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There was a recent controversy, and a heated exchange in the betatesting forum, which might have gone largely unnoticed, and I think the topic itself is pretty important for the community. The whole thing starts here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19282-cleaning-up-the-neighbourhood-beta/?p=430318 In essence, mapper copypasted portions of his previous map into a new one, along with portions of work by another mapper, with changes ranging from slight/cosmetic to none. Two examples: Since I was the only one speaking up in that thread, I'd like to hear our mapper community stance on such practices. First, does this even constitute reuse, remix, or adaptation? It looks more like a collection in CC definition. And, is there a way to protect your work under GPL/CC from such practices? (paging Demagogue...) Second, I'd just like to hear your personal opinion on this. To me, this is serious, quite dangerous precedent. It's not using abandoned work with sb else's blessing. It's also not an homage, as there's little creativity being shown here. This is copypasting and slightly tweaking sb else's work to speed up your mapping process. To me, it's self-degrading and admitting creative failure. Doing it with sections of your own map might just be poor taste and your personal matter, but doing it with someone else's work? That's whole another level. Do we have to start protecting .map files somehow, or have some kind of community guidelines in place on this?

As suggested, here is a thread for the following status update chain: As I take it, we could possibly make some content protection setup for authors by using the encryption hooks in our zip libraries. To what degree we would cater to that is hard to say but I am on the side of making it easier for semi-pros or professionals to release TDM missions without fear of losing their assets to the community. That said, missions can include distribution clauses in the readme so you can still legally enforce your ownership of custom assets in your pk4 pack. Obviously we would need to carefully review the license terms if the mission author wanted us to include these non-free assets in the core mod but if their request is that only TDM can use the assets then that's no different than the many commercial texture assets we include that have non-commercial clauses that don't allow TDM to simply offer them as a Texture Pack (etc). Edit: Thread closed. See discussion here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18924-securing-assets/