Fliggerty's sites are down 3 months now. I think this initiative is totally needed, we already went through a huge disaster with PlanetElderScrolls. Back then we were all thankful to Fliggerty, maybe in a couple of years we'll all be thankful to this guy here. Fliggerty can't have a say in that anyway, it wasn't his mods, he was doing the community a service by providing all other modders' mods from PES that would have vanished otherwise. We are all grateful for that!
Nearly all of those weren't Fliggerty's mods either, which is the entire point here. Not everyone who had things "preserved" on that site gave explicit consent. That consent is required under copyright law. Whether you agree with that or not, that's just how the legalisms of all of this works.
Even Wrye himself recognized that with his Parlor vs Cathedral essay. While he was definitely in favor of the Cathedral side of things, he was also very much aware that it wasn't something you can just impose on a community by force. It had to be adopted by mutual consent. Yes, this means some works will be gone forever, but that's fine. Nothing lasts forever. Part of why he retired was because he couldn't bring about the change he wanted.
In any case, asking what Fliggerty's take on this isn't the material issue. It's what are the takes of the various affected authors, and did they leave behind affirmative consent in their documentation for this.
Consider for a moment also, Archive.org itself believes they're above the law with regard to copyright and will only go against that if you file a DMCA against them for archiving your website without permission. They've been acting as though they're above the law since their inception. Something which is probably about to change with certain legislation in both the US and Canada (and probably the EU too).
Do you have a list of modders who have explicitly stated that they don't want their mods uploaded elsewhere? I want a backup of all MMH mods for personal use, including those that cannot be shared elsewhere without permission from the original author.
Not reuploading someones mod without explicit permission is an excellent rule when their mods are on a stable site, like nexusmods. never has there been a more stable site for modding games.
Now when we look at MMH on the other hand, or some other even smaller sites, the fact that they went down entirely and haven't come back up means that if someone doesn't reupload those mods on a stable site, they'll be doomed to obscurity, if not entirely disappear. Wayback Machine, as incredible as it is, is not perfect, and it's basically one step away from a mod being gone for good.
My aim with these reuploads is to honor the modders of the past, by making their work rexposed to people and actually accessible to players new and old alike. Many of them probably never imagined that Morrowind would be a game that is still heavily played and highly regarded to this day, many years after they stopped being active, simply because life moves on to other things. The mods I collected are organized with the mod author's name upfront, as a way of crediting them, not to mention it just makes organization easier.
You misunderstood me. What I said is that many of the authors who shared their work on Morrowind Modding History have explicitly stated not to share their work on other platforms (see the tab on MHH). By reuploading their mods to Nexus Mods (and agreeing with its Terms of Service) you violate their wishes. There is no need to speculate about these wishes, as they have explicitly stated them.
Good intentions and convenience don't give you any right to violate their intellectual property rights. I think Nexus Mods policy doesn't allow this either.
Circumstances and Times change. I don't believe that ones wishes are static to a particular time, locked in place for all of eternity to govern the rest of the future. Do we respect the wishes of a dead pharaoh when their tomb is opened? of course not. The society and culture they are from are long gone, and opening them up is the only way to learn more about the past. Dead Sites are like a Dead Pharaoh, and the Wayback Machine is like the Sarcophagus.
Ultimately, people have certain desires when a set of conditions are true. One such condition might be such that " my mod is on a stable site, i don't want it reuploaded elsewhere". Alright, the wish makes sense at the time, fair enough. Now take that condition away, what are you left with? a wish that makes absolutely no sense anymore, contradicted by shifting circumstances.
I think we're all sad when mods are lost to time, and I think we all wish repositories like Fliggerty and MMH would stay up forever. And I do genuinely applaud your effort to save the history of this community.
But I also think people have the right to self-determine the fate of their own work, even if that means consigning them to digital oblivion. I think it's better to prioritize that over saving mods. There are more valuable things within a mod community than the mods themselves.
I just don't agree. I will get to why I don't agree soon, but I first want to stress that situation has evolved since the last comment in this thread. I was contacted by one of the more prolific Modders from Fliggerty/MMH, HedgeHog, who got me involved with a group of old modders who are dedicated to the preservation of old mods. What started as a one man thing now is becoming a real team composed of largely old modders that want to preserve old mods. Even the old modders that aren't part of the team are cheering on my work, especially whenever i clue them in on my progress. The tremendous support i have received from classic modders towards creating a backup of MMH and Fliggerty lends a great deal of legitimacy to this project, beyond the philosophical reasons for preserving the mods.
