true, which is why i'm suggesting we all sit down in a thread and maybe agree as to where these limits are so events like those are avoided... and no offense but you yourself use connies alot (we all know you get permission) but your changes while subtle are your own. So what if someone were to cause fuss about them or any other design that shares a similarity, before someone could say its all cool people get opinionated and it turns into a flamewar.
thats how it always happens here.
Why not have a thread where the people who do all the work get the foundations laid in for some guidelines or something.
In my situation, if any one else where to approach me and say I stole their idea, it would be purely coincidental, but it would cause an arguement. However, the likelihood of that happening is very minimal, especially since I use WZ components for the most part.
However, we don't really need to get together to lay down some ground rules as to what crosses the line and what doesn't. If you really think about it, such ground rules have been laid down in various modding communities for a long time now, mostly through common sense. That's how we've always operated.
Unfortunately, there are those that don't have any sense, and will do what they want, when they want with other people's work. And most times, those people trounce out the old excuse that the original authors did the very same thing by making a copy of a copyrighted piece of material without permission from Paramount.
However, Paramount has been aware of the various communities and their work for years. If they wanted, they could have gone the route of the RIAA and sued every single mesher in the world that ever made a canon Trek ship 3D model. But they haven't.
However, in communities such as ours, if we start laying down the ground rules of what we consider plagarism, and those rules contradict most other communities' rules and common sense on such things, we're not only asking for trouble, we're going out and dragging trouble to us. Again, that's why various modelling and modding communities have a universal standard if you will, based mainly on common sense, to regulate such situations.
The problem isn't what constitutes plagarism or not. The problem is what people do to justify their acts when they're in a gray area. Again that's happened in this community before, and we all know the outcome of those situations.
