are mods protected by copyright？

@Grape_Eater

As far as I know, any work of art is implicitly copyrighted by its author, unless released under a specific liberal license. though the laws on that probably differ greatly depending on the country you live in.

In terms of mods, honestly, it's all pretty inconsequential; those mods are all free anyway. It's not like anyone will ever get sued over it, unless the used artwork belongs to a commercial game or the IP of a commercial game (as it was with some shut down Starcraft themed mod IIRC). And, when it boils down to it, as PPM user Renegade so perfectly summed up back in 2009:

---

@Renegade wrote:

You do realize this entire community is based on the fact that we collectively ignore EA's EULA and modify their content, right?

---

So, yeah. We're all grateful towards EA for realizing that modding extends games' life span and is not meant to infringe on their rights. Also, do realize all those mod assets are in proprietary file formats that are also owned by EA. Let that sink in for a moment 😉

The real issue you are wondering about, though, is asset theft. It's not a new discussion; the quote above is part of a very large discussion in 2009 on the subject of "protecting" of mix files, which basically amounts to messing up the archive's header in such a way that XCC Mixer can no longer read it but the game can. Opinions on that practice vary wildly, and even back then several people already considered the practice to be a form of DRM going completely against the open spirit of the community.

(In my opinion it's all pretty dumb. Open the file in a hex editor, or write a decent mix archive extractor that doesn't stick to XCC's rigid rules, and you can perfectly get to those files anyway. Even encrypted mix files only encrypt the file's header; the actual data is still up for grabs, if you manage to find where each file starts and ends. I personally wrote a program once to fix such "protected" mix files, purely as personal programming challenge and to better get to know the internals of the mix format.)

All that aside, the main factor in asset theft is the community. It's a self-regulating organism. If you use assets from a popular mod, people will recognize these assets for what they are right away, and if the creators of those assets are known to have policies against having their assets used, and you didn't get explicit permission from them, you will probably end up getting labelled an "asset thief", and people will stop taking your projects seriously. So unless the assets were posted publicly with the intent of being freely used in mods (though these assets still usually ask for attribution in the mod readme), the safest bet is to ask permission from the creator when you want to use their assets.

TL;DR: copyrights aside, don't use mod assets without permission or the player base will roast you.

Well, as a member of the modding community since 2005/ joined ppm in 2009 I certainly know how the community rules work. Being the community rule protector in Chinese community I actually need EA official opinion - so I can have more confidence defending decent mods like MO from unwanted hands. Simple banning/deleting would cause much unnecessary quarrel and flame wars.

@Grape_Eater

As I said, the very assets you're trying to protect should probably technically not even exist in the proprietary SHP / voxel formats they are in... I doubt there's even a basis for real copyright discussions here.

And, honestly, I doubt EA cares what mod makers do beyond the scope of "they're violating our EULA but we're allowing it for the sake of the fan base." All the rest is internal squabbles, as my linked topic from 2009 shows quite clearly. It's already in rule-broken territory; I don't think anything legal can help you there.

@Grape_Eater

The EA people here are community managers and tech support people, though... I doubt they can give legal advice on such matters.