There's a bit of a fuss going on in the sim racing community right now. A website called RaceDepartment—which serves as a hub for many a sim racing game—took down many pages of content containing mods for a pair of Codemasters Formula 1 games as well as Reiza Studio’s Automobilista following a cease and desist from the sport's commercial rights holder.

RaceDepartment was hosting mods for F1 2013, F1 2014, and Automobilista that let players update their games so that the cars look like this year's machines (rather than several years out of date). But those mods were unlicensed by Formula One World Championships Ltd, which owns the commercial rights to all things F1 (including TV broadcasts, online videos, and video games). That's riled a few people up, if this hyperbolic (and sometimes-profane) rant at Pretend Race Cars is anything to go by.

However one feels about unlicensed game mods, it ought not to be too surprising that the content has been removed. For one thing, RaceDepartment's terms of service unambiguously state that copyright and trademark infringement isn't cool and even tells users that "When creating or uploading free to use mods, car skins, helmets, cars, tracks etc users should seek official permission first from the copyright or trademark holders," something that didn't happen here, since Codemasters is the only organization with an official license for Formula 1. And being able to update a two- or three-year-old game to the 2016 season isn't exactly helpful to Codemasters either, giving gamers one less reason to pay for this year's game.

Nor should it be surprising given FOWC's attitude toward protecting its intellectual property. The organization is renowned for removing videos posted on YouTube by fans. And even in the ultra-exclusive Paddock Club (the VIP hospitality at F1 races that costs several thousand dollars per person), the back of each pass warns the bearer that they're not allowed to post videos or photos of their experience to social media accounts or elsewhere.

What's more, this isn't the first time this has happened. In 2014, similar C&D letters were received by other sim racing communities over the hosting of unlicensed game mods, suggesting that while their talent might run deep, memories run short.

Some see this as an own goal scored by Formula 1 at a time that the sport can't afford more negative publicity. The first race of the season took place last weekend in Melbourne, Australia, where a good race—something of a rarity these days—was overshadowed by the fiasco that was qualifying. As I wrote last month, the changes that the sport's governing body made to Saturday's qualifying format were extremely ill-advised, utterly ruining what was until then probably the most exciting part of an F1 weekend.

So bad was qualifying that something almost unheard of in F1—unanimity among the teams—broke out, demanding a return to the old format for the next race. But in a surprise twist—and despite that unanimous opinion that the changed format was bonkers—we learned that the plan is instead to double down and try it again but this time hope for a better outcome. (This reminds one of the definition of insanity...)

Still, even if one disagrees with the governance of the sport—a charge which now extends to the actual F1 drivers following the publication of an open letter calling for a new way of doing things—it's difficult to feel too much sympathy for the unlicensed modders. After all, what did they think was going to happen?