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Skyrim Mod Team Accuses Another Mod Team of Stealing Source Code

posted by martyb on Friday March 01 2019, @06:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the Skyrim-skirmish dept.

takyon writes:

Skyrim mod drama gets ugly with allegations of stolen code and misappropriated donations

One of the more useful [The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim] mods, for developers but indirectly for players, is the Skyrim Script Extender, or SKSE. It basically allows for more complex behaviors for objects, locations and NPCs. How do you have a character seek shelter from the rain if there's no weather-based behaviors in their original AI? That sort of thing (though that's an invented example). SKSE goes back a long way and the creators provide much of the code for others to use under a free license, while declining donations themselves.

Another project is Skyrim Together (ST), a small team that since 2013 has (among others) been working on adding multiplayer functionality to the game — their Patreon account, in contrast, is pulling in more than $30,000 a month. The main dev there allegedly independently distributed a modified version of SKSE several years ago against the terms of the license, and was henceforth specifically banned from using SKSE code in the future.

Guess what SKSE's lead found in a bit of code inspection the other day?

Yes, unfortunately, it seems that SKSE code is in the ST app, not only in violation of the license as far as not giving credit, but in that the dev himself has been barred from using it, and furthermore that — although there is some debate here — the ST team is essentially charging for access to a "closed beta." Some say that it's just a donation they ask for, but requiring a donation is really indistinguishable from charging for something.

Response from Skyrim Together.

Related: Modder Fixes What Bethesda Couldn't -- Skyrim
Bethesda 'Creation Club' for Skyrim and Fallout 4: No "Paid Mods" Here!

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @05:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @05:15PM (#808792)

    SKSE goes back a long way and the creators provide much of the code for others to use under a free license, while declining donations themselves.

    A cursory inspection reveals that only the "common" and "skse64/xbyak" directories are under free licenses, representing about 15% of the code base according to sloccount. The remaining 85% is completely proprietary due to a lack of any copyright license whatsoever.

    IANAL, but the specific prohibition against the ST team applies only to these no-license files (it explicitly covers the files in the skse64/skse64 directory), and the SKSE authors probably have no basis in law to enforce this prohibition. The files already have no license, which means nobody, including the ST team can use them except as permitted by copyright law (e.g., "fair use" or similar), and a note like this won't supersede that.

    These guys might have a valid copyright infringement case against the ST team. I'm not sure what they expect this mudslinging on reddit to accomplish.