I've been reading this thread up until about the 35th or so page, too much work to read the rest of it. (Yes, I created an account just so that I could post on this issue).
I was really looking forward to playing A3L, got through the application and interview processes at to which point they took no interest in anything to do with anyone that hadn't donated... It's basically them saying f**k off and come back when we've got your money.
Now that I've read (most of) this thread which I learned of via PsiSyndicate last night, I wanna see these thieves taken down with force, which brings me to my point of this post; more licensing issues...
Basically, we all know that anything with a patent or copyrighted name will require direct permission and a license to use outside of that company/person's ownership/intellectual property/blah blah blah (recalling the post about Crytek's bus)... Which made me think about the cars they're using; more explicitly the well known manufactures such as Aston Martin, Ferrari, McLaren, ect. Every game which uses these manufacture and model names requires the given license from these companies; all the big racing simulator games have these (Forza, Gran Turismo, Test Drive, ect.)... Now I remember Test Drive Unlimited 2 having a major licensing debate with Ferrari stating that they were not going to give them permission to use their name in their game due to some kind of PR issue about them having Lamborghini in their game, long story short; they were worried about players buying more Lambos than Ferraris so they said it was either one or the other (Ferrari eventually prevailed). Obviously Arma and BiS don't not have the required licenses to use these names within their game, other wise I'm sure they would have properly branded vehicles as stock, and obviously they means that any mod created using replicated vehicles is in breach of copyright for obviously not having said permission, now; whether that'll come back to bite devs like A3L in the arse, the modders who created it, I don't know; but I'm sure it'll have repercussions for BiS for knowing allowing mods like this to continue with unlicensed copyrighted vehicles... Truth be told, I don't have much knowledge regarding issues like this, and I'm not sure if it's already been brought up... But if Ferrari are willing to refrain from distributing licenses for matters as trivial as TU2, then well... What'd happen in this scenario?
I'm basically going out on a whim here and it's all assumptions, so correct me if I'm wrong in any way, as I said, I'm not too knowledgeable on this issues.
