Take-Two Interactive has sent out a cease and desist letter to the Russian programmers who designed OpenIV. The Delphi programmers used their spare time to create OpenIV to mod GTA IV and GTA V. Now that the cease and desist letter has been issued to the OpenIV team, they’ve had to take the tools offline, which means no more modding of Rockstar Games using the OpenIV tools. Effectively, the entire GTA V modding scene will die.
The news went live over on the OpenIV website, where the developers explained…
“On June 5th, 2017, we had received an official Cease-and-Desist letter. It clearly says, that with OpenIV we “allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights“. Yes, this letter is illiterate both technically and grammatically (really, they don’t even bothered with proof-reading the text). Yes, we can go to court and yet again prove that modding is fair use and our actions are legal. Yes, we could. But we decided not to.
“[…] So, we decided to agree with their claims and we’re stopping distribution of OpenIV.
“It was a hard decision, but when any modding activity has been declared illegal, we can’t see any possibilities to continue this process, unless top management of Take-Two company makes an official statement about modding, which can be used in court.”
It’s completely possible that others might design their own alternative version of OpenIV, but it would take quite some time. The team had to crack Rockstar’s encryption and it took several months before proper mods could made for PC.
OpenIV was used for both GTA IV and GTA V. It was absolutely necessary for GTA V given that no other tool could break through the encryption process that they used to ban the use of mods.
Rockstar had stated at one point that offline single-player mods were okay to use, and cosmetic mods wouldn’t get you banned from GTA V. A lot of people claimed that they were still getting banned, and Rockstar made a statement a few days later stating that they supported modding in GTA V.
Apparently Rockstar may support modding but Take-Two doesn’t.
And before pro-corporatist leap in to defend Take-Two’s decision, OpenIV was specifically used for offline, single-player mods. Unfortunately this was not enough for the Take-Two lawyers, and they decided that they could force PC players to spend more money on new items by prohibiting the use of mods.
Eventually, as Rockstar updates the game and makes older versions of OpenIV obsolete, so too will your mods become obsolete, and then after you’ll be stuck with the vanilla version of the game.
Some modders are now stepping up to take the place of OpenIV, and as usual, there’s also a petition on Change.org attempting to gather people’s attention in order to save OpenIV. Surprisingly they haven’t suggested using a GoFundMe to pay for the OpenIV team’s legal costs, but maybe they’re testing the waters first with the petition?
