Hello fellow modders, moderators and admins!
I have read the community pulse from October a few days ago.
That discussion was very interesting, and I recommend everyone to go have a read.
Anyway, today I wanted to ask you about copyright and licensing on mods that we develop in FiveM and RedM.
I have read on the Creators agreement that we accept to grant Cfx an unlimited, royalty free license to do whatever they please with our mods; [spoiler: but we don’t gain anything more in return for this.]
I know that a license does not equal copyright, so those of us who care for copyright can still keep that; but this also means that whatever license we choose for our releases, Cfx can ignore it and do whatever they please with it, while the rest of the community will have to follow the license of the release?
TLDR: we retain authorship of our releases, via our copyright, but we neglect all of our potential licensing rights, by agreeing to grant unlimited license to Cfx to do whatever they please with our releases?
In other words, the license we choose for our works will only be applied to the users of our releases, and will not apply at all to Cfx?
Thank you all for your patience and attention! Have s great day
This is a part of many licenses regarding games that support modding officially and where certain services are provided.
Probably the most important example as to why this is necessary:
The keymaster service is provided by Cfx. It allows distribution of assets to users. However this part of the license ensures that this is allowed to happen in the first place.
They literally need the right to copy and distribute the asset so this service can do its thing.
Tebex has a similar thing: You are giving them a license so they are allowed to sell the asset in your name and you can get the royalties of those sales. You are not selling those assets yourself. You just provide the asset and get money in return.
And while this leaves room for abuse, this is always just an issue of trust. You trust them not to do something stupid with your original code and they trust you to not abuse their service in any way.
These are two entirely different licenses. One is a contract between you and Cfx and the other one is a contract between you and your customers/users.
Thank you Kiminaze!
That was stated in the Creators agreement, indeed. No doubts that they needed the rights at least for distribution.
In regards to trust, what has been the past track record?
They have chosen to delete an important channel from the community without giving any official reason…
Doesn’t sound very reliable…
EDIT: I’m re-reading the Creators agreement… I will post a more comprehensive question to try and clear up any doubts.
Here I am… I’ve updated the title to reflect the additional questions that have risen after re-re-reading the Creators PLA. The two additional topics being: monetization and exploitation of our works.
The TL;DR is:
from section “commercial exploitation” (today it’s 4.4 in the doc) we can monetize, as long as:
it’s not related to lootboxes, virtual currencies, crypto currencies, nor NFT;
our custom server is not operated by a third party, nor as part of a promotion, sponsorship or endorsement of a third party
as of today, nothing else, but Cfx reserves the right edit the chapter with new scenarios
from section “rights to UGC” (today it’s 5.3) we give Cfx and Rockstar Games an unlimited and royalty free license to do whatever they want with our works through “Creator Services” and “Online Services”.
“Creator Services” = FiveM and RedM, as a service that the company kindly offers
“Online Services” = any product made by Rockstar, as we can read in the definition of Online Services given in the Rockstar TOS document
Please correct me if I read it wrong, it’s important to be on the same page with legal docs.
So, if the above is correct…
…this means Rockstar can put our works in, say, GTA 6, GTA 7, etc., completely free of charge, because we have accepted a license agreement with them that says so.
Imagine you do something nice and can monetize on it. Now Rockstar can take it away and monetize it themselves.
I see FiveM and RedM more as a sandbox now, where one can experiment with a game engine meanwhile it’s available for free.
The incentive in doing something in FiveM and RedM is, in my case, personal taste, that is, liking the GTA series. On the other hand, it is out-weighted by the granting of an unlimited and royalty free license that doesn’t sound fair, to me… My 2 cents.
I have heard that story so many times already but I have to be honest here:
What was that channel even about? I only ever read the news in their server or status messages, things like that.
It might just be that I never had the urge to need it in the first place, but I simpy don’t know. But that also means that I don’t see a “breach of trust” here.
I’ve personally never seen any direct negatives here. Only one thing that kind of annoys me is the lack of transparency regarding certain aspects which might be due to delays in support requests etc (mainly talking about copyright issues regarding servers).
You are correct, they could do that.
I’ve looked at your profile and you haven’t released anything in the release category yet, so I’ll only talk about my own assets.
While I feel like the quality of my assets is already really high, I do not see any reason as to why R* would put my resources into their products in any way, shape or form. The idea behind my scripts? Maybe. But copying code? Never.
As a company you have certain quality standards to fulfill towards your customers/players. And if I look at my script AdvancedParking which can save hundreds, if not thousands of vehicles on the map and respawn them whenever someone gets close: This works for community servers. This does not work for a finished game. It would be way too much data that’s needed to be saved to be viable at all. You can see it in GTA:O where the game only allows one private vehicle outside at any given time. Or just the miniscule amount of NPC vehicles driving around (talking about model variety) to ensure high performance.
Even looking at other major resources by other creators I still feel the same about it. Why would they incorporate NUIs in their game? That completely takes away from the aesthetics of the GTA series.
3D models? Maybe. But even then most of them are converted assets from other games and are not even supposed to be shared (or even sold) and they simply cannot use those anyways. For the few others with original ideas and assets that would be a risk to take (at least I would take it if I could 3D model properly).
I remember in the game Space Engineers (huge modding community in the Steam workshop) there was a huge outcry at some point because of exactly this.
The devs of the game took a beloved model from a modder and put it into the game. However that modder was asked if they could take it and he said yes. They could have just taken it and called it a day (similar license where they can use any UGC). But they literally asked him beforehand.
And even then they basically remodeled it from scratch since it wasn’t on par with their modeling standards at that point and it kinda didn’t fit the aesthetics of the game.
It was a cool place where to ask for help and to give help: it was the official fivem Discord channel, in the fivem category. It’s unheard of that a community gets channels like those, erased like that.
What’s done is done…
On the rest, I find it all clear, thanks again Kiminaze!
