Not sure if I should remove my mods from Steam. It just seems that there is no moderation there at all. I reported this mod... http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=41084497&searchtext=Killable weeks ago and the mod is still there! WTF! Isn't this mod a complete violation of Bethesda's policies on child killing!

Now I hear that modder's rights are being violated and that it is okay to completely ignore what a modder states in their mod usage. Files that have been uploaded in complete violation of the modder's usage statements and when the modder protests they are told they have no leg to stand on.
Mods are being stolen from Nexus and reuploaded under the thief's name, with full credit for all the work being given to the thief.....

I would have thought that Bethesda would be the first to support the rights of any modder. Surely they understand that these modders are investing hours/days/months of their own time unpaid to make these mods and are sharing them freely soley for the benefit of others.

As a modder I want to ensure that I am uploading my hard work to a site that will ensure that at the least my wishes regarding my work are adhered too....is that too much to ask? After all, I invested so much valuable time and effort into making it.

I have been uploading mods since Morrowind, now I am worried that if I upload exclusively to Nexus, it will be stolen and put on Steam. If I upload to Steam my rights regarding my hard work are worth nothing....

Either way SW doesnt seem to care whether it is stolen or violating your wishes, so untill they change they ways your going to have to accept that your mod may be either ripped off or abused. You can report that the work has been stolen though and i have seen mods pulled for that. so they do atleast keep that in check but they dont scan for it.

Also i dont think Beth has much say in anything that happens on Valve's site.

Well, it is OK, if that statement is unreasonable. And I cannot think it is reasonable to say that no one may create a completely new mod that merely requires your own.

The CK EULA is also quite clear that modders waive their moral rights over their mods: "You also waive and agree never to assert against Bethesda Softworks or its affiliates, distributors or licensors any moral rights or similar rights, however designated, that You may have in or to any of the New Materials. If You commit any breach of this Agreement, Your right to use the Editor under this Agreement shall automatically terminate, without notice."

I've been told by other forum goers that only Nick and Gstaff can admin the SW. That leaves 2 men to do the job that at least 10 people should be doing.

I think we should petition for them to get moderators, much like they do here on the forum. That way trusted people could manage the SW and get rid of mods that break rules, and preserve the rights of modders.

As of right now the SW seems to be an errant mess.

That just means we can't sue them over this. We can still ask to have our rights preserved. Like getting moderators. We just can't take legal action.

They can also tell us what we can and can't do with our mods. They have done so in the past.

Well I've arrived at the conclusion that the Workshop is not a fitting environment for modders to display their work. Self entitled brats will steal it, call it their own, and then laugh at you when you complain about it.

They believe themselves to be above the standards our community has operated under for 12 years now and are waging a literal war in order to change that. The problem is, the people doing this are all generally from a web community that has openly supported software piracy for paid commercial titles, so getting them to see what they're doing is both legally and morally wrong will never work. Valve and Bethesda simply don't understand what they're dealing with.

Might as well cut your losses, save yourself the hassle. Don't bother with the Workshop. I say this as someone who had been generally supportive of it from the beginning, but Bethesda's decision to allow unauthorized derivative works to be posted there was the breaking point.

Never used the steam community for downloading or uploading mods. Never will not unless I see big changes in the way it's managed

On that note, did we ever find a way to ensure that the user had a legal copy of Skyrim to use your mod?

I'd absolutely love to make Falskaar legal-copy accessable only. See those pirates squirm when they can't play! Can it be done, though?

It's impossible someone will always find a way around no matter what you do.

If you're worried that your mods will be ripped off if they are Nexus exclusive, then definitely don't put them on Steam. If the Steam Workshop contains a high ratio of stolen to genuine mods, it's more likely something will be done about it (probably just closing down rather than fixing, to be honest, it's cheaper.)

There has to be some way. Whether or not you would want to do that is another question. If you included an installer for the mod that doesn't unpack the data without first crc checking a few files, that'd do it I think...

edit: Hmmm... I believe "there has to be some way" because I believe everything is possible on a machine that runs, at its core, on 1's and 0's. OF course, by that standard, as someone else pointed out, someone will be able to figure a way around THAT.

So.

That will guarantee that most/many will never use the mod.

Sure, they might eventually... but why make it easy for them? I figure most people wanting a pirated version won't worry about it working with Falskaar immediately, so when they decide that they might, it'll be all the more effort for them.
In a similar thread, I was amused/horrified by gamesas.com (i think it was) copying this forum and pretending it was written by their own (clearly fake) members. In the thread that I saw, there were references to things that made it clear it was a copied thread (such as quoting martigen, who isn't a member of their forum ) and I couldn't help but wonder if there were similar ways we could make mods "owned" (such as hide your initials in unused vertices of a model, or in the name of some random scripts), so that we can say "look, this is mine". But then I realised I was thinking up DRM type stuff, and decided 1: I don't want to go down that route, and 2: that's precisely what pirates are most experienced at breaking.


Would be amusing to code in some bugs, that would require an update/fix at predetermined times in the future, to stop them corrupting saves... but considering people still don't know how to use BOSS, it wouldn't be worth it.

People would find away around it but would the people that make the cracks needed to install pirate games, be bothered to crack user made mods?

A lot of the people that download pirated games have no knowledge of programming or making the cracks needed so if they came across a mod that somehow needed it be cracked in the same way the vanilla game did, they would give it a miss.

Low hanging fruit will be deterred by including Update.esm as a necessary master. Most pirate copies don't include it, and can't, because it would require them to spend the time decrypting the files again to allow it. One good thing about pirates is that they're often lazy