene will be flooded with crap and yet another commercial-free space gets molested by the icy hand of capitalism. Financialization destroys everything it touches!
Why? If it's original work, and it does not violate existing laws, whoever makes it should have the right to seek compensation for their work, if they see fit. It's basically software like any other. Licensing models have been successfully applied to software plugins in past, mods fall into that category.
I'd agree that the modder should have the legal right to create a $10/month subscription mod, because I don't like copyright being so extensive as to give the game's authors control over that, but also really don't want to see such "licensing models" spread to another community that has so far remained largley uninfected.
Today's lesson: Suck it up and do what you're told.
Like it or not, you should accept that you're always at the mercy of a large corporation and you must follow their policies to the letter even if the law says something different.
Context: It's a paid mod but doesn't appear the guy was in it for profit, rather to support the time spent which covers multiple games.
The precedent here I find a little weak, a mod isn't facilitating piracy nor is it a replacement for the original product. You need to own the game, the mod is a layer that adds additional features.
When mapping the context to the real world it's more worrying, you don't get car makers suing accessory makers for selling phone mounts advertised to fit their vehicles.
At $10/mo for access even if he's not doing it for profit he's absolutely making bank. Verge in 2022 estimated about $20,000 a month [1].
CDPR has an explicit policy allowing free mods with a tip jar, but not mods that are pay-only. Whether or not you agree with that policy it's CDPR's right to make that decision, and you can't complain when they enforce it.
1: https://www.theverge.com/23190201/luke-ross-vr-real-mod-gta-...
How is it their right to make that decision?
This is taking the whole 'you don't actually own this game' to a whole new level when trying to dictate what mods you can use with it. The digital world needs a major reboot in terms of consumer rights, and this should happen sooner rather than later as companies are increasingly trying to take this into the real world by attaching software to hardware and then seeking to gain both rent and control due to nonexistent state of consumer rights associated with software.
But they're not going after people who use the mod. They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP. Someone else said upthread that CDPR doesn't go after people who make free mods (or donationware) so it's clear they don't have a problem with mods per se.
I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
Depending on your age the term Game Genie [1] probably brings back some fond memories. If it was before your time, it was a hardware device - a mod, you could attach to video game devices that would enable you to tweak the memory of the game in real time enabling you to do all sorts of things, mostly it was used for stuff like infinite lives or whatever but you could also do neat things like tweak the gravity in games.
The neat thing is that the device was completely unapproved by the device IP owners, most notably - Nintendo. It required the creators to reverse engineer the NES, crack their anti-pirate measures, and then finally enable a nice interface for users to 'hack' games at the end of it. And then for the icing on the cake they then bought copies of every single NES game, 'cracked' them, and published, and sold, books with codes for specific games precisely profiting off players of these games.
Nintendo tried to sue, and lost. They appealed, and lost. The Game Genie wasn't violating Nintendo's IP, they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything. And so it was a pretty much open and shut case with all the legal wrangling lasting mere months. And the exact same is true here. As a fun aside this even set the precedent for legally selling games on consoles without the approval of the console IP owner.
The point is that a derivative work has to be a derivative work, not just something that works with your IP. And this just sounds like a mod that hacks in VR capability for dozens of games that don't otherwise support it. I imagine they'll comply simply because going to court against just one of those companies is going to be a lot easier than fighting it, but it's a shame. Mainstream success seems to have turned into a terrible curse for CDPR.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie
DMCA wasn’t law during the lawsuits with CodeGenie and Nintendo.
Also countries have different laws not everyone lives in America.
> they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything.
I would like an even stronger precedent, to say that even if sales are harmed, it's non-infringing. E.g. a car aftermarket customization that improves performance so that it is equivalent to a more expensive model of the same brand, thus harming profits of that car brand. Or hell, just plain old regular repairs, so one can keep an old car for longer.
We don't owe it to corporations to protect their business models.
> I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
I don't see any difference between a paid or free mod. Were CD Projekt losing out on sales of the VR DLC?
> They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP.
They are going after someone who is making their IP more valuable. I missed Cyberpunk the first time around due to the initial bad reviews and then not having time after they fixed them.
With Valve coming out with their VR headset I am considering getting one, and looking at VR games, Cyberpunk with the mod was going to be a purchase.
Now they have just lost a sale.
How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content or require any particular feature of a base game (the "mod" supports many games) and is actually primarily meant for interoperation with a novel input and display method?
If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
> How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content
Adding a VR mode to the game is definitely adding content. If you mean storywise, okay, I agree with you. Still, he's profiting off it in the fact that you need to pay a monthly fee to access the mod.
Even if he claims he's not, he indeed is profiting off it, because there is no way you can use the mod without paying first.
> If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
The difference is that Valve would have asked for permission first from CDPR if they could sell their software, or even then, work together with CDPR to have the software be implemented natively on the game. Plus, Valve has the same stance on paid mods on Steam, so it's not really a good comparison here.
> How is it their right to make that decision?
It's their game, it's written in the EULA, which everyone accepts blindly without reading. You have accepted the EULA before playing the game.
This is the same as the Steam Subscriber Agreement saying you CANNOT make paid mods using Valve's IP unless given permission to do so.
There's nothing wrong with CDPR going after someone who thought they'd get away by making an important mod paid-only. It's a totally different story if the $10 fee was optional.
I agree, that do not(should not) have a leg to stand on here.
