[blockquote][b][url=/profile/Aysleph]Aysleph[/url] said:[/b]

I was actually a part of that "content theft". I did credit the original user for his idea but I didn't ask for his permission to use it prior posting my comment so I ended up deleting what I contributed to it. My apologies.

[/blockquote]That takes balls to admit. Happy to see you made the right choice!

[blockquote][b][url=/profile/Legion]Legion[/url] said:[/b]

8.* Do not repost content from this site:

1) That is not yours
2) That you do not have explicit permission to repost
3) That you do not give proper credit for in the repost

Failing to follow this rule will result in an immediate ban.

- Legion

[/blockquote]

Because I'm apparently stupid at English I'm going to ask for clarification. Let me be clear here. I'm 100% in support of any measures against content theft. I'm just concerned and slightly confused about the wording of a rule that is likely never to affect me.

Okay. By my reading (word of the law), an offense needs to hit four "triggers" to trigger a ban.

1) A member of this community
2) takes someone else's work from this community (tamrielvault.com)
3) and posts it elsewhere
4) without credit to the creator

By this yardstick it seems to me to be rather limited in official scope. Obviously when it comes to people who lurk (i.e. not members) and steal stuff from here and post it elsewhere, beyond asking them in the "elsewhere" (or the elsewhere admins) to take it down, you can't do anything. That said, there are a few other weirdo cases that I'm not certain about.

The new rule states clearly "from" this site. This is intended, right? So a theoretical thief stealing from another site and posting it here is not (technically) covered by this rule? Not that you should do this anyway, of course. If it is technically covered, should the wording of the rule be clarified?

In conjunction with that, we have a huge number of character builds that use a huge amount of art made by random artists on the internet - mostly probably without permission. If the rule is amended to cover the above situation, how does that affect art in general and such content in particular?

[blockquote][b][url=/profile/Henson]Henson[/url] said:[/b]

What was taken? Did the thieves have the Perfect Touch perk?

[/blockquote] This discussion was stolen. They kinda' did actually!

[/blockquote]

Guys, is this for real? Let's take a step back and think rationally for a moment. If this whole "community alert" is over a freaking forum game, this is unacceptable. Plagiarism is VERY BAD. But "stealing" a generic game that has been posted on hundreds, if not thousands, of message boards since the early 1990s is NOT content theft. If you see someone stealing your story, your build, your T&T writeup or mod spotlight, yeah that is messed up -- it's plagiarism. That should not fly, ever (and as far as I know, it never has here, regagdless of written rules). But if we're talking about banning people over a silly generic off topic game that wasn't even conceptually created here, that is beyond unreasonable.

Apologies if my opinion offends anyone here, but despite having largely drifted away, I still want the best for the Vault like any of you, and totalitarian and over-generalized rules like this aren't in ANYONE's best interests. I hope y'all reflect on this some more and consider my input, and feel free to reach out if you want to chat more.

[blockquote][b][url=/profile/Noodles]Noodles[/url] said:[/b]

The ban is initially temporary and it comes with a message instructing the person to take down what was stolen. Failing to do so will result in the ban becoming permanent. Otherwise, if the condition is met, the ban is revoked.

[/blockquote]

Ah, okay. That seems much better than an instant ban.

Are we talking about the discussion word for word stolen, with all the riddles or are we just talking about "borrowing" the general idea of that discussion?

Wait, you mean that the riddles thing wasn't a joke? In that case I think we'd better also qualify "what sort of content can we expect this rule to apply to?"

I think it's also worth asking, was it like one riddle, or the whole lot of them, or somewhere in between?

If you were serious about the riddles thing... I find I'm trending more towards Teccam's opinion.

The entire discussion, or just the riddles?

@Karves - The discussion itself was taken word for word, not sure about the riddles themselves but the very first sentence on the stolen discussion is the following and then it's word for word what's in Rogue's thread.

Copying RogueSilver's idea from the TamrielVault, this is th RIDDLES OF HUMILITY!!!!!

@Teccam - I get your point, and there is a little bit of a difference between using an idea for a game and stealing content normally. However, it is a little bit different when you have a discussion that is taken word for word from somewhere without permission, that's where you get into territory that in my opinion is stealing. If the wording was different, it was given a different name and if it didn't cleary say that it was copied from Rogue I would say that it's a different story and nobody would have noticed, brought it up or otherwise mentioned it. I feel that at the moment it is a grey area. I don't believe an argument can really be made that something wasn't stolen from Rogue and I'm sure people can always argue for weeks on weeks about whether or not it should count as content. 

That said, I do believe it's good that we now have a rule in place to stop content theft. It's a little weird to think that technically there was no official rule in place about it. However, I do think the rule could use a bit more refinement as Soly mentioned, especially the fact that we need to make it clearer that posting content from other sites is equally unacceptable and will result in the same punishment, that the method of banning is what Noodles mentioned rather than an instant perma-ban (because I think they are two very different punishments).