Your suggestion of a lawsuit is laughable. This is a school playground, not the real world.
Oh, yes, that's why mods get foxed all the time. Because the internet isn't real, and software piracy is childsplay. Crimes can't happen on the interweb!
*sigh* Silliness aside, a number of the posters on that forum are being 12 year old wankers. Which, admittedly, is only any different from the flamers from THIS board by their apparent maturity.
This is a legal situation, which means flaming is bad, m'kay?
Now, while my legalese is a tad rusty, I DO know that anything with a copyright by default extends to the entirety of the product. For those who may be easily confused here, a TRADEMARK registers a name, title, or effigy, whereas a COPYRIGHT states simply that the item in question, or any part thereof, canNOT be legally distributed without the legal consent of whomever holds said copyright.
Granted, the Wirehead team may not have made the copyright statements as obvious as is apparently necessary for some people. However, ignorance does NOT excuse you from comitting a crime. And yes, copyright infringement IS a crime. One of the reasons Wirehead is so pissy about the legality is because they tread a VERY fine line here. The mod is legal only so long as all material for the mod, excluding what was already included in quake 3, is created specifically for the mod.
We don't rip, we don't take credit where none is due, and we ALWAYS request permission to distribute anything that we did not create.
Mappers, or those who create individual replacement models, write copyright statements for anything they release. This is the nature of the beast. Maps are self-enclosed entities, whereas a mod itself is not. A mod is the sum of it's parts. I'm sure most mappers would LOVE to not have to deal with the statements involving "let me know if you want to use my map for something." But it's the wankers who'll rip a map apart and then claim credit for it that force them to do so.
In the end, the members of Wirehead Studios are being VERY lenient in this matter. We're trying to be civil and, the flamers from these boards and the other aside, resolve this incident relatively peacefully. Legally, ripping copyrighted material is a legally punishable offense, read: crime, and those who use and distribute the media are aiding a technical criminal. That means this isn't just Creed, this is everyone hosting, and using the files that have been ripped. The second Creed uploaded his modified files, he broke the law. The second you completed downloading the files, YOU broke the law. I'll let Lee do the real ranting, but this isn't a joke. And we don't treat it as such.
