Die all stats thieves!

(For those of you who also read the holonet - sorry for the double post, but this sort of stuff really hacks me off - and I want to make sure that scumbo dosent get away scott free).

You know what really, really, REALLY pisses me off - Stats thieves. Folks who just swoop in and snatch up your hard work and pass it off as their own. My first, hard lesson with this was ages and ages ago, with my write-up of the TIE Phantom. I put it up on Jae's mailing list, and suddenly every web page on the planet seemed to have the stupid thing - typos and all (If you are going to steal, at least SPELLCHECK for god sake!). And not a lick of credit, thank you very much.

(First, before I rant - I don't hold the editor of the Jedi Handbook at fault. They probably just took the submission and cut and [pasted it into the document. The editors have no clue they are a patsy)

*SIGH*, well it's happening again - a little more blatantly, this time. In the Jedi handbook there are several Force powers submitted by Kelly Kollman - Calculate, Direction Sense, Instinctive Navigation, Time Sense.

"But, Tony-" you say, "isnt it possible that Kelly came up with these powers all by his/her self? It's not like you have a stranglehold on originality, you know." Fine - great, I freely admit that great minds often think alike - and that it's not only possible, but DAMN likely that someone would come up with something very close in concept to what I produced. I understand this, and frankly have no problem with this. However - stealing the product note for note like he did is just wrong.

Lets go to the tape, shall we?

Ok - that's close, but not quite 100% mine. If it were just this one, I'd chalk it up to an overactive imagination - but there's more.

 

There, there. I sympathize with you. It's hard to be so creative and watch your product stolen. But what to do? That is the real question. All you can do is take it with a grain of salt, and remember that in a way, it is a flattery. The only other thing you could do is not publish your character stats but keep them for your own personal use in personal games.

I too created a wonderful character about seven years ago now, and her name has been copied and copied and copied. What was once unique is now used on a lot of forums I come across, ie, hotmail, ezboard postings, almost all free websites, etc.

I know that doesn't help you much. Sorry

 

Thanks - the support makes me feel a bit better. The ranting and raving dosent hurt either.

Of all the problems of the internet, of the endless '404 page not found' errors and porn sites up the kazoo - this is the biggest problem of them all. It's just so damn easy to cut&paste, or to FILE->SAVE AS any piece of work out there.

Vigliance is the order of the day, I guess.

 

I hear where you're coming from, a friend of mine who's a shadowrun nut made a website with ton's of stuff for australian conditions only. Within a week, there were four sites with exact copies, he considered getting yahoo-geocities to make them take it down ( there was a clause in his contract that made anything he put up on geocities their (yahoo=geocities) own copyright material), but stopped when the four sites stopped being maintained and became out of date (like going from 2nd ed to 3rd ed, same thing but diferent game)

 

I feel bad for you. That has to suck.

 

I'm pissed off. You wanna see something blatant?

http://www.homestead.com/swkf/home.html

Yeah, take a look at that site, then take a look at SWRPGNetwork. Me and Armage busted our butts trying to make SWRPGNetwork a quality site, and this is just a slap in the face.

 

Oh my god - that sucks beyond suck! Ok, I had some ground to stand on - but that, that is just SHAMELESS! I feel your pain.

Why dont you mail homestead.com and get them to pull the page? Oh wait. Damn - that wont work, they'll just put it back up on geocities or tripod or something.

Some sort of legal sounding cease and decist? There has to be leagal form letters somewhere on the net that you can use.

Perhaps just mailing the author and asking him what the hell is up?

 

Wait - I've got it! Go to http://pub37.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=3093666474&cpv=1 and lets have this discussion on his BBS! If you'll be unable to get him pulling his page (or changing the look) then perhaps we can shame him into submission.

 

I mailed him pretty much telling him how shameless a ripoff it was, but he won't take it down. I don't know what else to do, but hey, I just think it will make him look bad. Especially since he pretty much copied some of our stuff verbatim...

 

>>>Especially since he pretty much copied some of our stuff verbatim... <<<

Did he steal any of the actual stats? I didnt look that closely to see if he did or not. My Vexation with stealing the look of you guys prevented me from continuing on.

 

That the same thing happened to my friend, he now uses CSS and asp so he can hide most of the code on his page. But that is shocking, blatant ripoff, worse than anything i've seen before

 

An interesting twist to this story occurred today. I got an e-mail from this guy's BROTHER....basically, he had warned him about copying our page, and encouraged me to try to get it **** down. Weird.