Let's say I'm doing an Indie sports game, and ship it with fictional players, but make the game capable of reading a config file, so that players are able to edit in real names to suit themselves.
The game is a free multi-player, peer-to-peer (p2p) game, and so once the game is published, there is no central server authority which controls what the players are doing, thus allowing them to mod the game as they please.
What's the legal situation with something like that? The file is literally just a plain text file with some names in it. I would imagine that if I were to host that file, and have my game download and consume it on start up, that would be unacceptable, as it would be the same as shipping the game with real player names?
So that makes me wonder, would such a file be illegal for people to share? If I were to make such a file, and distribute it to the community via a forum, would that be illegal? What about if I didn't do that, but a customer did?