: From the moment you distribute your Myth creations in any
: way (ie the Mill) they are the property of Bungie,
: which now means they are all currently the property of
: Take 2. Not their authors.
Unless you can point me somewhere that says that, I'm fairly positive that's not correct. Bungie (now Take Two) owns the rights to the file formats used in Myth mods, and thus any use of those formats by you, in creating Myth files, are subject to licence by their owner. While I couldn't tell you the exact licence for Myth files off the top of my head, the one Bungie has always granted before (in Marathon days) is that it's OK to use them so long as you're not making money from them.
That said however, any content that you create that goes INTO those files is still your copyrighted work. Bungie or Take Two couldn't have, for example, grabbed Under Myrkridian Standards and just decided to use it as the core of Myth 3, although I would have certainly welcomed such a proposition. (I was a writer/designer on UMS and the project lead left the project in my keeping as far as future works go; I was hoping to expand upon it into a larger scenario covering the same events that M3 wound up covering).
THAT said, however, just because you created and own the copyright to something doesn't mean you have the right to demand that people send you back freely distributed copies of your work. Your post, for example, is already copyrighted, just by you having written it. If all the forum's copies of it are lost and you want me to send you a copy from my own personal forum archives, I don't have to to so. So the Mill was just a freely provided distribution and archive service for your files; if you lost your copy that's your own damned fault, and nobody is under any obligation to send anything back to you.
All of that having been said, and said, and said, however, it strikes me - why are people bothering Clem about getting a copy of the archives? Randall (Frigidman) actually runs Fileball, created the whole thing, and unless they've got some weird, widely-distributed server farm where Clem hosts all the Mill stuff himself, I would figure that Fm would be the one to ask about getting a copy of the archives from. Not that it really matters now since Claude has said No to hosting a new Mill replacement here (not enough bandwidth with all the Halo load). But if someone else can supply the bandwidth, I'd be happy to help and talk to Randall about getting a copy, for whatever my name is still worth.
