Sad news for the modding community of Grand Theft Auto IV as Take-Two has sent a C&D notice to the development team of the OpenIV mod for GTA IV. As a result of that, the team decided to stop working and distributing OpenIV.
OpenIV was a multi-purpose editor and archive manager for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV and Episodes from Liberty city. This tool helped a lot of modders to replace/change textures, however according to Take-Two this mod allowed ‘third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights.’
The development team behind OpenIV claimed that during the ten years of OpenIV’s development period, it has been strictly following of Civil Code of Russia (only reverse engineering for interoperability), featured clean-room reverse engineering, did not distribute original data and code, and did not mess with the Online mode of GTA IV.
The team claimed that while it could take Take-Two to court, it eventually decided against something like that.
“Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we’ll get absolutely nothing. Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can’t compensate the loss of time.”
As such, the team decided to agree with their claims and it is stopping distribution of OpenIV!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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