Reports came in yesterday that the lead developers of  Grand Theft Auto modding tool OpenIV which allowed players to create singleplayer mod were issued a cease and cease and desist presented by Take-Two Interactive. While we did know that this was announced yesterday, we did not know the reason why.

Apparently, it is because  OpenIV allowed players to create mods which caused online harassment to be done because of malicious mod creation. “Take-Two’s actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately, OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interferes with the GTA Online experience for everybody. We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.”

The developer talked about this cease and desist order on GTAForums:

On June 5th, 2017, we had received an official Cease-and-Desist letter.
It clearly says, that with OpenIV we “allow third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify that software in violation Take-Two’s rights”.
Yes, this letter is illiterate both technically and grammatically (really, they don’t even bothered with proof-reading the text).
Yes, we can go to court and yet again prove that modding is fair use and our actions are legal.
Yes, we could. But we decided not to.

Going to court will take at least few months of our time and huge amount of efforts, and, at best, we’ll get absolutely nothing.
Spending time just to restore status quo is really unproductive, and all the money in the world can’t compensate the loss of time.

So, we decided to agree with their claims and we’re stopping distribution of OpenIV.

While most of the community is highly against this decision and it counts negatively towards the company’s reputation, it would seem that this decision will not be turned. For more updates, stay tuned.

Source: PCGamer