Take-Two Interactive’s legal battle with fans who created mods for GTA has got another update this week. Back in February, we covered the major update after 18 months since the lawsuit was made public.
According to a filing for this lawsuit in February, both Take-Two Interactive and the group of GTA modders have “settled in principle” and are currently “finalizing the settlement”. This was said to take 30 days. That time frame has now passed. A new filing has been made today with an update to the situation found by @videotech_. The case has indeed settled and and the actual settlement terms will not be made public. The modders have agreed to pay Take-Two’s legal fees along with additional expenses. Take-Two are also hoping to find out additional “unnamed”
On top of that, a second filing was made today for the case. Take-Two Interactive to dismiss the modders and close the case.
What led to this lawsuit?
We first reported on this case back in September 2021 when Take-Two filed a civil action lawsuit against 5 individuals. Originally, this group of fans filed a counterclaim on GitHub a few weeks after Take-Two Interactive sent a takedown notice removal of the reverse engineering projects for GTA III and GTA Vice City.
This cause of action comes after the group filed a counterclaim on GitHub weeks after Take-Two sent a takedown notice for a full removal of the reverse engineering projects for GTA III and GTA Vice City. The group’s argument was that they were not using any infringing code and were let to believe the project was legal. Take-Two were supposed to respond to the group’s counterclaim but never made one so GitHub reinstated the project.
Take-Two took this further launching a lawsuit against them as per this filing. The some members of the GTA community have been upset by this particularly because GTA 3 and Vice City are hard to get up and running on more recent videos of Windows. They require mods and time to sort out. These reverse engineered versions made the games far more playable. We wrote a lengthy article detailing why Take-Two should not go after community members with such hostile tactics.
If there is another update to this case we shall report on it so stay tuned to RockstarINTEL.