They might not like the fact, but the dev is selling his software, not theirs. It would be akin to MS sending a take down request to software running on windows.
I wonder how much "strength" the tos really has in this case.
The term "derivative work" covers a lot. For example all fan translations are one and all content stored on movie subtitles sites is by definition illegal. I don't know about those particular VR mods but in general case it is easy to show that game mod is not a standalone work and counts as derivative work, so game developer can limit the distribution however they want.
I think it's more a dependency and less a derivative (there isn't any source code/game objects being distributed via the mod as far as I can tell.)
I would be very interested to see how a court would rule on this, as AFAIK such as Lexmark v. Static Control Components, you can modify products you purchase, but how much weight would the TOS really hold?
It shouldn't be CDPR's right to make this decision. A mod is just software that runs on top of other software. Microsoft doesn't get to dictate what I do with Windows. Apple does try to dictate what I do with my iPhone, but even then, if I manage to jailbreak my phone there's nothing they can do about it.
CDPR's policy and the law are orthogonal things. They would have to demonstrate that the mod and its business model violates some kind of law.
Question is, as long as he's not using their assets, what leg have they to stand on and enforce this? He's selling his software, not infringing on theirs.
On the money, had not spotted how much he was making from this. Given he's been at this for several years and the quality of the product I'm quite happy he's been able to devote the time to this.
AFAIK DMCA is such a strong law that you just have to circumvent any kind of access mechanism to violate it. I’m not a lawyer.
“No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
“to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;”
I’m not sure how modding works in the case but usually this is why companies can come after folks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
> “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
This wording always bothers me. If a person were to circumvent a technological measure that tries to control such access, then the circumvention itself proves that this measure was not effective at doing what it is supposed to be doing. Therefore the person is not circumventing something that _effectively_ controls anything. They just showed that it is ineffective, and therefore the law does not apply to them.
Of course, no one who actually has to interpret these laws shares my opinion.
The meaning of effect is not what you think it is. In this case it simply means “to bring into being”, or “have the intent to”.
Modding is actually a legal minefield.
Publishers don't care because there is no money involved.
Question for people who are lawyers or lawyer adjacent: would you be able to reasonable argue against this in court, assuming you do not use any Cyberpunk assets or content directly, and instead just offer a dll mod of the game that writes memory at specific addresses and modifies code (i'm assuming that's what this mod is doing)? To me, if you're not using any of the actual game's content CDPR can't reasonably claim that you're infringing on their copyright, but ianal.
I suspect this is not a copyright issue, but rather a ToS issue.
In the 9th circuit you would have to get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v._FormGen_Inc. overruled.
There are a handful of relevant fair use cases, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin....
CDPR is a Polish company though, so how is US law relevant?
DMCA is US law, that's how.
Hmm I'd say their takedown has no value then?
Unless they have a business presence in the US and sent it from there.
They have a business presence in the US, and sent it there.
Because they invoked DMCA?
Very unclear about the reasoning behind CDPR decision. Unless he was redistributing code or assets from the game, how is this any different from any library emulation/wrapper like Wine/Proton or the multitudes of libraries like DK3D? Are they gonna sue Valve once their game works on the Steam Frame?
(I can only assume they're planning a specific version for the Frame and they fear this mod would offer a superior experience for a lower price)
Meanwhile thousands of modders make some money on nexusmods from their Cyberpunk mods. My Cyberpunk mods get me like 200 USD/month in passive income. Why is this guy getting singled out?
Difference between selling your mod rather than getting revenue from ads on the download site.
So why is the download site not being targeted?
(Not arguing that it should be, just continuing OP's logic.)
CDPR's policy is you can have a tip jar but you can't put it behind a paywall. Dude was asking $10/mo on Patreon for access. I imagine he does quite well because he has the same mod for a lot of other games.
Pretty sure he could rerelease it for free and ask for donations.
"he has the same mod" is downplaying it. He's adding VR for games with widely different engines. Same functionality yes, but vastly different codebase.
why didn't they put him on their payroll? surely they could have negotiated a proper deal?
[dead]
Today's lesson: don't paywall mods!
Like it or not, mods should be free. Unless you want that scene to turn into another shitshow, just like what happened with Youtube. The moment you open the floodgates on that, the modscene will be flooded with crap and yet another commercial-free space gets molested by the icy hand of capitalism. Financialization destroys everything it touches!
>Like it or not, mods should be free.
Why? If it's original work, and it does not violate existing laws, whoever makes it should have the right to seek compensation for their work, if they see fit. It's basically software like any other. Licensing models have been successfully applied to software plugins in past, mods fall into that category.
I'd agree that the modder should have the legal right to create a $10/month subscription mod, because I don't like copyright being so extensive as to give the game's authors control over that, but also really don't want to see such "licensing models" spread to another community that has so far remained largley uninfected.
> it does not violate existing laws,
That's an issue if you're USA-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v._FormGen_Inc.
Game mods extending video games almost inherently violate copyright as they are a derivative work.
Today's lesson: Suck it up and do what you're told.
Like it or not, you should accept that you're always at the mercy of a large corporation and you must follow their policies to the letter even if the law says something different.
I don't think that's a sane stance.
Damn, and I was just getting to love gog as the not-a-fuckwit alternative platform. guess i'll stick with steam afterall.
GOG split from CDPR just before the new year: https://www.gog.com/blog/gog-is-getting-acquired-by-its-orig...