And here's the response I (GBTAW) got this evening from Flightsim.to's spokesman on their Discord channel discussion:
In response to @GBTAW "They state clearly that they do not claim ownership, copyright, or intellectual property of any uploaded content. Therefore they have no right to refuse to delete such content at the time it is requested by the content creator and owner."
Well, yes, we do. The conclusion you are drawing here is, from a legal point of view, simply wrong. Some companies would even go so far as to sue you for making such a statement because it is defamation and has no legal basis. Intellectual property and copyright are not the same as the distribution licenses you are grating pretty much to every website which intends to share your upload, and has absolutely nothing to do with IP or copyright. Obviously, not every pilot is a lawyer for a good reason and we're not blaming anyone for missing that legal understanding of quite complex terms because legal language and instruments can be complex, but it becomes quite funny as soon as pilots pretend to be lawyers overnight. It's important to read and understand the terms before drawing conclusions, and if someone draws that conclusion, to verify whether that conclusion does even match the reality to the slightest extent - which it doesn't in our case. Let me bring up this example: Ironically, I've seen some creators move their content from Flightsim.to to Nexusmods, despite their terms are exactly the same - if not being even more permissive. We've pointed out various times that terms like ours are in place on pretty much all sites that allow users to upload content, because they are required. Take Nexusmods for example:"When you upload or post content to our site, you grant us [...] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that user-generated content. In particular, we may retain your content indefinitely and are not obliged to delete your content if you so request. The rights you grant us continue after this agreement is terminated or your access to the site is withdrawn by us."
GTA5Mods has pretty much the same terms. So does mod.io - and every other website that is created for sharing mods. Take mod.io as another example:
"You grant mod.io a perpetual, non-revocable, non-exclusive worldwide right to use, reproduce, process, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, transmit, transcode, translate, and otherwise communicate and display and distribute all such User Generated Content on the Services (License). The License authorizes us to make your User Generated Content and any derivative works of your User Generated Content publicly available through the Services including for broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication on other media for users of our Services to use, share and access. Nothing herein shall restrict mandatory local copyright law applicable to you."
Our terms do not allow even 10% of the typical industry clauses. Now, does that mean that Nexusmods, GTA5Mods or Mod.io do have bad intentions in regards to the mods which users upload? No. Have they ever used any of the rights granted? No. Are these terms legally required? To run a business, most likely, yes. Has any of the creators ever complained about these terms? No.
It is tragic and ironic at the same time that we see quite a few creators have their mods deleted on Flightsim.to because we are allegedly trying to modify, rip-off and sell their files, even though our terms expressly forbid all of these things. Then they upload their content to Nexusmods though, while Nexus' terms explicitly allow both selling and modifying their file. So what we're clearly seeing here is the effect of the misinformation that has been circulating, some of which may even qualify as "fake news", because people start reading our terms, don't have the legal understanding, and think they're abusive. Compare our terms to the terms of other modding sites and our terms will sound like heaven to creators. I agree that it wasn't a wise decision on our part to introduce changes simultaneously with the launch of our premium membership though, as this obviously have compounded the confusion and concern.
Okay, this was getting pretty off topic here, but I wanted to give my five cents a go. As I said before, we don't want libraries to just be deleted overnight, even though other creators base their mods on them, just as we don't want an add-on that we recently featured in our news to be suddenly gone. Hence the deletion periods, which will be listed clearly and transparently in our terms. This is not because we're eagerly trying to generate money - To be honest, I myself couldn't care less whether a single file gets deleted or not, we've chosen this approach to protect the community from sudden deletions, and we've explained it a dozen times.The majority of feedback we have received appears to be in agreement with these suggested changes. There are still people who think this will make them lose their copyrights, GDPR rights or intellectual property, or who still might think this allows us to sell their files but unfortunately there's nothing much left to say, it's like trying to explain someone that 2 + 2 is 4 and not 5. Like people said before, this minority, who has absolutely no legal clue but comes up with GDPR concerns, is very, very small but loud. I addressed our lawyer today with the GDPR concern brought up the days before, he smiled and literally refused to answer. Guess why. Let the lawyers do their job, we will do our job, which is to serve the flight simming community, like we've done in the past three years. If you want to jump off, we won't stop anyone, but we'd advise to read the terms of other platforms first.I'm getting the revised terms done and will post them here before getting them live so you can also address your concerns to the most-likely final version. We plan to have these in effect before March 5 and users who have deleted their file can re-enable it if they wish to do so, we'll get back to you with more information soon. Please note after March 5 there will be no way to re-enable deleted files."
