Pretty much spot on. The community is evolving and it's become easier to mod as well as there being a larger amount of users exposed to it. People won't always agree with someone's ideas or additions to mods (using Arthmoor's Oblivion gates in Open Cities or the chest/book/companion additions to WATER awhile back as examples) and given there are legal, acknowledged ways to make modifications without consent it's going to become more of an issue if modders don't want people removing or changing things through patches/esp mastering and something like a modder's version of the GPL is going to have to be drafted and used.

Courtesy is a nice thing, but if someone's stubborn and refuses to change or allow you to make a change and there's a legal way to do what you want to fix their program/mod/resources/what have you, there's no reason not to outside of others possibly seeing it as rude. Don't forget though that this could cause problems in the long run like in the example from earlier where a modder disappeared and if whomever it was that wanted to fix the bugs couldn't get into contact with them and it was under a license disallowing any sort of modification under any means (if that's feasible) then it'll just have to be shelved and hopefully someone will make a new mod with the same ideas and purpose on their own.

I don't know if we need to start handing out fliers or anything; the point of this whole exercise was just to get people to talk about something that I don't think we've ever really had to deal with before (runtime modification). This discussion probably won't ever apply to 90% of authors or 99% of users, but academically I thought it would be interesting to talk about. I know Dark0ne has been watching the thread pretty closely, as well as his own thread, so at least he's well-informed of our discussion.

I think the farthest I think we've come is that targeted runtime modification is of questionable legality (there seems to be evidence both for and against outright illegality). It is of course strongly frowned upon unless permission is sought and obtained.

Also, almost 300 posts in the last 5 hours about a rights discussion and we haven't gotten locked. I think that's an achievement all by itself.

I just found out today, so.. Don't feel bad. Down a ways in here -> http://wryemusings.com/Cathedral%20vs.%20Parlor.html

@Gram; The RiffTrax and Apple jailbreaking cases imply legality. Those are what I've been confused on, too. I think you are right on with the guesses. Some things like that I think should just remain as personal mods if the case came down to it.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tlavian/publications/article/Berkeley_Law_Journal_softwarecombinations060403.pdf

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10948823384535046136&q=Micro+Star+v.+Formgen,&hl=en&as_sdt=2,36&as_vis=1

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10867856245078964488&q=Micro+Star+v.+Formgen,&hl=en&as_sdt=2,36&as_vis=1

The Game Genie case and any cases based on it are as close as we're going to get to an answer. And by answer, I don't mean someone's BS interpretation of the derivative works clause on this forum. I'll quote MicroStar v Formgen as calling it "hopelessly overbroad". I'm going to refrain from any opinion myself. This is giving me a tremendous stomachache.

Edit:
In case anybody isn't familiar with Game Genie, it was coded to modify specific games in runtime.