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from the I-see^w-hear-what-you-[almost]-did-there dept.
Voice-acting rights halt effort to put Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4
An ambitious modding project that sought to recreate Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4 is shutting down over unforeseen legal issues surrounding the original game's voice acting.
"The Capital Wasteland: A Road To Liberty" project was a five-person effort to implement the base content of Fallout 3 as a mod for Fallout 4, complete with the latter game's graphical and engine improvements. In a message to supporters, though, project lead NafNaf_95 writes that the mod has been shut down after a conversation with Bethesda, in which it "became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen."
That planned approach involved an audio extraction tool that would have taken the voice acting from legitimate Fallout 3 files and converted them to a form that could be used in a Fallout 4 mod. Bethesda and an outside lawyer advised the Capital Wasteland team that extracting this licensed content, which wasn't fully owned by Bethesda, would be legally questionable under copyright law and could make the modders legally liable for damages.
Apparently, having installed copies of the two games and running a utility is not good enough for Bethesda's lawyers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Friday March 16 2018, @12:34PM (3 children)
Well no, of course it isn't. If you're distributing someone else's copyrighted material, why should they care about the intent or the effectiveness of the DRM you happen to put on your own product?
The article is annoyingly vague:
I'm left to assume the modders were indeed planning on distributing the copyrighted audio. Couldn't they just perform the necessary extraction/conversion at install time? No need to distribute the copyrighted data, just take it from the pre-existing Fallout 3 installation on the user's machine. This idea has already been mentioned in the Ars comments.
Ideally they wouldn't even need to convert, they'd just have their mod play directly from the Fallout 3 files on disk.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 16 2018, @01:02PM (2 children)
Performance rights of the voice actors (see above).
TFA spells it out pretty plainly: They can re-record all the audio and get around that particular issue. But then it wouldn't be the original anymore, would it?
You make an interesting argument, but I would counter-argue that doing it the way you suggest would actually be a derivative use of the original Fallout 3 files. And remember you're talking about performance rights and not duplication rights here.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @04:05PM
Certainly it's a derivative work - but it's a derivative work created by someone who already has a legitimate copy of the original, and isn't distributed. Generally speaking you're allowed to do anything you want with a work you own EXCEPT distribute it or make a public performance - both things that receive special consideration under copyright law. You want to make a mix-tape of your favorite bands for your own use?? Go for it, as long as the DMCA hasn't been invoked by "technological protections", and you don't give anyone else a copy. Want to chop up that Sesame-street bedspread to make a jacket? Nothing they can do about it.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday March 16 2018, @04:57PM
There is another group doing a Fallout 4 New Vegas mod and I believe that is precisely what they are doing.
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