Good evening!

I need to get some clarification on licensing terms as I begin Skyrim modding. I happen to be an IT professional in the real world, so I am very concerned that I respect Bethesda's intellectual property as I would want my own to be respected.

Here is my situation: My wife and I both play Oblivion and Skyrim on a fairly high-end tower PC (and we also have Oblivion on PS3, but that's not directly relevant to modding). I do my modding on a laptop so that I can work on mods while traveling on business, and to keep our "development" and "production" environments separate.

With Oblivion, this situation was simple enough to manage. I purchased two copies of the PC version of Oblivion, installed one on each machine, and am fully legal.

For Skyrim, I have it installed only on the tower right now, and I ordered a second copy today so I can legally install it on my laptop.

My first question is, how do I manage the Steam registration of this second copy? Can my one Steam account support registering multiple copies of Skyrim with different serial numbers? If so, how do I arrange this? I'll create a second Steam account if I must, but I really don't want multiple accounts.

Secondly, let's assume that my wife would like her own Steam identity on the tower machine, and/or that I want to install a test environment in a separate user account under Windows 7 so I can final-test mods on a more powerful machine without making a mess of my own (or my wife's) leisure gaming. I have no problem with buying whatever number of copies I need, in order to be legal, but I am not sure how many I need or how to configure them.

Third, I have some custom Blender models and textures that I created for Oblivion. Can I legally bring those forward to reuse them in Skyrim? I have some models that are entirely original (that is, from-scratch mesh and texture), which I'm confident I can legally use as I wish since they were built in Blender and GIMP and not in Bethesda's tools or formats. But what about models that use my original mesh but have Bethesda textures? If I retexture them to use Skyrim textures, am I still okay legally? What about models that are modified versions of Bethesda meshes, using Bethesda textures (such as some customized dungeon tiles I've made)? In this last case, I certainly acknowledge Bethesda as the owner of the model, but I'd like to know if it's okay to move it from one Bethesda game to the next since that would be Bethesda-to-Bethesda copying.

In short, it would be very helpful if there were a licensing FAQ that addresses questions of this type for modders or multi-computer households, for those of us who are committed to non-piracy but confused about how the game and CK EULAs apply to situations other than one computer, one person, and one installed environment per system.

If this info is already online, I apologize for the wasted bandwidth and would appreciate a link pointer. I did search the forums, but didn't have any luck finding what I needed.

Thanks for any information that you can provide.

Syscrusher

I think I can answer one question, at least-- any custom created content you can reuse as you wish, since you are the creator. Anything that relies on other content (editted assets of previous games, etc) can not be used.

So, your from-scratch models? They be good.

Isn't one of the "advantages" of Steam that you're able to install, legally, on as many PCs as you like? You and your wife wouldn't be able to play the game at the same time, but that does make me wonder if you could load the CK while she's playing the game.

You might just be better off PM'ing GStaff and asking for an official response though.

Now, since you did already buy that second copy, just have her make an account and you're all good, then you can both play whenever.

@Arthmoor: I didn't see anything in the EULA or the Steam registration process suggesting I could install more than one copy; if so, that's nice to know. In my situation, I still would want the second copy because there are times when we might both want to play at the same time. For instance, if I'm on a business trip and she's at home, I could play on my laptop and she could play on the tower system. So it's not a wasted copy. If you're correct about the Steam multi-install situation, that just gives me some additional flexibility.

I thought about PMing GStaff but decided they were probably buried under a million tons of PMs right now, so I thought I'd post a regular forum topic and let them step in when they have time. My thinking was (also) that there's a good chance someone else in the community already asked these questions and could quote an official response, but I just hadn't been able to find it with search. It turns out that this topic is a fairly challenging search engine situation because it overlaps so many keywords that have tons of hits.

