Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat

[Urwumpe]

I have to rant a bit today. We all know, copyright infridgements can also happen here. We have a nice little paradise of an internet community here, but sometimes, bad things happen. We have forum rules for dealing with such accusations, and usually, the moderators are pretty sensible to it.

But, then, I started to notice a behavior, that I consider extremely destructive. Somebody makes an add-on of a really existing spacecraft. As we can expect, similarities to other add-ons of this spacecraft will exist. Copyright infridgement could be hard to tell, unless it is directly obvious.

Still, people feel they need to attack the criminal. Worst of all, they can't even prove it and don't even try it. They just claim it looks too close to XYZ to be original. An add-on looking like the original and looking like another add-on of it.... impossible. Must be copyright infridgement. Bring tar and feathers. It is a modern digital witch hunt.

Where is the burden of proof? Sure not on the side of the accused add-on developer. How could he? Just adding a signature in the unmapped part of the texture or creating artificial errors in the texture would not be enough. The only person who is responsible of providing evidence and documenting the argumentation is the one who accuses. And even then, it is no reason to do this in public. If the user is wrong, the accusation will still persist in the public memory, and the user will not have to publicly excuse his zeal.

So... please calm down. Don't believe it is a copy, prove it is a copy - against all reasonable doubt. Don't create a storm by jumping on the discussion like "Hey, a copyright infriger, I also dislike this, I will also blame him without providing any evidence".

Really... it annoys me. Not that it is not possible that a new add-on developer might have gone the easy way. It is possible to happen and it will happen. But if you have no evidence, don't burn the new developers publicly. This gives the whole community a very bad name.

 

[Loru]

I fully agree that such matters should not be done in public. There is a report button in any post and it should be used to solve that kind of situations.

Yes. Sometimes bad things happen like this time and staff misses a questionable post and fails to defuse situation in time.

I can assure that we'll look at this issue carefully.

 

[Urwumpe]

I fully agree that such matters should not be done in public. There is a report button in any post and it should be used to solve that kind of situations.

Yes. Sometimes bad things happen like this time and staff misses a questionable post and fails to defuse situation in time.

I can assure that we'll look at this issue carefully.

This wasn't actually directed at the O-F staff, which does the best it can, but rather at the community. It would also be much better, if the O-F moderators would not even need to defuse such accusations.

 

[4throck]

There's confusion between copying, cooperative development and improving upon something.

The people in the music business have sorted this out long ago.
If you play other people's music, you give them 50% of the €€€.

Here we an apply the same criteria. Each repaint will pay 50% royalties. Since they are all free... Case closed. :lol:


On a more serious tone, this can be solved in part by having a model history or multiple authors by add-on on OH. Categories such as repaints/updates/derivatives might also help.
This happens with sc3 dependencies for example. We need the same for add-ons. That way the original work is always mentioned as such.

 

[Face]

On a more serious tone, this can be solved in part by having a model history or multiple authors by add-on on OH. Categories such as repaints/updates/derivatives might also help.
This happens with sc3 dependencies for example. We need the same for add-ons. That way the original work is always mentioned as such.

A good point. This is another advantage of a dependency model like what COI represents. There you also have the ancestry and appropriate credits embedded in the system.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

With the sheer amount of data available I can see where this might become a continuous problem. What I mean is, there is virtual cornucopia of reference material due to the internet. For my Cosmos I found hundreds of pictures that I can use as baseline reference material for my textures. Now if I use anim8tor for the mesh(which I did) and paint.net to develop the textures (did that too), and another developer uses the very same reference pictures and similar mesh building techniques (because we both learned from ar81's tutorials), it will stand to reason that our projects might be similar. Depending on what drawings we used, the might be very similar (to the point of being virtually identical).
I stopped my (slow) work on the Angara because what I had looked really similar to what scorpious released a few weeks ago. So, he beat me to it, his looks really good and works great, so I don't need to finish mine.
If someone wants to do a repaint, they should state that it's a repaint while giving props to the original. And on that note... Who did the textures for the stock shuttle stack?

 

[Urwumpe]

Who did the textures for the stock shuttle stack?

Initially Michael Grosberg.

The Orbiter was later modified by some guy called Don Gallagher. I really don't know who this is. Maybe Donamy knows it.

The external tank mesh and textures had been done by Damir Gulesich.