We feared that this day would come… And now it’s here.

The day, when GTA modding was declared illegal.

GTA modding had long and glorious history.

Since GTA III, people have created lots of different mods: from simple texture replacements to impressive full conversions.

And the modding always was a “gray zone” — a battlefield between lawyers and PR…

For almost ten years of OpenIV development, we had tried to play as nice as possible and even more:

Strictly following of Civil Code of Russia (only reverse engineering for interoperability).

Only clean-room reverse engineering.

No distribution of original data and code.

And absolutely no messing with Online…

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.

Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we’ll get absolutely nothing.

Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can’t compensate the loss of time.

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.

Discuss on GTAForums

With many thanks for all modding community for all your fantastic creations,

OpenIV team.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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