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:Somewhere in America...

[awptic]

Somewhere on Slashdot someone is repeating old jokes and doesn't know why.

If the GPL doesn't bother you, why does this?

[Dr. Spork]

The way I read the EULA, it's not like Bioware puts any restrictions on your distribution of your creations. You can set up an FTP, etc. What they do say is that if you make something with the toolkit, they have a right to redistribute it.

Compare this to the case where you splice a whole bunch of GPL code modules together (using your immagination/creativity) and the license declares that others have a right to use your code, even to sell it.

Because the toolkit is so high-level, you basically cannot use it to create content without Bioware IP inside. That content "infects" your creation the way GPL code does, and that puts restrictions on what you can do with the code. The only restriction Bioware insists on is that you give them the rights to use what you make. So you can't, as you said, try to sell off your creations for money to Bioware, because they are, by the license, entitled to your code already--so they can get it for free. Again, this would be the same if you put together a software project full of GPL code. You couldn't say "I'll hide the code until you pay me."

Anyway, I think the GPL is a fair license, and so by extension, I think Bioware's conditions are reasonable too. Basically, they want all the code to be "free"--meaning they want it to be available. I'm sure that down the road, they might try to print and sell a "distribution" CD of the best fan modules that were created. If you don't want to buy it from them, I'm sure you can just get in touch with the authors and download their modules for free. Or, I'm sure there will be many web sites online that keep an inventory of freely-released fan modules. Some of them might even try to make their own "distribution" on CD and sell it. I see nothing in the Bioware license that prevents this. In fact, I see the license encourages wide redistribution of the modules, which is cool, and also in Bioware's interest.

So where exactly is the problem with the license? I honestly don't get what you're worried about.