Use of CZ content in Half-Life modifications

[D3ads]

There's this debate going on over at the Half-Life Improvement forums and various other places about whether or not CZ and CZ:DS content is illegal for use in vanilla HL. A lot of you wont really care most likely but it's a point of discussion I thought we could bring up following hydepth's comment about Paranoia.

Here's a post I made in HIT, I can't be bothered to re-write it again:

You know the mod is Russian, so there's bound to be something illegal in there

Use of CZ content in Half-Life modifcations as far as I'm concerned is pretty fair-game so long as full credit is given to Valve, Turtle Rock, Gearbox and Ritual for the data. Of course it's still technically deemed as illegal, but I doubt that people would be petty enough to disallow content from an obsolete title to be used in an 8 year old graphics engine considering how much money they're making as it is. It's not as if they're selling many copies of CZ anymore either, with CS:S about.

Thing is, the forum has had a problem with use of illegal content before, Epic went apeshit over conversions posted on here awhile ago, which many of you will recall (I wasn't here at the time but I know about it). Epic have always been known to be touchy about these things though, with good reason and their discomfort was completely justified.

Though I doubt Valve would care about the poison zombie animation being used too much, that's highly illegal and thus is an issue to bring attention to over CZ content.

I think the main attraction of the CZ content is the animation, there's a shitload of animations in there that aren't in any HL based title, about 100+ for each character with just about any kind of body movement you could think of like faked ragdoll corpses, tactical takedown of a building, dragging a wounded soldier across the ground (very much like MOH:AA/COD) etc. The character models themselves are pretty good as well and with a few hacks they'd easily be converted to 'SD' quality. The props and weapons included are also of medium-high quality.

Does anyone work or know anyone who works at Ritual? What do the Gearbox people think? Can someone from Valve clarify if this content is illegal/legal for use within free modifications?

[Warby]

i am pretty sure that is only ok if it is a mod for the same game that can only be played by people who own said game

[fonfa]

not okay. i don't know if they'll care, but everyone should avoid those kind of things.

[JamesL]

It may well be illegal technically, but Valve has basically become what it is today by encouraging and building upon the mod scene. It would be pretty dumb to start slapping about the enthusiasts who buy and mod their games.

making money out of the assets makes it into a completely different matter of course.

[Izuno]

making money out of the assets makes it into a completely different matter of course.

That's really the key distinction. If you are reselling work it becomes a legal question. I think for non-commercial mods I don't see the problem.

[MrBaracuda]

*cough* what is vanilla hl *cough*

[ifO]

Vanilla means like 'plain' or 'ordinary', like 'vanilla sex' is normal sex rather than 'kinky sex' with whips and shit. So by 'vanilla hl' he means... half-life.

It's questionable using CZ stuff, well it's wrong. But I don't think anyone will care, they will probably get away with it, since they're not selling it.

[Rick_D]

people used to go ape-shit about it

but again if all they are using is the animations then i can understand (i have no idea what this is all about so, meh) because finding animators to work on modern engine-based mods is _hard_ - finding them for a corpse of a game is bound to be pretty much impossible.

[MrBaracuda]

So.. there's also kinky hl? D:

[Taylor]

It probably is illegal but I doubt anyone actually cares.

[Defrag]

AFAIK Valve are happy to turn a blind eye to it as long as you don't go bonkers (like releasing an unofficial CS mod that uses CS:S content). As long as it's just bits & pieces, it shouldn't get you sued.

[Section_Ei8ht]

Valve probably wont care, but afaik this violates many terms of service. In taking an asset from CZ and putting it in a mod for HL, you are allowing people who do not own CZ to access and use materials from a game they do not own. In a sense, you are distributing copyrighted material (albeit very small amounts) to people who may not own the game.

I've had to deal with this matter before. I personally dont care one way or another, I'm just telling you how lawyers see it (US lawyers, that is). Valve most likely wont care, but there are other publishers/devs that are much more anal about this sort of thing.

[rockdude86]

dont think it would be a problem seeing the used things stay with the same license owner, however when i started mapping i recreated dm-Gothic and deck16 from the orignal ut for hl1 never released it though since i thought they probably wouldnt really like that any idea's on how that would work out?