But lets get down to actual the actual reasons why I disagree.
1. I already checked the Nexus rules on this matter. Their rules state that a user may not submit a page for a mod that already exist on the Website. This does not include mods that exist on another website, and well if a website is gone, this is even more true.
2. On the chance an old mod in my archives has previously been reuploaded, I don't in the slightest think my preservation archives violate the spirit of the rule. Obviously the rule about reuploading has a purpose, and that purpose is so that you don't get false credit, or steal views, downloads and endorsements from the original mod page. The nature of my archives do not advertise any specific mod in isolation, as it's a very large collection of mods. My mod pages are named in a neutral, generalized manner. To top it off, my naming scheme in the format of '[Mod Author] - [Mod Name]' inherently gives credit where credit is due to each and every respective modder.
you make some great points on respecting the wishes of the authors but even so I couldn't condemn someone for wanting to preserve a mod made like 10-20 years ago for people to enjoy. if they find it and are that vigilant about it and ask it to be taken down that's something I'd also respect but if it was something they said 20 years ago and have long since moved on with their life I couldn't argue against saying f*** it.
Let people enjoy morrowind in peace. in principle I'd rather an archive be kept even if the person who wrote the book might not like the medium its shared on. but then I'm the kind of person who doesn't like anything hidden in the shadows. it's the book burnings you gotta watch out for.
at best this is a good thought experiment to keep in mind to not lose your soul, otherwise it's needless and pointless bureaucracy.
given what I've seen from the author, he just wants good works of the past to be preserved. it's not something one should get in the way of. if the original mods authors cared that much about exclusivity and whatnot, they would have their own hand picked websites that they would maintain their mods on, but the reality is most of them have moved on with life. the guy who ran mwhistory is done with morrowind and with maintaining a website for morrowind mods. he may not even keep his promise of the site being back up, because as you know things change and he's under no obligation to do something exclusively for others at the expensive of his own time and energy.
a lot of the mods on the morrowind nexus were honestly uploaded in the same manner. because this site in its current state happen many years after the modding scene for morrowind started to die down. a lot of mods would have disappeared then too if someone didn't take up the task of putting them back up.
good on you to keep this stuff in mind tbh. it's important to think about. I mean if there was another website for mods I would use that too but the nexus seems to be the only one with the foundation. I used to love gamespy's format but that went down, everything else went down. this is all we got and its big enough to stay since it expands itself to other games.
@GreatSephiroth To add to what you said about there being plenty of old mods being posted in the past - Even Morrowind Modding History is/was itself, atleast half of the time, mods reuploaded from Planet Elderscrolls. The whole site was designed around the concept of preservation in the first place. I just see myself as continuing the legacy.
There is also a greater philosophy behind my work than just simply republishing things for the sake of it, that i will finally get into. There is a Modding Philosophy called Cathedralism. Cathedralism is the view that when you mod a game and publish your work, your mod becomes a contribution to the modding scene as a whole, granting all other modders the ability to build a greater body of work from a collection of mods - a cathedral of mods. This is contrast to parlor modding, which is the view that a modders mod is like a private parlor show that invites guest to the show, but can shut down the show anytime and kick out the guest. People in the Cathedralist Camp are inclined to view Parlor Modding as completely anti-thetical to the spirit of modding, and this is my view as well.
An important comparison is that Cathedralist Modding, is essentially the same concept as Open-Source Software, applied to mods. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), is the concept of software where the source code is opened for any and all to see the code and redesign as they see fit, without being made proprietary or being charged, which can easily form into a community of open-source development with people contributing things many years down the line, even when the original author long moves on. There is plenty examples of FOS-Software out there, but the most prominent development of FOSS can be seen in the Linux Community. Anyone can download a Linux distribution, change it up as they see fit, rebrand it as a different Operating System, and republish it as such, creating a fork of the parent linux distribution as its own thing.
Bethesda has made it easy to mod their games with the Construction Set. While Bethesda used to have a policy to where they reserved the legal right to take ownership of any and all mods by modders, they abandoned this policy a few years ago. However, the fact that people could mod Bethesda games to their hearts content without fear of any reprisal, in the first place lends itself to a cathedralist viewpoint. While Bethesda's EULA used to be in the Parlorist Camp (where they as a company are the parlorist which all modders must bow the knee to), but it is has since become much closer to the Cathedralist camp. There was a major upset a few years ago in which Bethesda in fact did try to act on their parlorist EULA, by monetizing Skyrim Mods on Steam, but the justifiably huge community backlash caused them to entirely reverse not just this decision, and best of all, to change their whole EULA such that Bethesda forfeits the right to own any new content made by modders. In other words, they forfeit their right to 'close the show and kick out the guest', which in this case the guest happened to be the modders.
