"The rule is you cannot have a written licence or copyright claim if you want to promote or distribute your Mod on this forum or Steam Workshop."
Not offering a license means 'all rights reserved'. It still, years later, beggars belief that these rules don't reflect this most basic of legal concepts.
Quote gov.uk (bold emphasis mine):
You automatically get copyright protection when you create:
- original non-literary written work, eg software, web content and databases
A copyright claim is a specific form of action; an enforcement of copyright protection. It is not a copyright disclaimer, which don't have any legal basis anyway (i.e. writing 'all rights reserved' on things doesn't have any legal weight). A 'credit' is legally meaningless too. I can't believe any lawyer would write something so fundamentally wrong like this unless they'd never worked copyright before.
I stopped modding EU4 because of this hilariously broken policy and I'm sad to see it's still in force. It's hard to follow rules that contradict the law, and I don't see how anyone can produce quality work when there is so much legal uncertainty, esp. in an age where retailers want to sell mods and don't comprehend why modders would want to protect their work from other people profiting off it.
It's hard enough even when you have good, sensible open source licenses to ensure any derivative works contribute back to the community and the project; almost all the mods I've written over the past decade+ have been abused at some point or another, usually people taking the open-source code and trying to create their own derivative, closed-source, versions that don't contribute back to the community at large. This is not good for anyone except the people doing the (illegal) theft. Paradox are the only company who games I've modded for (of dozens) who seem to actively want this to occur.
I guess I'll check back in a further 6 months to see if this policy has been improved and, if not, I'll probably just write off Paradox products as realistically no longer worth modding.
As for not having legal discussions in this thread... I tried having them with the legal team. They didn't discuss it, they just dismissed it as "accept it or get the hell out". So I did the latter. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth... I'd been modding Paradox games for many years with my own licenses. I'd rather resolve it, but if Paradox really do not want this resolved then there's nothing I, or anyone else in my position, can do.
I stepped away for 6 months partly to see if
I might change my mind, but nothing has changed except the industry (specifically, Steam) has demonstrated why it is even more imperative that modders can enforce protections on their work to insure against other people abusing the works by adding monetisation and publisher grabbing rights in to the mix. I'm more convinced than ever that it's not worth spending hundreds of hours on high-quality content if the net result is that other people will take it and produce lower quality content from it, or expect the right to hide it behind closed-source for personal gain, when there's so many other games out there (i.e. almost all games that offer modding) that won't artificially and intentionally encourage those risks for modders.
