As EA's EULA clearly says, any mod made for their games requiring their copyrighted content belongs to them and not the modder. They used to enforce that and would have sites that sold Sims mods shut down, but they got lazy in recent years and just let it slide I mean Paetron can say its "donations" all they want, its a pay wall, so EA could go after them but they probably fear alienating those who actually pay for the game and all the penny pinching and unneeded expansions.
That's interesting, so by that logic i wonder, does this make EA accounable for all the mods made for the game? I mean, not that it's illegal but with these mods you can turn Sims 4 into a torture, murder and rape simulator, that's way too messed up for EA to get itself associated with, since they consider a simple sex mod as "disgusting". Not that they'd take credit for it, but by that account, any mod that is made for Sims 4, regardless of content within, technically belongs to EA because the game and it's engine itselves are their copyrighted properties. So I guess thanks EA for letting me simulate gang rapes with bdsm kinks on Sims 4.
I'm fine either way as long as both games and mods (even patreon content) can be pirated and is indeed pirated thanks to Russians. Altough i pay for some animators to support their works, I knew that EA's TOS dictates paywalls such as patreon is only allowed if the actual content is to be released free anyway and paying is only to get early access, which is BS in most cases and many animators have patreon only animation packs.
At some point, it becomes pointless for EA to chase every modder who's out to earn a few bucks out of their work. EA games are already expensive, it costs +550 usd to have sims 4 and all it's expansion packs (2 months of mininmum wage where i live), so why bother with a modder I tip 3 dollars a month, it'd take 15 years for me to pay a modder the amount of money the entire sims 4 collection costs. And not all modders and websites are from countries where justice system and laws care about copyright and EULA infringements. I for one know that courts in my country wouldn't care if i modded EA games and sold it for profits, they'd only care about the income taxes i pay, and couldn't care less about an online agreement between me and an american company, especially if that company has no branch or representation in this country.
I wonder if Bethesda does the same or not, since they're the most modding friendly developer company out there. Though I haven't heard of any Skyrims mods being sold while there are tons of Sims 4 CC that is hid behind a paywall.