If you want to be technical about it all....sharing ANY stock file from the game can be considered piracy since all of it is copyrighted material. However, since we are modding various things...that puts it into sorta a grey area and as such is open to interpretation.
I know of some companies that consider modding to be a big copyright violation...(can anyone say ea games?) where others embrace it as a way to make more money since it gains them far more dedicated fans.
Rockstar has been back and forth about modding due to the whole 'hot coffee' mod from the san andreas modding community which made them tighten down all of their games to make modding much harder...but NOT impossible.
This is just like the mega mod that I am working on. This will be modding nearly every file in teh game and to get around the whole copyright violation/piracy part I will be distributing the mod most likely in the form of one giant patch system that will patch a completely stock bully (steam or retail) and 'install' the entire mod since distributing the entire world.img can be considered a form of piracy since if you think about it....if someone was to download each of the 'file backups' one at a time from here that many others have posted long before....and put it all together...they would have a nearly complete and full working game.
I may have to talk with the staff to revise the rules regarding what files can be distributed and if they can't then work out with everyone here a very friendly method for distributing certain mods. This will make sure that anyone downloading certain files has at least a full copy of the game on their system and well...if it IS pirated...then it is their choice and I actually can understand why piracy exists....it doesn't exist for the intention to harm the companies...but rather because most companies put their stuff so out of reach of most people that piracy is the only way to even get things.....even though I have not pirated anything in ...probably 20 years now....and can get nearly anything I want free of charge or at a very good discount....not everyone can do the same thing.
