Paid for mods just never seems to work as smoothly as Valve wants, does it? In the latest iteration of Valve's attempt to let others sell their mods for cash so it can take a small cut, the first big DotA 2 mod that gave itself a price tag, Roshpit Champions, has been found to contain content from other modders and the creator has had to apologise.
Nothing major was lifted, but there were a number of in-game items that the creator clearly hadn't created themselves. Indeed one item appeared to have been taken directly from World of Warcraft, which could open up Valve even to some potentially murky legal waters - Blizzard is one of the few publishing giants that would have the financial backing to be able to threaten Valve in any meaningful way - not that it would gain much positive press from doing so of course.
The person behind Roshpit Champions, Ryan Caioppo, did attempt to claim that when content was submitted to the DotA 2 Steam Workshop, it became the property of Valve, which is not the case at all. After this was pointed out to him and other players ragged him for a while on forums and subreddits, he finally apologised and promised to remove all icons nabbed from elsewhere, from the mod.
He's also apologised to the modders for using their content without permission.
As Kotaku points out though, this seems like a problem destined to resurface in the future. Mods are about building content on top of content, of standing on the shoulders of modding giants. But when you make money from any of it, it becomes so difficult to figure out who's is who's and who owns and earns what.
It's very messy.
