The Take Down SDVMods.net Initiative - Help remove this content thieving website here!

What are the chances that its the same person again?

 

That mainly depends upon the profit margin they work against, domains alone cost a pretty penny, and pissing off hosting providers means you cannot just use the cheapest ones there either.

 

I made it very clear to these dickheads that they were not to upload any of my mods (stardewmods as well) and as far as I know they've complied. I check periodically and can't find any of my stuff. To give them credit, they did ask me via PM on Nexus, and didn't just outright steal.

This has been going on since pretty much the beginning.

 

Mine were removed by stardewvalleymods.net after messages through his facebook page and nothing else of mine has appeared so I didn't bother to pursue anything further there.

 

I want to file a DMCA form as well, but because English is not my native language I'm having difficulties understanding what to write where. What is 'holder's full name'? What do I put there? Am I the copyright holder? Do I skip? Is it my name or username?

Sorry for all these questions haha, filling in files can be confusing. Maybe your answer will help others who want to file a DMCA.

 

I myself used <full name>, Aka <nickname>
That way I represent myself as both the legal person and the online identity.
Both the full name is effectively your first name, any secondary names, followed by your last name.

 

When I first found out about this, I was 200% pitchfork and torch mob mad. I was able to get all of my mods taken down. I message the site's contact info and filed a DMCA like Entoarox suggested. I strongly encourage everyone who is a mod author to check the site for your mods and do the same.

 

Sorry for being away for an extra day, everyone! Main thread has been updated! This is now a full-on take down initiative! Lol. A little bit cheesy of a title for it, but whatever. I'm mad and staying that way! As of right now I'm going to start contacting modders with stolen mods on the site. I'll be linking them to this thread by messaging them on the forums, Nexus, and/or Steam. If anyone wants to help me with this, let me know! I'm not sure how long it will take me to get through everything but I'm going to do as much as I can tonight.

 

my own update: I filed a DMCA two days ago and CloudFlare responded by telling me my complaint was forwarded to the site. My mods are still on their website though. I'm gonna try again and message them directly on fb in a few days if nothing's changed.

 

I'd recommend emailing them, commenting on your mod pages, and Facebook messaging them every 24 hrs until they're gone. At first he viewed my Facebook message and didn't respond. I called him out and said I know he viewed the message and that he needed to remove them otherwise I would take legal action. The next day, my mod was gone, then around 12 hrs after I noticed that he replied to my email with a simple "removed" and nothing else. Real stand-up guy. If you keep pestering him he'll remove them, but definitely get screenshots of your mods and email them to yourself with the date so that you can prove to his provider that they were up there at one point! I didn't do this and I regret it so much.

 

goddamnit. well, this kinda shit was bound to happen to me at some point. Thanks for contacting me about it. I definitely did not consent. I worked damn hard on my wallpaper mod.

 

"Enchanted Forest Mod bring full of greenery, flora, fauna and perhaps to your Stardew Valley.If you’re lucky enough, little fairies will appear."

thanks for failing to copy paste my description, moron site owner lmao

disgusting what they're doing, I hope this site gets taken down

 

It's infuriating, isn't it?! I've spent hours alone on my little farmhouse recolors. I can't image how people who make their own pixel art & write their own code must feel. Please let us know what action you take and if/when you hear back from the website creator!

I agree! Please let us know what action you take and help us take this guy down!

 

for right now, I commented on each of my stolen mods;

http://puu.sh/rYV82/f53ee31171.png

if they ignore me then I'll start REALLY bothering them...

 

I submitted a DMCA for my mods (all 4 were stolen) and I also commented on each one demanding its deletion.

 

I have a feeling that they will ignore you and just not approve the comments. I'm glad you mentioned the forums though - I'd LOVE for him to find this thread and know he's getting called out. Lol.

 

Emailing the admin and contacting the host are all good steps, please continue to do so. I just want to share some knowledge from past issues in other modding communities before anyone decides to try and speculate whether anyone has any legal grounds here.

I am a modder in the Sims community who has been involved with it for six or seven years. Since TS2 came out a decade ago, a lot of issues broke out in the modding community about mods being stolen, reuploaded to other sites, repacked, and other things which benefited the theif via ad revenue.

However, an important detail about many games and their terms of use is that modders do not and cannot hold any kind of copyright or license over their mods because of it using assets of someone else's product (in that case The Sims, in this case maybe Stardew Valley). This is entirely dependent on the EULA of the game in question and varies game-to-game, publisher-to-publisher. If you really want to know how much of your mod assets are owned by you, you could email ConcernedApe, as I don't think that sort of thing is in the EULA (I haven't checked) I wouldn't, though, because CA is already overworked and tired as it is.

This means that there are no legal grounds for removal of this content, and unless a file host simply takes down random things that get flagged without really taking the case into consideration, there's not much one can do beyond emailing the administrator/reposter and urging them to remove the content.

In any case, regarding my own mods, I have had my work stolen by dozens of different pages and people for years so I am kind of tired and won't be pursuing anything regarding this beyond emailing the administrator.

My only concern is that players will download from their site and receive outdated mods, or be served malicious ads or files. Such things are unacceptable and I don't want anyone's computers or games to get hurt. It will also inevitably lead to users coming to the original sources to complain that their mods 'don't work' or 'gave them viruses', which adds strain to the original modders as well.

 

Don't let it discourage you or deter your focus. I know I put too much energy in reporting and dwelling, even took time off from making mods and missed opportunities to work on certain mods I wanted to work on because of it. My suggestion is to report what you see but also take note and figure out ways hidden within your mod/s to distinguish your disapproval of their blatant disregard. Mention in your postings, put annotations on your YouTube videos that display your mods and attack from within your descriptions too! I even added transparent markings to trace back to people rehosting content.

 

First of all, thank you for sharing your experience with us. Since your post I've been trying to find the EULA for Stardew Valley online & in my game files but I'm missing it. Does anyone know where I can access this?

You're right about not bothering CA. He's made himself so involved and available as a developer, but in turn it's our responsibility to not overreach our boundaries. I'm going to email Chucklefish to try to see what their opinion on our rights (or lack thereof) are. Even if the content we've created for the game isn't technically ours, then surely it's violating the EULA of the game itself, which would bother the publisher, no? Based on Androxilogin's previous success in removing stardewmods.com, I'm going to keep pushing forward to have the site removed. I'm sure Cloudflare & the site's host would rather not have all of this negative traffic regardless of whether or not there are any actual legal actions we as modders can take. My main concern is whether or not we have the rights to file a DMCA complaint against the site.

On a slightly unrelated note, I thought your name sounded familiar! (Edit: I must have been thinking of your name from somewhere else, but I found your tumblr and I remember seeing your sims Lily and Pepper way back. Small world!) I've probably used your Sims mods in the past! I'm sorry that you've had such issues with your mods being stolen and I respect your decisions here. Thank you again for sharing such useful information!

 

While ownership of any content created based upon stardew valley content is iffy, a lot of mods use their own assets, and while those assets may interact with or even replace stardew assets, the fact remains that the assets themselves are not created by CA or directly derived from content created by CA, so while CA could legally disallow us from distributing these assets as stardew valley mods due to infringing on his intellectual rights, the actual assets are the intellectual property of their owner unless CA specifically has each and every one of us sign a contract to give him those intellectual rights in either part or fully.

For example, every bit of code I myself have written from scratch, barring it being a exact re-implementation of pre-existing code that can be proven to be such, is rightfully my intellectual property.
In short, while there are dark gray areas involved in modding, intellectual ownership is not one of those areas, CA is just being a cool guy and let us play around with his property without banging us over the heads when we do