CurseForge Guidelines Update: Mod Cloning Ban and Copyright Compliance

Recently, popular Minecraft mod creators Iris and Sodium decided to leave the CurseForge Platform. They are invaluable contributors to the Minecraft community, providing essential mods that have enhanced gameplay experiences for countless players. We hate to see mod creators choose to leave CurseForge and wish them all the best in their future.

Their departure has led to claims regarding the cloning of mods and copyright compliance. We want to take this opportunity to discuss this issue, claims raised, and highlight the positive changes made to CurseForge’s Guidelines as a result of these discussions with our author community.

Cloning Clarified

Following the recent removal of Iris and Sodium from the CurseForge platform, other creators began publishing forked versions of these mods. Both Iris and Sodium’s creators stipulated an “open-source” license type which allows anyone from the community to re-distribute their work. As these forked projects complied with the mods’ license and didn’t violate any CurseForge Terms of Services, they were approved by the CurseForge moderation team and were published on the platform.

These events kicked off a series of fruitful discussions with the Minecraft author community, resulting in valuable feedback. Some authors believed that the purpose of the license is to indicate what is and is not allowed. Therefore open-sourced projects are meant to allow forking, and it’s the responsibility of the authors to protect their work by selecting the right type of license. While others felt that interpreting the open-source license by the letter of the law does not take author intent into account. Authors who use open-source licensing to allow others to add to their work, did not intend to allow outright cloning and redistribution of their mods. It became clear from the discussions that the current set of guidelines concerning forking open-source licensed projects and cloning did not cover all edge cases, and clarifications were needed to resolve that outright cloning is not allowed on CurseForge.

Updated Guidelines

We have updated the CurseForge moderation policies, and added some clarifications to make it clear that:

• Outright cloning is not allowed on CurseForge, unless you have explicit permission from the content owner, even if their license allows that.
• Publishing a fork to an open-sourced licensed project, must include functional in-game changes.
• In any case, re-using someone else’s work (even with permission) requires creators to include due credit.

We’ve also introduced a new type of “report a project” form, specifically focused on copyright infringement. This form could be found here.

Conclusion

• Following the discussions held with the authors community the forked clone projects were removed from CurseForge
• Moving forward, outright cloning is not allowed on CurseForge. Future projects that do not meet the CurseForge Guidelines will be rejected by the moderation team.
• We encourage authors who believe their projects may have been compromised in any way to submit a Copyright Claim in order to resolve the matter as swiftly and fairly as possible.

We’d like to thank our passionate community for continuously working with us to improve the platform and ensure its guidelines are supporting a healthy ecosystem. Thank you for helping us make CurseForge better.