Middle Earth Role-Playing TC for Skyrim has received a cease and desist letter from Warner Bros. Enterprises. Development has halted in compliance with this but all is not over...
We have a lawyer from the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW) on our side, currently aiding us in our appeal for being a transformative piece...
We also need our fans to support us too, use the twitter hashtag #SaveMERP to inform everyone; friends, celebrities and journalists of our situation. As many of you will ahve seen we have caused quite the stir on almost every gaming forum around so If we can show WB how many people are behind our mod we may be able to sway them in our negotiations.
There is now also a twitter feed at the side of this moddb page following MiddleEarthsBane and AlasdairHurst. You can also show your support by liking and sharing these pages and posts on Facebook!:
Facebook.com -Save MERP
Facebook.com - Official MERP Page
Stay hopeful, and most of all keep checking on our moddb page,our facebook and our bethblog thread for more news as it happens. Also Twitter. @middleearthbane or @alasdairhurst
"There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for!"
-Samwise Gamgee
Sign our petition, and get MERP back in development! Gopetition.com
You have my Sword!
Looks like we have ourselves an oddly equipped army to do battle with :P
Muster the Rohirrim. Assemble the army at Dunharrow. As many men as can be found. You have two days. On the third, we ride for Warner Bros. ... and war.
deeeaaaath!!!
and my bow..
And my AXE!
They are afraid of you... very afraid... they know you could do it better than anything they have spit out until today...
They just don't want to endure the embarrassment that would follow, "Hey look, these guys do better things in their free time than what your guys do as full time paid job!"
They don't want competition...
Sadly this sooo hard!
What they should do is officially support them. Hire them on, let them make the game, but using another engine with the assets they've already created. This mod is going to be one of the best LOTR games that has ever been released, and they should embrace it!
If only companies cared more about the quality of the game. The hard work put into something that you can be proud of. They could hire the MERP team. Give them the support they need to finish the project. But instead, they want to kill it. Most likely because they want to throw out yet another crappy game with Lord of the Rings stamped on it.
It's sad. :/
Sad? More like pathetic! ;/
Unfortunately we only get to talk to lawyers of the publisher, not any developers. And lawyers don't give a rat's arse about games :(
**** wb
I prefer to call them "Warner Hoes"
Perhaps Whiny Bastards?
(buried)
Those bitch *** mother *******, i would kill each and every one of them. ******* douche bags can't stand people that do better job then them. You have my support!!!
Hey, just because you don't like them doesn't mean to go off the deep end.
(buried)
Yeah **** you too, go suck some Warner Bros ****, you have no place here if you defend them.
Well I am telling you to zip it with the death threats. This is a game and while a passionate project, it isn't worth going THAT far over. We don't want this being like the umpires who got death threats over baseball. And before you tell ME to bugger off, I am on the team.
(buried)
Fine bugger off, no 1 was talking to you...
I understand your sorrow but getting mad doesn't fix problems. What can and will help is spreading the word!!
MOCK their company....if violent doesnt solve the problem, you simply not using enough violent
Wow...This is dumb. This is somewhat maddening. Worst part is, it's probably because of that horrible looking LotR Xbox game they're making now, and they don't want any attention taken away from it.
You've certainly got my support, not that I can do much/anything really, and I hope this isn't the end of this mod :/
I hope WB will lose this battle
If it becomes a battle WB will win. What we want is them to turn away from the battle before it begins.
You carry the fate of us all, little one.
Ok, so with the same logic I can draw some fan-art of the Lord of the Rings characters, say a picture of Legolas, put it up on deviantart and then Warner Bros can contact me and demand me to remove it.
Totally with the same logic. There's seriously no difference except what medium I do my fan art in.
Actually, if you read the copyright law, there is a difference. The law has several complex factors.
This is like Lord Of The Rings all over again, with this project being Frodo and Sam and WB being Sauron XD
And we all know who won that battle eh? :)
Facebook.com GO LIKE AND HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
Third Age Total War was okay but this isn't? Mother *******
Maybe Warner Brothers is on their Period.
Bloody Warner Brothers ;P
A Google petition, like for the ACTA would be a good idea, no?
You can only win! "All volunteer!"
PS: You will interest a lot of people with this mod, they will have to buy skyrim for it... you could ask them!
And Mojang seems to love taking part of the small games studios, maybe mod?!
Unlike the ACTA, which violated rights, constitutions, and was generally wrong and ineffective in its determined purpose, this is a case where the letter of the law is being debated between two groups. We would never get the support of Wikipedia or other such colossal groups.