Since Steam is being used for the DRM - you can install the one game on several machines since it requires you to connect to your steam account in order to launch the game so you can not be using it on 2 seperate machines at once ( IIRC it will only allow you to set one machine into Offline mode at a time also so that if you were traveling with the laptop in offline mode then the desktop at home would not be able to login to the account - but I'm not sure on this!)

In your case since you both may want to use the game at the same time then yes you are better off getting the second copy of the game and registering the second copy under her name (so you each have separate licenses and would log on to different Steam accounts so one of you would not keep the other from logging into the game. -- You may also want to install a separate copy of the game to different folders on the desktop and use a different User account in order to keep the save game files and mod lists separate as well (since you and her may want to have different mods installed and different Saves that the other does not overwrite !!)

Thanks JDFan; that's very helpful information. I am completely new to Steam, and didn't know how this worked.

It appears, from what we've seen so far with the one shared copy, that the list of available mods is common across all users (which makes sense, since that is determined by the physical presence of files in the Data directory), but that each user can independently enable and disable mods in their game options. So far, that's worked okay for us, but I agree that separate copies would be desirable. When the second copy arrives tomorrow or Friday, I may go ahead and reinstall (backing up our data first) the way you suggest.

Update: I've mostly resolved the situation. I found an article on the Steam support forums that told how to move an existing installation. Initially, my plan was to do as JDfan suggested, put her copy in one folder and mine in another (each of us with a copy in our own user directory). This didn't quite work, but I came up with a backup plan.

Moving the existing installation, which is registered to me, into my user directory worked flawlessly, just like the Steam forum post said. Unfortunately, when I tried to install a second copy of Steam into my wife's user directory, the Steam installer refused to do it. The only options it offered were to uninstall Steam or to "repair" it, and the dialog box specifically mentioned updating the registry settings. I figured that would bork *my* installation, so I aborted out.

What I finally did was to move Steam back to the \Program Files\Steam directory, then I inserted the new DVD of Skyrim I bought for my wife. I ran its installation process to "repair" the installation. All it did, which took only a minute or so, was to ask me for the serial number again. I entered my wife's serial number, and connected the game to her newly-created Steam account. Now the "gaming" system, both our user accounts, are tied to my wife's Steam account. Our achievements are still intermingled, but neither of us cares a whit about that.

This freed up the serial number already registered to me, so I will now install *my* copy onto my laptop for modding and for playing when I travel.

As I said, the situation is not ideal, but it's workable. I really dislike the registry in Windows -- absent that, more software could be safely multi-installed per user rather than per machine. {sigh}

Thanks again to those who posted here. Some of the IP issues are still open questions, but at least the operational modding vs. playing issue is solved. I've got two copies available, and I'm legal.

Why don't you use your account both on your desktop and laptop? Steam allows it. There's no need for you two have two keys for yourself.

For the texture issue, you can just have your model use the texture already included with the copy of the game, there is no need to make a duplicate. Customizing the models will most likely qualify as a derivative work. A precedent would be the "No More Blocky Faces" mod which took the Bethesda normal map and modified it to remove the blockiness.

The goal is to have my wife be able to play on the desktop machine while I am using the laptop for modding. I could manually switch Steam from one user to the other on the desktop when we login/logout, but we just don't care about the whole "achievements" tracking thing, so if our records are intermingled, no big deal. It's not worth the effort of having to switch Steam every time we login as a different user in Windows. I tried to install Steam individually in each user account's home directory, but it wouldn't let me do that.

My models do use the Bethesda textures where applicable; I didn't duplicate them. Of course, any of my own textures I can do with as I please. The textures at issue are those that exist in Oblivion, such as the Ayleid tile textures, that do not exist in Skyrim. So basically what I'm asking is, can a derivative work of one Bethesda game be used in another Bethesda game?

It occurs to me that another option could be to ship my model with missing textures and tell the downloaders they need to copy in the needed files from their own personal copy of Oblivion.

No, you cannot use resources from any other game, including previous Bethesda games.

The second option could work, however as textures are in a BSA it would be a pain in the [censored] for users.