So what's the point I'm getting to? If Bethesda doesn't "close the door" on modders, and the time they tried was met with enormous backlash, it makes even less sense when a modder attempts to "close the door" on other modders, as what the parlorist camp would allow for.
I just want to add here that MMH also didn't respect modders' permissions when including PES mods. I for one, never gave any permission for my mods to be uploaded to MMH. Ultimately, I am forever grateful MMH existed so my mods didn't get lost forever. When a site disappears, we all should be thankful for initiatives like this one here.
Don't listen to any of these people! YOU HAVE DONE A GREAT SERVICE TO THE MORROWIND COMMUNITY HERE! The modders expressed their wishes to not download them on different sites when their mods were uploaded on sites they knew and trusted. Those websites no longer exist. The modders did not create their mods to not be played, that's why they uploaded them in the first place. If they come back, which they wouldn't, and say they don't want their mods publicly used anymore, then this defeats the purpose of their creation. The reasoning behind it is fallacious. It's like arguing "George Washington didn't give Dolly Madison permission to save his portrait before the White House burned down, so she should have just let it burn." You sir are a hero! We have these beautiful mods for our beautiful game now, saved and intact! To not continue the Morrowind modding tradition would be a disgrace. Thanks again!
Has anyone figured which one of these mods allows the player to get over 30 million gold from the locked chest in the census and excise office as well as over a billion gold from a chest on a table right outside the same office in Seyda Neen?
I have a backup of my circa 2014 hard drive, where I have several hundred mods downloaded from MMH, elricm, PES, various other sites. All of them are unpacked into a data files directory, but it would be easy if tedious for me to piece together an archive for most of them. Lots of ridiculous race mods, some of the wacky and wonderful work of Lady Rae and some other long forgotten creators. Are there any particular mods that you are hunting for?
56 comments
Even Wrye himself recognized that with his Parlor vs Cathedral essay. While he was definitely in favor of the Cathedral side of things, he was also very much aware that it wasn't something you can just impose on a community by force. It had to be adopted by mutual consent. Yes, this means some works will be gone forever, but that's fine. Nothing lasts forever. Part of why he retired was because he couldn't bring about the change he wanted.
In any case, asking what Fliggerty's take on this isn't the material issue. It's what are the takes of the various affected authors, and did they leave behind affirmative consent in their documentation for this.
Consider for a moment also, Archive.org itself believes they're above the law with regard to copyright and will only go against that if you file a DMCA against them for archiving your website without permission. They've been acting as though they're above the law since their inception. Something which is probably about to change with certain legislation in both the US and Canada (and probably the EU too).
Not reuploading someones mod without explicit permission is an excellent rule when their mods are on a stable site, like nexusmods. never has there been a more stable site for modding games.
Now when we look at MMH on the other hand, or some other even smaller sites, the fact that they went down entirely and haven't come back up means that if someone doesn't reupload those mods on a stable site, they'll be doomed to obscurity, if not entirely disappear. Wayback Machine, as incredible as it is, is not perfect, and it's basically one step away from a mod being gone for good.
My aim with these reuploads is to honor the modders of the past, by making their work rexposed to people and actually accessible to players new and old alike. Many of them probably never imagined that Morrowind would be a game that is still heavily played and highly regarded to this day, many years after they stopped being active, simply because life moves on to other things. The mods I collected are organized with the mod author's name upfront, as a way of crediting them, not to mention it just makes organization easier.
Good intentions and convenience don't give you any right to violate their intellectual property rights. I think Nexus Mods policy doesn't allow this either.
Ultimately, people have certain desires when a set of conditions are true. One such condition might be such that "
my mod is on a stable site, i don't want it reuploaded elsewhere". Alright, the wish makes sense at the time, fair enough. Now take that condition away, what are you left with? a wish that makes absolutely no sense anymore, contradicted by shifting circumstances.
I think we're all sad when mods are lost to time, and I think we all wish repositories like Fliggerty and MMH would stay up forever. And I do genuinely applaud your effort to save the history of this community.
But I also think people have the right to self-determine the fate of their own work, even if that means consigning them to digital oblivion. I think it's better to prioritize that over saving mods. There are more valuable things within a mod community than the mods themselves.
