Is it legal to download fan mods?

[Zeldafan2]

My real question here is, if someone bought a PC game legally, and then decided to download a modification made by a fan to the game, is that legal or not?

To show an example, if someone legally bought a foreign game, but didn't know the language of said game so he found a fan translation of the game on the internet that modified said game so that he could read/play it in whatever language. Would that person be doing something illegal?

[Atria35]

It depends on the game. For example, Sims has a whole host of fan-made skins for characters and the like, and sets up a community specifically for that. If it's from a legal site (as in one that is hosted by the developers themselves and says so everywhere), then you can probably be sure that it is. HOWEVER. If it's from a fansite, then don't do it, those mods are not supported by the developer and are indeed illegal.

As for the international game... Well, that's a gray area. That is the equivalent of fansubs for anime. Some people will be okay with it, some won't, go with your conscience.

[Davidizer13]

I'm not so sure you can call most mods illegal - quite a few games nowadays are designed as being open to modification. Valve is known to hire programmers from the modding community, and even bought up Counterstrike, which began as a total modification, and made a commercial product out of it. Now, if the mod contained copyrighted material, like music or images, then it'd be illegal, and if it gave you some sort of advantage in an MMO, then you'd be subject to punishment from that community for cheating, but other than that, I don't see any problems.

Fan translation, though, that's more debatable. I think Atria got it right by comparing them to fansubs. In and of themselves, you aren't pirating anything, but you're most likely going to have to download the original game if you're going to use them, and that would probably be illegal. They could be seen as an encouragement to piracy in a legal setting. But there's plenty of fan translations to freeware games, like La Mulana or Cave Story, where the game's already been given to you for free, so in my mind there's no trouble at all there.

[blkmage]

Yes.

[Zeldafan2]

Thanks for the speedy replies.

However, this is particular in response to Davidizer's comment, what exactly do you mean having to "download the original game if you're going to use it"? I'm not trying to sound stupid, but in my example, I was demonstrating a situation where someone had already BOUGHT the game legally, and was planning to download a fan translation patch for it. (For the reason I asked, I was planning on buying the memorial edition of the Clannad visual novel, but wasn't sure whether it would actually be legal to use the Baka Tsuki fan translation they have developed.)

Apologies in advance if you've already addressed these points, and I'm just missing what you are trying to say, but I'm honestly just confused.

[Atria35]

^ I think he misunderstood and thought you only had the fan translation patch. In which case, you would have to download the game to use it.

The big thing is that the VN would have come from Japan, having no American publisher or license, so downloading a fan translation patch for it really is completely like downloading fansubs for unlicensed anime. It's all a legal gray area.

[blkmage]

It actually isn't like that at all.

What does it matter that it's not available in North America? It still requires a copy to be acquired, whether by purchasing or pirating. Whether you decide to buy it or not is the point at which legality is considered, not the point at which a patch is made available.

The equivalent analogy is downloading the script file for a fansub and muxing the video together from your own BD/DVD source. It's a lot of work, but you had to buy a copy to do it.

I mean, at this point in history, we have Amazon.co.jp, so availability in America is kind of irrelevant.


Oh, one thing you might want to make sure of is that the patch works for the specific version of the game you're getting.