This may be a dumb question... But does Bethesda have any say in the matter at all? You're using their game after-all. If THEY could be convinced to back you in anyway, would it change anything?
It may. Or it may just get them sued :P . It doesn't matter; this situation would be a business hot-potato. They would never touch it and I can hardly blame them.
Hold your ground!! Hold your ground!
"Fans of Skyrim , Fans of LOTR, My Brothers!
I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me!
A day will come when the courage of Fans and Modders will fail, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of friendship, but it's not this day. An hour of Copyrights and Corrupt companies, with the Age of Mods comes crashing down, but it's not this day! This day we fight!!! By all that hold dear on this good Mod, I bid you to stand, Men of the MERP!!!!!!!"
Theoden: "Arise!! Arise, supporters of MERP! Companies shall be shaken, WB shall be splintered! A fair use day, A red day! Ere the sun rises!! Mod now! Mod now! Mod; Mod to ruin and WB's ending!!
MEEERRRPPP!!!"
Rohirrim: "MEEERRRP!!!!"
Theoden: "MEEEERRRRP!!!!"
Rohirrim: "MEEERRRP!!!"
Theoden: "MEEEEEERRRRP!!!"
Rohirrim + Merry + Eowyn: "MEEEEEEEEERRRP!!"
Theoden: "Forth Eorlingas!!"
Tinyurl.com
@swapper
Sorry for stealing your idea, but I thought it fitting :)
Post an email we can all write letters too to convince them in a nice way that shutting mods down is bad for buisness.
just call everything slightly different :P Rings of the lords for example :P you guys could be real ******** about it and just answer everything with O **** thats a coincidence, failing that send all work to be published (uploaded for public consumption) by a chinese member over a chinese server, because lets face it China does not give a **** about other countries 'laws' ^^ there are ways around this, I know you wanted to be 100% accurate as far as you COULD BE but... slight changes mean they have nothing.
Simply change your accounts, upload form internet cafe's that would be funny or do that once its done to multiple places.
I saw this and I thought, "Why are these guys getting a C&D letter when they aren't profiting off the mod?" Then I realized that was why WB filed it: because they couldn't make any money off this through royalties, etc. if it was free. Sad, but true.
I hope this all works out well for you guys and you get this straightened out. I would be very sad if this project gets killed because of a greedy publisher.
We stand behind you!
HOLD THE LINE
i'm just slightly concerned that it took you guys a while to share the letter with the rest of us...
anyways, I could ask the maker of skyrim mods weekly to talk about merp:D
Anything to gain exposure is awesome! Please tell everyone you can.
Well I'm not doing buisness with warner bros, that's for certain. They can shove their overprice, low grade crap where the sun don't shine.
Ack! Those greedy bastards!
Just because REAL Tolkien fans know how to make REAL quality entertainment...
If I was in your guys' situation, I would make sure that you stressed a few things:
1. MERP is a MOD.
2. MERP is NOT going to be sold
3. All of the assets being used are made by YOU, or came with Skyrim.
4. The mod is being called "Middle Earth Roleplay Project," not "Lord of the Rings: Skyrim," so it will rarely conflict with anything produced by WB, unless they decided to name their next game "Middle Earth" or something like that.
I'm pretty sure mods would be covered under the Fair Use Act as long as you use assets created by you. I've been following the MERP for a few years now and I haven't seen anything that you didn't make. Just try to keep a level head and make sure they understand what you guys are trying to do.
I think that this might be a case where the lawyers have nothing to do, and they "conveniently" stumbled upon something that might infringe on WB's copyrights. I almost consider lawyers separate from the company they work for. They're probably doing this just to keep there jobs.
Lawyers can do a lot of underhanded things, but if they want to stay lawyers for long, they can't lie in legal notifications and negotiations. So they have a case, how strong is to be determined.
And yes, the lawyers are almost certainly separate. They likely work for a law firm whose client is WB.
Layers lie all the time:) jk but usally to win a case a layer has to be baised and has to somehow stamp that same thinking process on everyone else.
Yeah, your right. I wasn't trying to say that they were making up stuff, or that they were doing it because their jobs were on the line.
(I just noticed how much it sounded like I was.)
I remember how much people where bashing on Bethesda when their lawyers filed copyright infringement against Mojang for Scrolls. So I wanted to make sure that people shouldn't boycott WB because their lawyers are aggressive.
I admit that I probably wasn't thinking straight and was a little angry, and that I probably should have put some more thought into that comment.
But like I said, you just need to stress that you are doing it with your own assets and that you don't aim to get money from it. You could maybe offer to change the name of the project if they try to get you for infringing the copyright of one of their games/products.