A heads-up to modders

[Guest]

For those who aren't aware of this, modders in specific just a heads-up for you.

 

For those not familiar with IMVU, it appears to be a instant messaging program which uses 3d avatars instead of a regular 2d image.

 

I was alerted by Schadeljager that one lovely member of their community is currently passing off modders' oblivion mod work (which I'm sure a few people know of) as their own, namely scythes mods and a lot of armor mods. Not only that, but cultbrain's sauron armour set has also fallen victim to this thief.

 

You can see the items he is selling (yes, he's making money) right here. I find the comments he posts along with them quite amusing, as he really seems to be sucked in by his own lies.

 

"All the items available or buying from me,

my creation by the divine powers,

made by unbreakable materials to ensure perfect usage."

 

Now onto the legalities.

IMVU have a Product Flagging Policy in which it states that if your work has been plagiarised you can contact them via post or fax, but with me living outside the US and not owning a fax machine (and quite frankly not willing to pay money out of my own pocket for the postage) i've found alternate means of contacting them.

 

The only email address that could be found for them that wasn't either billing or development is clare@imvu.com (ironically the development email is for questions about making your own 3d assets, or stealing, you know, whichever) . If anyone else finds their work on this person's page and feels the need to email them as well, then do so. Hopefully this should raise their awareness levels about potential theft, seeing as they have no real countermeasures in place. Except of course the original owner stumbling across said items, which is not good enough frankly.

 

I don't mind people using mods and making their own but stealling another's work and making money off of it, is quite fairly overboard.

 

Here is the link to where this guy is selling other modders' work.

 

http://www.imvu.com/shop/web_search.php?manufacturers_id=295841

[LordJerle]

Technically anything developed for a Bethesda game is their intellectual property, including mods, though, so that could be a pain in the ass.

[Guest Donkey]

Actually only vanilla stuff falls under this category. everything else not made or used within the esm is your property. So if you create new animations from blender, your own skeleton etc.. those belongs to you not bethesda.

 

Why else would people spend 100 of hours modeling new stuff. only to give it away free to bethesda ?? they could have earned money by now.

[Guest]

For the most part I can understand why modders would sell their mods, but to be honest, I feel, that selling something as simple as a armor mod or weapons, is to me pointless.

 

I won't pay for a mod for a game that I'm playing and thus I don't sell my mods, they are free to the public as long as you just add my name to your credits it is fine.

 

It makes sense that modders do this, countless hours,days, months have been spent on it and you'd like to have something back, but having people steal other modders' work, claiming it as their own and making money from it is un-acceptable.

 

As characters like these that make modding not worth the effort, as these type of people can't make something out of their own, and fail at everything else. Hopefully the admins of the site would do something and get the idiot to stop selling other modders' mods as his own.

 

But alas, he is one of thousands.

[Guest Donkey]

If they are selling anything esp related, that is crime since they are technically stealing from bethesda now.

 

As for models no they are not allowed to sell anything that is not created by them. I am sure when bethesda is aware of this they will be taken down quickly. there was someone who was only showing footage of how great oblivion looked in Crysis engine and bethesda made a lawsuit against him. For only showing of stuff..

 

And he did not even use anything from oblivion but made all models from scratch... So that was weird..

[Guest]

That I actually saw. Dunno what was actually the problem with him doing that, guess they couldn't handle it that someone could get a better look than what they could pull off.

 

But for the most part, seeing idiots like this making money out of other people's work just makes me sick, but he is most likely one of thousands that are doing it.

 

Then again, when one actually decides to release something to the public there is bound to be something like this happening, and on top of that for the most part when you do something like this, you some how agree that this will happen, whether we like it or not. So far the admins of the site haven't done anything to try and stop this guy, so I doubt that anything will be done soon.

[Guest GingerTom]

"Then again, when one actually decides to release something to the public there is bound to be something like this happening, and on top of that for the most part when you do something like this, you some how agree that this will happen, whether we like it or not."

 

For awhile I was putting music up on fast and furious--an album a week: http://www.jamendo.com/en/

 

But I've stopped now--might go back one day--anyway even though it's free to download everybody's music (but not use it commercially uless you pay for it) I realized some one would probably steal mine if they liked it enough--I just made up my mind I wasn't going to worry about it.

 

Reason I'm mentioning that site is because some people have taken the music on it, mod it up, and post it on TesNexus.

[Tregarin]

Stuff for free:

Don't click that fucking link! It's a malware installer. (thank goodness I run my browser in sandbox... fucker can't touch me, but it might get someone else)

 

Anyone else want to kill the fuckers who do this shit?

[Guest]

Stuff for free:

Don't click that fucking link! It's a malware installer. (thank goodness I run my browser in sandbox... fucker can't touch me' date=' but it might get someone else)

 

Anyone else want to kill the fuckers who do this shit?

[/quote']

 

Yip, I would like to burn the retards who always screw up the good things out there with their bullshit. There are many who would like to blow these people's pc or burn them to the ground, may I say I'm one of them.

 

I''ve had my fair share of malware, viruses and all the crap that comes with it. Luckily for them there is always someone better who counter their stupidity, no matter how idiot proof we make something, the world would always be one step ahead.

[Guest Donkey]

Saw that yesterday, did not put much attention to it, only found it a bit strange response for a thread like this. Real problem is you can still ban them but if they are using proxy they could easily return again,

 

Not even sure why so many sites even allow proxies they could easily ban it, if your hiding behind one looks like you got something on your plate. Spammers usually hide behind it to bypass banns etc..

[Symon]

(Puts on professional hat)

 

Because there are a lot of proxies out there and a huge number are entirely legitimate, like the four hundred odd I run. Most websites don't want to keep out 200,000+ users. Further, some ISPs require their users to use their proxies/accelerators to access content, or will provide such proxies as part of the 'parental control' service.

 

In short, a proxy is a tool like any other and you can't really make any assumptions just because there is an X-Forwarded-for header in the http request.