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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: 2) by ilsa on Friday March 16 2018, @02:45PM (5 children)
Given the number of wacky copyright issues that are in the news on a continual basis, one would have thought that the very first thing these people did was consult with lawyers (particularly Bethesdas) about the asset copyrights before then even sat down and wrote their first line of code.
And contrary to the ignorant sarcasm in the summary, it's *not* just about having both games purchased and installed on the same machine. Distribution rights are a thing. If the voice actors have contracts that explicitly stipulate that their contribution was only usable in Fallout 3, then Bethesda would be obligated to drop a legal hammer on these people.
Just because you have good intentions doesn't exempt you from having to deal with harsh realities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mobydisk on Friday March 16 2018, @03:21PM
But it is only being used in Fallout 3. It's just Fallout 3 running in a different engine. It's not like they took voice lines from Fallout 3 and re-used them in another game, or in Fallout 4. This is more like changing the record player that is being used to play the voice, not using it in a different work.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:26PM
Since they had Liam Neeson and others in it.
Honestly though, compared to Morrowind, I don't see Fallout 3 as being good enough for a Recreation unless they were redoing the map as well. I stopped playing it after trying to find my way to the congress building, finding a glitch in the geometry that allowed me to jump through and then finding out like 1/8-1/4 of the map was 'dead space' behind a row of buildings near the BoS headquarters (The Pentagon building, also not to scale.)
While it was graphically a revolutionary Fallout game for its time, it really didn't age well, and compared to other bethesda offerings it was rather tepid all things considered. I had more fun with the FO3 Village Mod+Disguise Mod (The former of which was the inspiration for all the crazy FO4 base building.) Between those two I actually felt like there was some life in the wastelands and my character could actually make a difference outside of tightly scripted events (I spent a great deal of time collecting NPCs from the wasteland to 'save' with my ever expanding town. The enemies randomly spawning inside your base during raids? Those were in the original mod as well as FO4 :) Kind of makes you wonder if Bethesda just copied the modders logic, doesn't it?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 16 2018, @03:48PM
Shouldn't that apply to virtually any mod, then? At what point do you cross a modding line when you're effectively making a derivative product of the original work?
Very nice rest of your comment, BTW. You said it a whole lot better than I did.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @04:15PM
> Distribution rights are a thing.
Very true - but where's the distribution? If the modders were planning to extract and distribute audio files, then yes, that's definitely a problem. But if they were planning to distribute an extraction and conversion tool, then there is no distribution involved.
(Score: 1) by Provocateur on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:22AM
Maybe inevitable? Just watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx_cOTkrSyU [youtube.com]