So take two decided for some obscure reason decided to shutdown the OpenIV project a tool that allows modification of GTAV Single player
Their cease and desist which was according to the OpenIV team "illiterate both technically and grammatically." seemed to be assuming that the tool was responsible for GTA Online cheats. Which is odd because OpenIV by design doesn't modify the online part of the game if you try and load it with OpenIV running it shuts down it doesn't use any of the game code and even when so far as to use clean room reverse engineering to code sections that interface with the game. I looked into this a while back as some of the mods allow much more sophisticated control for making machinima over the rockstar director and it maintains a very careful firewall between the game and it's own code separate launch separate directories it doesn't modify the game files directly it goes out of its way to stay in the single player portion.
Legally speaking Mods are somewhat of a grey area fair use probably allows for them but it's never been conclusively tested in a court so there is no existing case law and so far no one wants to die on that hill fighting a corporation with big money and big lawyers for a mod where it's likely best case even winning would financially ruin them. And this is what happens here the makers of OpenIV have pulled it from the website and advised people to uninstall it
So this basically just shuts down singleplayer mods but does nothing to prevent the huge number of abuses that happen in the online mode.
Jim sterling has a piece on it and describes the rational akin to someone during a zombie outbreak deciding to shoot all the people that hadn't been bitten.
It's a sorry state of affairs that this group who have gone out of their way to do the right thing and worked on this for over 10 years are suddenly now taken down by the publisher (the dev rockstar north active support mods and have even featured OpenIV mods on their own public company blog) using a legal team that can't even be bothered to proof read their own cease and desist.
Comments
I've saved that vid for later. I looked at OpenIV's mod tools for machima too when I was putting together the clips for my vid. They certainly looked comprehensive! I think I landed on the Rockstar blog at one point, actually. R* in the past have said that they enjoy seeing what people do with mods. Particularly in GTAIV which put in real vehicles and updated the graphics for PCs with more poke than consoles.
Sadly I don't think this will have much effect on T2. They will continue this sort of draconian bullshit because no-one is going to want to fight a company filled with expensive lawyers in court, even if there is a case for fair use.
Yeah it's the issue with this and things like let's plays on the youtubs it's a grey area probably legal under fair use but so far no one has wanted to challenge it so people like nintendo can copyright strike anything that uses their game play and T2 can take down useful modding tools
There was some weak sauce statement from Rockstar saying they did this to prevent online hacking with the tool which seems a bullshit explanation. Even if it were true they've only driven it underground rather than fix the issue it's not like hackers can't get access to dodgy stuff and it seemed the openIV team were really doing their best to make the tool as strictly the right and good way to do modding as possible. But rather than work with them to fix any back doors there might be they've just had their team of barely literate legal people fire off a cease and desist.
Sounds like Rockstar stepped in and made take 2 back off of single player mods from now on they're going to focus their lawyering on the multiplayer only stuff and will also rockstar be working with OpenIV to close any holes where it could harm the multiplayer
which is the way they should have gone about this from the start but still nice to see this turned around.
Rockstar reported said: