---
title: "Legal posture and the storage locker"
description: "What openmw-web does about game data, paywalls, the storage locker, terms, upload attestation, privacy, DMCA safe harbour and bundled mods, and why."
book: "Legal"
order: 80
---
This page is the operator-facing record of openmw-web's legal posture: **what we do, why,
and what must never change without revisiting the decision**. It is not legal advice.
## 1. The line we stand on
Two behaviours have actual takedown history in this space:
1. **A host serving game data to browsers.** Take-Two DMCA'd DOS Zone's browser-playable
GTA even though it carried disclaimers and required the user to own the original. The
host's serving of the bytes was the infringing act; ownership-gating did not protect
them.
2. **Paywalling access.** Skyrim Together drew a Bethesda C&D when its beta sat behind a
Patreon tier. Multiplayer itself was never the trigger — TES3MP has run public servers
for years untouched, as has OpenMW for fifteen.
Everything below follows from those two facts.
**Non-negotiable invariants:**
- We ship **no Bethesda assets**. The engine is a clean-room reimplementation (OpenMW);
the player brings their own legally acquired game data.
- **Access is never paywalled.** Donations fund the open-source engine, generically.
No tier may reference uploading, storing, or playing Morrowind data, and no tier may
gate storage size, streaming, or entry to any world.
- The demo world ships **only** the OpenMW Example Suite (freely licensed content).
## 2. The storage locker
Players may upload their own game data so it streams back to them on any device. The legal
framing is a **private backup locker for files the user already owns**, and the product
mechanics must match that framing exactly — courts look at behaviour, not labels.
**Mechanics that are legal invariants, not implementation details:**
| Invariant | Why it is load-bearing |
|---|---|
| Per-account isolation | Each user's locker is theirs alone |
| **Zero dedup** | Dedup converts "their backup" into *our master copy*, which is the whole distinction |
| Encryption at rest | Ordinary custodial hygiene |
| Streaming only to the authenticated owner | No public URLs, no sharing, ever |
| Vanilla-manifest gate on upload | We accept only the retail files the user attests to owning — arbitrary uploads are refused by construction |
| Export + delete on demand | It is their backup; they can take it or purge it |
Relaxing any row above re-opens §1's first takedown pattern. Do not do it without redoing
the analysis in §6.
## 3. Terms of Service (click-through at account creation)
The ToS must state, in plain language:
1. The user **owns a legally acquired copy** of Morrowind (and any expansion they upload),
and their uploads are **personal backup copies of their own files**.
2. Uploads are **private to the account**. The user grants only the limited licence needed
to store the files and stream them back **to that same account** — no other use.
3. Prohibited use: sharing account credentials to distribute content; uploading files they
do not own. Violation terminates the account.
4. No warranty of continued service; the user may **export or delete** their locker at any
time.
5. Disclosure that an email address is stored for account and contact purposes, and
processed by our CRM (see §5).
## 4. Upload attestation
At **upload time** — not buried in the ToS — an explicit, unchecked checkbox:
> These are my own backup copies of files from my legally purchased game.
The attestation is logged with timestamp, account, and manifest hash. That record is the
evidence trail; a ToS clause alone is not.
## 5. Privacy and the CRM
- The **email is contact data**, never an identifier in gameplay. It appears in no wire
payload and on no peer-visible surface — only in the owner's own profile view. (Enforced
in code and asserted by a test that scans a peer's entire message inbox.)
- SSO deliberately requests `openid profile` only and **never an email scope**; accounts key
on `(issuer, subject)`. The email is typed by the user, not harvested from a provider.
- CRM (Attio) processing must be **disclosed in the privacy policy**, with a separate,
**unchecked-by-default** marketing-consent checkbox.
- **Delete-my-data** purges the account, its character docs, the username index, and any
queued CRM upserts (`--delete-account` covers all of these today).
## 6. DMCA §512 safe-harbour checklist
All four prongs, completed **before** the locker is reachable from the internet:
- **Register a DMCA agent** with the U.S. Copyright Office. (Cheap, online, and safe
harbour does not exist without it.)
- Publish a **takedown policy** and a `dmca@` contact on the site.
- Adopt **and implement** a repeat-infringer termination policy in the ToS.
- Ensure **no direct financial benefit** attributable to stored content — see the
monetization invariant in §1. This is the prong our own donation copy could most
easily break.
**Attorney review is required, not optional.** The locker model has favourable precedent
contours (user-directed storage, per-user copies), but this is exactly the fact pattern
where a real IP attorney reviewing the ToS, the attestation flow, and the holding entity is
worth the fee.
## 7. Mods
We ship exactly two mods, both mesh/texture optimizers with no Bethesda-asset
redistribution concern of the §1 kind: **Morrowind Optimization Patch** and **Project
Atlas**. They are bundled as a streamed BSA (`openmw-web-assets.bsa`) that overrides
vanilla meshes only — no textures ripped from Bethesda's own data, and no ESP/ESM records.
The BSA loads for every player who brings their own Morrowind, single-player and
multiplayer alike; it does nothing on the free example world (nothing to override there).
Redistribution rests on the **authors' permission** for these two mods; their licence
terms are the operative right, and this community treats violating them as radioactive
regardless of legality.
Any future mod that is **derivative of Bethesda assets** (upscaled or repacked textures)
stays bring-your-own permanently: author permission does not clear §1's first pattern.
For the licensing obligations of anyone hosting the bundle, see
[Self-hosting: Licensing notes for hosts](
/openmw/docs/self-hosting/#licensing-notes-for-hosts).
