Calling out to all Battlestar Galactica modders!!! Thread

Hi everyonne!

I'm starting this thread in the hopes of all of you with BSG mods wiped from the face of ModDB joining into the discussion here.

First of all: I was shocked and saddened when i got the message from ModDB admins that our mod, the Nexus BSG mod is being pulled due to copyright claims of NBC Universal. This we cannot fight, these are the terms of ModDB, and we are making our projects based on NBCU's intellectual property.

The only way for us to get our projects back on track is for NBCU to authorise us to do so. To make this happen, i would like to ask you to write emails to NBCU, in hopes of someone noticing us, and maybe, starting a dialog with them. To achieve this, my first step was to write an email to Brian Steel, Senior Vice President of Public Relations at NBCU. I know, the chance of him actually reading my email is slim, but we have to try.

If you want to keep your projects alive, you can find contact info to NBCU here:
Nbcuni.com

The only way they will let us keep going if we make our case. Politely and with logic. We need someone to notice us.

We are doing this on a non-profit base, for the benefit of everyone, and they need to know that. I would like to make our efforts centralised as much as we can, so let's use this thread as a little campaign "base".

Thanks of reading, and I hope many of you find this thread

SoulAssassino

It wasn't just Nexus BSG, either. Every single mod that had anything to do with BSG (Diaspora, Fleet Commander, etc) were ALL removed from ModDB - this was some 20-odd free, non-profit mods made by fans, that NBC shut down.

I personaly leave this on you Matt... you can get better polyte massage together for those fuc*ers then i can... i will just wait for any responde from NBC and also will be prepared for storming any product that NBC will or has made....
in short: reporting for duty...

I myself could use a polite massage!

I find it surprising that like 20 bsg mods got shut down and none of those teams have come in here to post :\

The BSGO game is pretty much a big pile of crap, I used to play the open beta months ago and I was basically the same as all the other Bigpoint games, to get anywhere you either have to farm for hours on end or buy into their packages, Its main focus is on PvP and as far as I know the storyline is basically an afterthought. If they were that bothered about their intellectual property, they would have released a decent game years ago at the height of BSG's popularity.

To me this action smacks of desperation, as the money boat for the franchise is running a little thin as 'officailly' interest dwindles

Edited by: chulaksaviour

irony is that these free mods and games were actually helping NBC build the community ...

but it leaves another question to modDB team
as there are mods available for years, from many sci-fi universes
e.g. StarTrek, StarWars, StarGate, Babylon 5 etc.

where the content was made from scratch ...
are they going to vanish too ? cause that would be sort of end of modDB

Edited by: Dwarden

As long as the copyright owners don't mind, mods based on inverses like Stargate, B5, or Warhammer can exist and be happy.

NBCU was full well within their rights to shut down these projects based on their intellectual property unfortunately.

WEll i run scifi at war, and they wont restore it till i remove all other IP from it, so that more or less means the end of SFAW on moddb

How abot we just move all of this to a chineese site that doesen't give a crap about IP laws?

Personally I vote for us all to boycott NBC those idiots can't see past their profit margins far enough to see a little fact AND that is fan base rules everything. You want to make more fans bring out quality products, in NBC''s case they ain't brought out nothing and I mean nothing dealing with the current BSG universe it's all been TOS Battlestar and that's discounting BSGO for which I play. I believe and this is my whole hearted opinion is they are biting the hands that are feeding them. These mods were bringing in fans that missed out on the show during it's runs they see that the ships look interesting see the name look it up on Youtube or google or even Wikipedia. They if their interest is peaked after looking it up buy DVD's/Blue Ray of the seasons and the plan. Voila what does that equal money in their pockets money in their pockets they can then use to fund other projects they wish to pursue which include the upcoming Blood and Chrome series they want to put out.

SoulAssassino wrote: First of all: I was shocked and saddened when i got the message from ModDB admins that our mod, the Nexus BSG mod is being pulled due to copyright claims of NBC Universal. This we cannot fight, these are the terms of ModDB, and we are making our projects based on NBCU's intellectual property.

At least you got a message! All I got was "Where's Diaspora gone?"

Reporting for Duty! I'm not sure what else we could be doing other than protesting NBC. The problem there is how? Also Washuluver87 is completely right in that we are the hand that feeds them, especially when it comes to BSG which has been down on the fan lvl since the end of BSG re imagined or Caprica for that matter. There needs to be a way for us to make a legitimate claim to NBC.

This makes no sense to me. Remove all the mods based on some IP from moddb, you lose half the moddb. I mean, just run a search on it for terms like "star wars", "star trek", etc.. I fail to understand what does anyone have to gain by pulling a bunch of non profit mods off a modding site. As a member of the Diaspora team, however, right now I am mostly disappointed in the moddb staff that not only failed to inform us that they are taking down our pages and why, they also failed to respond to our inquiry about it for more than 24 hours. That is just completely unprofessional. I see their admins are doing an excellent job of avoiding this thread, too..

Edited by: newman1702

I didn't get a reply from NBC yet. I will copy in the email i wrote them, you guys can copy it, change the name and start emailing all available nbc contacts.

Yes, one thing we do not want to do is be angry and rude with the NBC officials. I'm hoping we can all come to an agreement of some kind. A friend of mine works on BSGOnline and he told me they were told of an unanmed BSG project that was being shut down by NBCU because they didn't ask for permission...obviously that extended well past the ONE project. However, if we ask for permission nicely, perhaps adhere to a few guidelines then we can continue their development. But if we're anything but polite and courteous about it, those chances will disappear.

