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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @12:45PM (4 children)
> From TFS, it sounds like they were planning on extracting the audio themselves and distributing it.
I didn't get that impression. They mention an "audio extraction tool", which would imply that you'd need to use the tool to extract data from the original game files by yourself. That redistributing art assets is illegal is well-known in the modding circles, so any large and/or ambitious projects are unlikely to do it.
There are numerous examples of other modding projects as well as open-source remakes that reuse assets from copyrighted works, but most of them require you to provide the original (or pirated, of course) data yourself. For example, early versions of OpenTTD required the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe disc.
So what's the problem in this case? My hunch is that the lawyers are asserting that the encoding used for Fallout 3 audio data counts as "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work", which would mean that it runs afoul of the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. [wikipedia.org] If so, unless there is a specific exemption by the Library of Congress, extracting the data is illegal, even for private use. Distribution of tools intended for circumvention is illegal as well, which would mean that the modders can be held criminally liable if they provide you with the extraction tools... which could easily result in one of those infamous trillions-of-dollars-in-damages lawsuits, plus decades in prison.
Since Bethesda doesn't fully own the rights to the audio, it can't even give a "do what you want" license. They're usually very friendly to modders -- Bethesda games tend to be more like modding engines that actual games -- so I'd like to think that they would give the permission if they could. A third party, especially a "legacy media" one, is very unlikely to do the same.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 16 2018, @01:09PM (2 children)
Also quite possible. Barring DMCA issues though and given the assumption that the user is the one doing the extraction, there shouldn't be any copyright issues for the modders themselves. I assume one of the above is the problem though or, as you said, Bethesda likely wouldn't have had issue with it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday March 16 2018, @03:51PM (1 child)
In the present legislative climate, how would one go about "barring DMCA issues"?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:12AM
"Barring DMCA issues" = "should DMCA issues not be relevant"
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:03PM
That was one possibility that I thought, but it depends on whether or not there's an "effective technological prevention measure". If the files are just in a zip file or just sitting on your hard drive, then there's not really a technological prevention measure.