What to make of Valve’s recent fan project takedowns

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Valve)

From Black Mesa to the recently launched Portal: Revolution, Valve has had a reputation for being pretty willing to let modders run wild with new creations based on its popular games. Recently, though, a series of legal threats and takedowns of Valve-related fan projects have some worried that the Half-Life maker is going the way of Nintendo in stringently enforcing its IP rights against projects and mods that it sees as infringing.

While there are differences between the situations leading to three recent fan project takedowns, there are also some similarities that hint at the specific types of fan projects that are drawing Valve’s legal attention these days.

What’s happened so far?

Valve’s recent efforts started last week, when the company sent a DMCA takedown request to Amper Software, a team of volunteers looking to remake the aging Team Fortress 2 in Valve's more modern Source 2 engine. The DMCA notice, as posted to Amper's GitHub, focuses on the team’s use of "TF2 assets [that] have been ported to Source 2 without permission" and the "unauthorized porting and redistributing of Valve's assets without a license, [which] violates Valve's IP."