Bioware Release Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset

Max writes "Bioware, the company who have been working on Neverwinter Nights for many years, have recently released a beta version of the NWN toolset for all to download. The toolset is a brilliant feature of NWN, as it allows players to create and script their own custom made adventures. This beta version is limited, but designed to give players an insight in to the massive customisation available in the game. The file itself is 241mb and can be downloaded from Bioware " Update: 05/19 04:10 GMT by M : Zed Pobre submitted an important note concerning the EULA of this toolset, appended below. Update: 05/19 14:16 GMT by M : Derek French of Bioware has a response below. I respectfully disagree with him; I've just read the SDK EULA's for Starcraft and Half-life, and neither of these would permit the company to redistribute your mods for their commercial gain, while Bioware's would. Update: 05/20 05:16 GMT by M : Bioware is going to take another look at the EULA.

Zed Pobre writes "Careful review of the EULA of the Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset reveals the following clause:

• Section 4(b):

  "By distributing or permitting the distribution of any of your Modules, you hereby grant back to INFOGRAMES and BIOWARE an irrevocable royalty-free right to use and distribute them by any means. Infogrames or BIOWARE may at any time and in its sole discretion revoke your right to make your Modules publicly available."

This is more or less the same as if a company producing a compiler wrote into the EULA that by distributing any program compiled with that compiler, the company would permanently get the rights to do whatever they wanted with that program, including reselling it for profit and then forbidding you to publish it yourself.

Derek French, the Assistant Producer for Bioware, confirmed that this section of the EULA is not going to change for the final release. Although he noted in the same message that similar clauses have been used by other companies providing tools for users to create their own content, NWN has a much greater scope than any of them by far, and it's now a profoundly bad idea for someone who wants to keep control of their writing, characters, or game ideas , or use those elements elsewhere, to make a NWN module using those elements publically available.

This kind of clause falls just short of "Bioware Owns Anything You Make", since if they want to sell a module you created themselves, the clause even allows them to forbid you from distributing your original version for any reason. The sole comfort in this is that the clause apparantly does not allow them to make a derivative work of your module, so it would have to be distributed "as is" -- but if the module contained enough "objectionable" material that they wouldn't want to take it for themselves, they could still forbid the owner from distributing it.

Once again, it seems that companies are only against piracy as long as it's their material being pirated. If they can pirate some individual's material by throwing an unreadable EULA up for a second at install time, it's perfectly fine.

The full forum thread discussing this can be found here."

Comments

Re:...and if I don't distribute my modules?

[ZxCv]

If you make something with it (in, say, a week), you owe them at least giving them unrestricted access to it - they put in 5 years X x Developers and you, a week and $50.00. right?

Hardly. That's like saying that because Apple has invested years into developing iMovie, I owe them unrestricted access to movies I make with it. Wrong. Their compensation from me came when I purchased their product. Why should I compensate them any further by giving them any rights to my creations?

Re:Greetings from BioWare

[Danse]

Here's what the Starcraft EULA has to say:

C. You are entitled to use the Program for your own use, but you are not be entitled to:

(iii) use or allow third parties to use the Editor and the New Materials created thereby for commercial purposes including, but not limited to, distribution of New Materials on a stand alone basis or packaged with other software or hardware through any and all distribution channels, including, but not limited to, retail sales and on-line electronic distribution without the express written consent of Blizzard;

Aside from that, there is no other limitations on what you or Blizzard may do with any "New Materials" that you create. (It said earlier that "New Materials" refers to custom levels created with the editor.)

So, yeah, I think he's full of crap when he says that these other EULAs contain the same control freakiness as Bioware's EULA. In fact, I'm going to send him an email and a link to this thread and maybe he can come back and explain himself.