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However, I hope that everyone realizes that Carbonite has a copyright, and Rythal breached said copyright?
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Carbonite was developed as a money-generating-enterprise, not as part of the mod community. When Blizzard banned fee-to-use mods and encrypting the Lua (as Carbonite did), they switched to a donation model. Their rebuke of Rythal is not surprising, given their low feelings of the community of modders and users but it does display a unique lack of understanding, both of the relationship between mod authors and mod users, and the community on these forums as well.
If you want to argue copyright infringement, show me the damages that the Carbonite folks incurred. Rythal's work
maintained users of Carbonite for the dickish and ungrateful authors who don't even have the courtesy to keep tabs on the forum enough to update the users of the mod, let alone truly maintain the project. The authors of Carbonite received a net
benefit from Rythal's
unpaid, uncompensated work.
I've had my mods 'fan updated' before and those fans have operated as Rythal did: keeping the mod updated for the users while I get my act together and providing me their updates free of copyright. That isn't any degree of "infringement;" rather, it is how a mod community should work. Users are happy; mod author is happy (unless they're simply jerks). Numerous mods have been 'fan updated' and those updates disappear when the mod author re-appears and I can't recall ever seeing such a display of asshattery on the part of a mod author. Rythal even went the extra mile -- and went an extra mile beyond that -- to assert the copyright of the Carbonite authors in his patch.
I understand the need to assert copyright in order to retain it but a
polite email is all that is required. The Carbonite authors bring to mind the image of a person who drops something and walks away. When someone meekly picks it up and brings it over to them, they snatch it back and accuse them of being a thief. Rythal meekly picked up the ball the Carbonite asshats, er, authors let drop hard, and he got spit on for his trouble.
I am abandoning Carbonite at this point. I'm perfectly happy for mod authors to make money from their work; I'm not happy supporting the feckless jerks who run carboniteaddon.com.