Am I Allowed to Upload This?

[minngarm]

The way it works is when you make a mod you have copyright on it. Legally you have the copyright on it. Other users require your permission to use that mod as part or a base of their own. Now if you don't care you typically write in the permissions that you do not have to be asked. If it does not expressly say that, they have to get your permission first. Beth, and the Nexus will reinforce this without the original mod author having to even know about it because it keeps them out of the muddy legal waters to have a harsh silence is not consent practice.

 

So yes you need permission to upload them if you are using others mods as the base. If you make your own mod entirely from scratch that works independently without any other mod, then you can upload that and have copyright yourself.

 

Note: None of the above has any bearing on you and joe making the same type of mod in the same type of way when neither party was aware or attempting anything nefarious. Duplicate ideas in separate mods is perfectly acceptable, but if it is found you are skimming ideas from other mods that is another thing entirely.

[DexesTTP]

Ok, so let's step back and talk from a purely, no-ethic-involved legal PoV about mod contents and content in general.

Ideas
This section is based on this stackexchange question
An idea can't be copyrighted, trademarked or even have a precedence. You don't really "own" an idea you had.

Except in one case : patents. Any idea that is patented can only be reproduced with approbation and/or fee from the original patent beneficiary, and any idea that isn't protected under a patent is available for anyone to take freely without even mentioning the original author.
This works due to international laws, and is limited to "non-broad" ideas that implies an actual way to implement something. E.g you can patent the idea of "touchscreen using pressure-detecting crystals that change their resistance when deformed" but you can't patent "touchscreens" or even "pressure-detecting crystals", because both of them aren't implying an implementation.

Design
The design is an improved form of an idea. It basically comes down to an idea + the work done to make it doable. A design can be patented, but if it is not, well...

 

As of now, it is unclear if design falls under Intellectual Property. You might have heard that Oracle is suing Google over the use of the Java API on Android, because Sun (bought by Oracle) put time to design the API while Google just took it and implemented it. Once this trial is settled, we will have an answer with an official precedent (in the US at least), until then nothing can protect your designs except patents..

Implementation
Now, this is the thing that always falls under intellectual property, provided some limits.
An implementation is everything "created"... A written story, a drawing, 3D models, lines of code, to a whole mod. It is supposed the author put time to create his implementation. Because it was in the original question, this does include any values or "small" results the author might have created.... might

This doesn't always work though. There is some implementations that can't be attributed to someone, much like ideas and patents. I probably can't e.g. write a 3-sentence story and CC-BY-NC-ND it, because I would probably not "own" it per say, but it depends of the story. The "basic idea" behind it is that the author had to provide effort to make the implementation, so that it can be considered intellectual property. So if the author just slapped the value there and called it a day, then it isn't their IP. However if they studied which value is the best to go there before putting their mod out you'd need to ask them for a right to use their IP.

 

 

Either way, all these things can only be settled by justice in court. Even if you copy a mod and put it somewhere else, the only thing the mod author can legally do is sue you for theft of IP (which is pretty expensive to pay for, so be careful).

 

What usually happens though is that the mod author reports you to the website managers, who will then refuse to host your mod due to the assumption that it is stolen IP. Note that there's no need for them to justify this : they can decide to not host any of your mod if they want to just because they don't like you, after all it is their website. (footnote : discrimination is them not wanting to host mods from a "class" of people like e.g. russian, transgender or black-skinned - not just you, and "free speech" simply doesn't apply on a website.)

 

 

Now, to go back to the original point : can you "copy values" from lots of mods, bundle them together and call it your IP ? No. And the funny thing is, this isn't your IP because you wanted to copy the mods, not because you used the values.

 

At the same time, if you decided to make a "fix all" bundle and slapped the same values than everyone out there without trying (e.g. by studying the values and finding them yourself or even by pure luck), you could have called this mod your own IP.

 

 

tl;dr : ask permission for your mod to all authors whose mods you've retro-engineered. Otherwise, yes this will be theft of IP.

[noahdvs]

If it's something very simple, how do you tell if it was stolen or made from scratch though?

[DexesTTP]

If it's something very simple, how do you tell if it was stolen or made from scratch though?

 

The original author has to prove that it was stolen, usually by proving that the other person didn't have a process to get the exact same result (so he stole it from the original author), or by associating a mark on the work with another of his IP (think like artists putting their names on drawing) and proving that the IPs are independent so the work was likely stolen.

 

This can be impossible for really small things like simple values ("I found them at random" is a valid process), and that's why they usually aren't copyright-able.

 

This option is already unavailable for the OP though, because he straight up told us that he took the mods of other people.