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 Pino P on Friday March 16 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)
Per your request, here is my attempt to bring AYLALTU's comment [soylentnews.org] closer to standard English:
"Good. But would Slacker News pay my legal bills if they just happened to be wrong? These bills would occur and be payable for both Bethesda and the modder, so long as a suit has any merit whatsoever. And this suit obviously would have merit, even if it is winnable."
In other words, the case isn't enough of a clear win that it can be disposed of in summary judgment. A federal judge is likely to find facts in dispute that must go to a jury trial, which is expensive, and AYLALTU wanted to know if Slacker News was willing to foot the attorney's fee and court costs for this trial.
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Friday March 16 2018, @04:24PM
As for finding facts in dispute, there would need to be sufficient and extensive evidence of differing realities. The modding team is heavily outmatched by full-time, better staffed, and more paid legal teams and their assistants. In the case of anything DMCA-related, there is little hope that a single, small team can rebuke all the mountains of evidence provided during discovery.
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