Agreed.

jstubbles, can you ask your friend to contact someone higher up? Or at least send our email to someone who will actually read it?

Soul, I can certainly try. While BigPoint has to dance to NBCU's song and has no direct control over anything - I'm sure they may have easier access to those that do. Can you email me a completed version of the letter to you sent out to NBC reps? vassago5k@gmail.com

Thanks,

Sure, i'll send you a copy, just have a read through and change the names.

any updates from nbc or anyone else?

Certainly not from ModDB! I STILL haven't gotten anything explaining why they removed Diaspora.

I only just found this thread now and by having to search through google. I have been helping/assisting and modding for the fleet commander mod.

As a fan and modder I can tell you that I purchased the whole of the BSG seasons and razor movie. I even introduced (conservatively) about 20 other people to BSG and they liked it - for the NBC bean counters how does +2000% purely from just 1 persons word of mouth sound?

I'm certain of those 20 people (so maybe in excess of +5000%), at least some of them who had never heard of the series then told others. Word of mouth through personal recommendation is a powerful tool. It was because I was passionate about the series... and that unfortunately is what I call biting the hand that feeds you.

I wasn't aware of this issue, however moddb's stance is always to uphold the copyright holders rights, if you choose to make fanArt you choose to put yourself and your teams hard work in the firing line of the licencor of that IP.
I'm sorry to hear so many bsg mods have had to be removed due to this, i'm guessing with the release of BSG online a main reason for NBC to do this is, to bottle neck fans to playing due to lack of other choice.

newman1702 wrote: This makes no sense to me. Remove all the mods based on some IP from moddb, you lose half the moddb. I mean, just run a search on it for terms like "star wars", "star trek", etc.. I fail to understand what does anyone have to gain by pulling a bunch of non profit mods off a modding site. As a member of the Diaspora team, however, right now I am mostly disappointed in the moddb staff that not only failed to inform us that they are taking down our pages and why, they also failed to respond to our inquiry about it for more than 24 hours. That is just completely unprofessional. I see their admins are doing an excellent job of avoiding this thread, too..

To address your concerns.

ModDB is not just BSG fans, get real we were round long before the re envisioned series.
It states in our terms of use and when you make a profile, you can't breach copyright, we will allow people to upload fanArt however if the IP owner asks us to remove them, we will, would you rather a few mods go or the whole site?

I'm a admin, have been for a long time and only found out about this from this thread, i stand by the staffs actions as it's the law and we don't need to justify ourselves due to this.

Protest as much as you want, as a avid BSG fan i support you but don't go badmouthing staff doing their job.

TKAzA wrote: I wasn't aware of this issue, however moddb's stance is always to uphold the copyright holders rights, if you choose to make fanArt you choose to put yourself and your teams hard work in the firing line of the licencor of that IP.
I'm sorry to hear so many bsg mods have had to be removed due to this, i'm guessing with the release of BSG online a main reason for NBC to do this is, to bottle neck fans to playing due to lack of other choice.

newman1702 wrote: This makes no sense to me. Remove all the mods based on some IP from moddb, you lose half the moddb. I mean, just run a search on it for terms like "star wars", "star trek", etc.. I fail to understand what does anyone have to gain by pulling a bunch of non profit mods off a modding site. As a member of the Diaspora team, however, right now I am mostly disappointed in the moddb staff that not only failed to inform us that they are taking down our pages and why, they also failed to respond to our inquiry about it for more than 24 hours. That is just completely unprofessional. I see their admins are doing an excellent job of avoiding this thread, too..

To address your concerns.

ModDB is not just BSG fans, get real we were round long before the re envisioned series.
It states in our terms of use and when you make a profile, you can't breach copyright, we will allow people to upload fanArt however if the IP owner asks us to remove them, we will, would you rather a few mods go or the whole site?

I'm a admin, have been for a long time and only found out about this from this thread, i stand by the staffs actions as it's the law and we don't need to justify ourselves due to this.

Protest as much as you want, as a avid BSG fan i support you but don't go badmouthing staff doing their job.

I'm not protesting the fact that if moddb is asked by NBC-Universal to take down our project, then moddb has little choice in doing so. You'll note that my main complaint was that the Diaspora team has not, to this moment, been contacted by any of the moddb staff about the takedown. We were not warned in advance that moddb has to do it, we were not contacted afterwards, we then sent a question to moddb staff well over a day ago and to this moment haven't received so much as a word.
I have never stated that moddb was just about bsg (where would you get such an idea from?) or that you're somehow expected to tell NBC "no" when they tell you to take down mods based on their IP. Nobody expects that, and when I say that such a decision makes no sense I'm directing that towards NBC. When I say that it's completely unprofessional to take down a project without notifying the project lead, and then fail to respond to an inquiry about it for well over 24 hours, then I'm directing my complaint towards moddb. I trust that makes the distinction clear?
I'm sorry if this sounds like "badmouthing the staff" but I do believe that since to this moment we weren't notified about this at all, our project just having vanished, we do have the right to express some to-be-expected polite dissatisfaction with the failure on the part of moddb's staff to send us a simple e-mail.

Edited by: newman1702

While I disagree with badmouthing the staff, it was a bid rude of ModDB not properly notifying the mod teams they were closing. I'm 100% in agreement with taking the content down as stated in the terms of use, but ModDB could have handled it a bit more gracefully.

That being said, we're trying to take avenues of polite and courteous discourse with NBCU executives, in order to come to some arrangement. While we may not be able to come back to ModDB (I'm hoping we can), we may certainly be able to host the mod on our own website.

100% in agreement, newman.