GTA and the ESRB
I just have a quick thought on this. The ESRB re-rated San Andreas because it had an inaccessible sex mini-game. Now, the issue seemed at the beginning to be whether the sexually explicit content was created by the modders or the developers of the game. Rockstar was claiming the content was created by the modders. I’m not sure if that makes a difference to the ESRB, but that was Rockstar’s defense. What’s the difference between a modder creating new content for a game and accessing previously inaccessible content? There isn’t one. The modders are still essentially adding content to the game. The inaccessible content already being on the disc is a meaningless technicality. The ESRB may as well rate games based on mods for them. Do they actually want to do that? I hope not.
There may be an interesting intellectual property argument here. For example, does the modder damage the intellectual property of Rockstar. I think that he or she (I think he in this case) certainly does in this situation, since the mod is being used as a means to change the accessibility of that property.
That could be true. Rockstar has claimed that the mod is in violation of their end user license agreement. I don’t think they’ve explained their reasoning for that, though.