But lets get down to actual the actual reasons why I disagree.
1. I already checked the Nexus rules on this matter. Their rules state that a user may not submit a page for a mod that already exist on the Website. This does not include mods that exist on another website, and well if a website is gone, this is even more true.
2. On the chance an old mod in my archives has previously been reuploaded, I don't in the slightest think my preservation archives violate the spirit of the rule. Obviously the rule about reuploading has a purpose, and that purpose is so that you don't get false credit, or steal views, downloads and endorsements from the original mod page. The nature of my archives do not advertise any specific mod in isolation, as it's a very large collection of mods. My mod pages are named in a neutral, generalized manner. To top it off, my naming scheme in the format of '[Mod Author] - [Mod Name]' inherently gives credit where credit is due to each and every respective modder.
Let people enjoy morrowind in peace. in principle I'd rather an archive be kept even if the person who wrote the book might not like the medium its shared on. but then I'm the kind of person who doesn't like anything hidden in the shadows. it's the book burnings you gotta watch out for.
at best this is a good thought experiment to keep in mind to not lose your soul, otherwise it's needless and pointless bureaucracy.
given what I've seen from the author, he just wants good works of the past to be preserved. it's not something one should get in the way of. if the original mods authors cared that much about exclusivity and whatnot, they would have their own hand picked websites that they would maintain their mods on, but the reality is most of them have moved on with life. the guy who ran mwhistory is done with morrowind and with maintaining a website for morrowind mods. he may not even keep his promise of the site being back up, because as you know things change and he's under no obligation to do something exclusively for others at the expensive of his own time and energy.
a lot of the mods on the morrowind nexus were honestly uploaded in the same manner. because this site in its current state happen many years after the modding scene for morrowind started to die down. a lot of mods would have disappeared then too if someone didn't take up the task of putting them back up.
good on you to keep this stuff in mind tbh. it's important to think about. I mean if there was another website for mods I would use that too but the nexus seems to be the only one with the foundation. I used to love gamespy's format but that went down, everything else went down. this is all we got and its big enough to stay since it expands itself to other games.
There is also a greater philosophy behind my work than just simply republishing things for the sake of it, that i will finally get into. There is a Modding Philosophy called Cathedralism. Cathedralism is the view that when you mod a game and publish your work, your mod becomes a contribution to the modding scene as a whole, granting all other modders the ability to build a greater body of work from a collection of mods - a cathedral of mods. This is contrast to parlor modding, which is the view that a modders mod is like a private parlor show that invites guest to the show, but can shut down the show anytime and kick out the guest. People in the Cathedralist Camp are inclined to view Parlor Modding as completely anti-thetical to the spirit of modding, and this is my view as well.
The Cathedral and Parlor viewpoints are detailed thoroughly in this document: https://wryemusings.com/Cathedral%20vs.%20Parlor.html
An important comparison is that Cathedralist Modding, is essentially the same concept as Open-Source Software, applied to mods. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), is the concept of software where the source code is opened for any and all to see the code and redesign as they see fit, without being made proprietary or being charged, which can easily form into a community of open-source development with people contributing things many years down the line, even when the original author long moves on. There is plenty examples of FOS-Software out there, but the most prominent development of FOSS can be seen in the Linux Community. Anyone can download a Linux distribution, change it up as they see fit, rebrand it as a different Operating System, and republish it as such, creating a fork of the parent linux distribution as its own thing.
Bethesda has made it easy to mod their games with the Construction Set. While Bethesda used to have a policy to where they reserved the legal right to take ownership of any and all mods by modders, they abandoned this policy a few years ago. However, the fact that people could mod Bethesda games to their hearts content without fear of any reprisal, in the first place lends itself to a cathedralist viewpoint. While Bethesda's EULA used to be in the Parlorist Camp (where they as a company are the parlorist which all modders must bow the knee to), but it is has since become much closer to the Cathedralist camp. There was a major upset a few years ago in which Bethesda in fact did try to act on their parlorist EULA, by monetizing Skyrim Mods on Steam, but the justifiably huge community backlash caused them to entirely reverse not just this decision, and best of all, to change their whole EULA such that Bethesda forfeits the right to own any new content made by modders. In other words, they forfeit their right to 'close the show and kick out the guest', which in this case the guest happened to be the modders.
So what's the point I'm getting to? If Bethesda doesn't "close the door" on modders, and the time they tried was met with enormous backlash, it makes even less sense when a modder attempts to "close the door" on other modders, as what the parlorist camp would allow for.