Over the months, Flightsim.to has become a well-known and trusted, #1 go-to source for Microsoft Flight Simulator add-ons and mods of any kind. Today, we are hosting more than 10 thousand brilliant add-ons and liveries, which elevate the in-game experience of Microsoft Flight Simulator to an entirely new level. A few days ago, a third party developer launched a new payware aircraft - Captain Sim's Boeing 777-200ER, as you probably already know. Like with all other aircrafts, users and creators started to create paintings and liveries for this third-party aircraft, allowing other users and customers to improve their in-game experience by flying an airline carrier of their choice.
However, yesterday we received a legal takedown request prohibiting us from hosting user-created liveries for the B777-200ER. Captain Sim points to their license terms and claims that they are the rightful copyright holder of all liveries. To this end, the company refers to their - in our opinion - highly questionable license terms which includes the following:
- Paragraph 4: All Free Liveries for the 777 Captain III must be published via ACE only. No one is allowed to publish the 777 Captain III Free Liveries elsewhere.
- Paragraph 9: All Free Liveries for Captain Sim products remain a property of Captain Sim.
That said, the company is claiming that all liveries created for the Captain Sim B777 are property of Captain Sim and they can withhold these from distribution at their own discretion. As much as we would love to continue hosting your liveries and admire the hard work creators have put in these, it seems that Captain Sim wants to avoid users publishing liveries for their products to any platform other than their own. In our opinion, this is definitely a wrong path to take. However, we legally have to investigate and probably follow the request, as Captain Sim threatened us with further legal action, if we do not take down all liveries.
Unfortunately, we cannot rule out the possibility that we will not be allowed to host B777-200ER liveries in the future, and we will probably have to disable all uploads for this aircraft. We will implement the necessary measures once the legal investigation is completed. We kindly ask you - for the moment - to not create any more liveries for this aircraft, if you intended to upload them elsewhere than on their ACE platform.
Flightsim.to is used to friendly collaboration and good contact with third-party devs. It is all the more unfortunate that a developer wants to limit the sharing of free content and claims unrestricted ownership of all user-created contents.
Link to their terms: https://www.captainsim.com/products/rkcopyright.html
almost 4 years ago