Originally Posted by Xrystal
Hmm, was just reading the Elder Scrolls Online EULA to see what it says about reverse engineering etc. And I found this little titbit in there.
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That's actually in there to protect Zenimax from add-on writers. If someone writes an add-on that provides a simple, useful function, and later Zenimax adds that function to the vanilla UI in a similar way that the add-on writer did, the add-on writer could sue Zenimax for stealing their add-on to put in the vanilla UI. (This is true whether ZO got the idea for the feature from the add-on, or not. All the plaintiff would have to do is prove that ZO could reasonably have been exposed to the add-on. George Harrison got slapped down by Ronnie Mack's publisher on
exactly this grounds.) Remember that whole fraught thread about copyright law between add-on authors? Those concerns apply to Zenimax too. This is their answer.
This is also why many franchises hate fanfiction -- it's not because they want to quash their fans' creativity. It's because they don't want their fans to sue them for "stealing their ideas" to make money.