Originally I didn't want to reply to this thread any longer, but this needs to be addressed, I believe.
Perhaps I was too vague, thus the confusion.
First, why 'political correctness' and not 'simple decency'?
For a simple reason. It is a new trend for some companies to sue independent modders when they feel too protective of their work or franchise. Previously, the case was completely ignored by game developers even if the credit wasn't given at all.
'Political correctness' because officially listing ANY copyrighted content is a suicide. It's all grey moral area here. The reality is that when you use as least copyrighted material as possible and don't advertise your mod to rip work of professional companies, there is a high chance nobody will bother you and ask this site (twcenter.net) to delete the forum section of X mod and delete download links.
Why suicide? Because it is usually more offending for these companies to see independent modder shamelessly claim to 'steal' their work and build something 'better' on their base, yet alone release that.
When you don't use too much copyright materials and don't boldly admit to have used them, nobody bothers. Usually companies have some line of tolerance when it comes to what they deem to increase their profit (get more fans interested in LOTR gaming franchise) or decreasing their profit (because someone made a mod for other game which gives free access to majority of paid content from their own game). Plus, rare cases when they see modders as competitors.
Well, you mentioned EA textures.
Allright.
What about other 'stolen' textures, models or anything? What about 'stolen' movies? What about 'stolen' music? You don't investigate that, no, because you don't want this mod to be bare bones with incomplete units, art and music.
Instead, you focus on one single, documented case such as Shredder's, and articulate your posts the way that it might almost seem that he is the sole scapegoat to take responsibility and be mocked for not giving credit where it's due, when there is much more than that in other areas of this and other mods.
I can't really see how focusing on punishing Shredder is going to improve the situation. Look around, there are tons of cases like that, just less visible.
We are modders, we don't have time and resources to make all the content we need on our own. Look at Broken Crescent. You do realise how much copyrighted music they have there, just to get the 'Middle and Far East' mood right? Do they do that for profit or to annoy the companies they 'steal' from? No, they include this music for your own, perverse enjoyment, so you can enjoy it while playing the mod. There was a case recently with BC when some tracks got removed ... well, guess what, only the ones identified. If I wanted I could identity the remaining 90%, but I didn't do that, I wasn't the one responsible for bringing it to surface either.
In this case common decency is to shut your eyes and ears and don't shout 'thief!' as long as the mod in general isn't a complete rip-off of work of prof. companies, but it merely fills the gaps to complete the experience.
You talk much about double standards ; to some extent I agree with you. It's grey moral area. The staff of these forums has a tough job, because they are forced to mercilessly ban users and remove content BOLDLY violating the copyright. But, when such content is a mere 5 or 10% of the entire mod (often less), the particular modders are given some slack. Don't see, don't say. Everyone benefits, yes?
I will try to put it as simple as I can - unless you want to start an inquisition over these forums and get us, modders in trouble for giving something back to you for free you can enjoy at your own discretion, let this topic die. Let it die, because we all know very well that some common-decency rules need to be broken if our mods are to even advance from the stone age in terms of development and polish. Don't even mention contacting professional companies and asking for permission to use their content to create a mod or stand-alone game ; there were very few cases when this worked and I could count these cases on the fingers from my left hand. In all other cases, this only gets people in troubles.
We don't have professional graphic people to create the entire quality content we need on time ; but this is usually least of issues. The biggest issue is with music, on rare cases a mod can find independent music composer to do some tracks for them for free and give his blessing, but in majority of cases you would hear only vanilla tracks over all mods. Would you want that to happen? And more importantly, did anyone over there was stupid enough to boldly admit to using copyrighted material? It would end up in a revolution eating it's own children ; 80% or more of all mods would get deleted, their users banned ; and those who talked so much about decency and transparency would have a wide range of 'almost vanilla' mods to play.
About double standards yet again. Don't you think it's double standards to focus attention on single modder and mock him for what he do, but be completely blind on all other cases of copyright infringement?
Credits for "borrowed" EA material? Moderator opinion requested.
Re: Please tell me there's a good explanation, because this does NOT look good...
ing do. Ideas and inspiration of others are always used by other people to help futher their own gain. Good example of this is comedy. Comedy is not orignal anymore. It's just comedians now baseing their work off of the successful work of others. TV shows are another good example of how nothing is orginal anymore. All TV shows use the work of previous shows as stepping stones to be more successful then their predecessor.
Originally Posted by Yarrum
s sake. DG had exactly the same reasoning as why he stopped letting the modification of his models and textures, because people took it for granted that they were there to be accessed, and when it was simply requested that people ask before they modify, there was uproar, so no more Rhun modification.
And what is the end of this 'shocking finding'? Aren't the ingame movies copy pasted into the game? Screenshots? Music? Lore? Middle Earth map? Text on the ring? Those things are just as bad aren't they?! 
