piracy?

[LHammonds]

Regarding the amount of piracy, nobody is going to be able to provide an accurate statistic. The publishers will bloat this number to epic proportions and pirates will downplay it the other way and John Q Public

 

Just so everyone knows, greywaste has been quite helpful behind the scenes to bring light the scumbags trying to take credit for other peoples work so it is a pointless argument to try and tell him what and what not to do in this area. Riven1978, you seem to wanting to pick a fight but failed to understand that what greywaste was saying...which was that he chooses which battles to fight.

 

When it comes to reporting files having stolen content, you really need to bring some proof to the table. It can be fairly easy for us to verify that an Oblivion mod contains content from a DLC in which it does not require the DLC since most of us have Oblivion and the DLCs...however, if a mod contains content from another game (The Witcher for example), the staff may or may not have the game and chances are even less favorable that we mod those games and have or know how to extract the content.

 

Basically, if you think a mod contains illegal content, please try to do the research if you can so it can be handled swiftly. If you cannot verify the claim, we may not be able to verify it either unless we have access to the source material. We typically will not take a mod offline unless we have proof or are fairly certain during an initial look-over in the evidence. It is best that we investigate most claims assuming innocence until PROOF of guilt. But even then we have to weigh evidence such as the person being investigated might have been given permission to use assets from another mod which might have obtained the assets from another mod or another game on another site which obtained the sources illegally. There is a difference between the person knowingly ripping content and claiming it as their own and somebody that was given permission to use assets under a false pretense that the asset was from another modder.

 

LHammonds

[urbex]

The banning can seem excessive, but if the nexus isn't clear about it it will just get the point where piracy related threads infest the forums and it actually becomes a problem.

 

Common senselessness: Going to a virus ridden website to spend 3 days downloading a copy of the game uploaded by a hacker and playing it only to find someone who was seeding it had tampered with their copy, therefore causing a broken disk. 3 days wasted.

 

Thats how i see it. ;)

Please, don't make false claims. Pirating video games is bad, but making up stuff is worse.

 

Thats how i see it. ;)

Edited April 13, 2011 by urbex

[Riven1978]

In all honesty i was and am not trying to "pick a fight" with anyone, I am just tired of people saying that this site is knowingly (or even unknowingly) allowing illegal content and turning a blind eye (which is what i was reading in his post, my apologies for that) However regardless of how much he has done for the site in that matter i cannot agree with his statement about how valuable or popular a modder is as a basis of which "battles to fight" I don't care who it is, if they are in fact knowingly ripping content I say get rid of them (which in all fairness this site does a great deal of, which can be seen in the Banned/Strikes posts) which as you stated can be extremely difficult to determine. I myself keep my games very limited due to the fact that i really don't like a great deal of the games out there, so I myself in the area of confirming or dismissing a person on ground of piracy am a poor "role model". However I have been accused of such behavior in the past (and acquitted of the accusation) is why i keep an Image of every permission i get for defensive measures against such accusations.

 

Greywaste I offer you my apologizes for the "attack" I misread your meaning and am deeply sorry for that. Although i don't agree with some of your grounds, i do wish to offer my thanks in your part in helping weed out some of the reprobates that seem to plague us. All i want is to be able to have a place I can share the stuff that i enjoy doing with others with as minimal worry about the idiotic portion of society trying to ruin it (I am not so naive to think that there is a total escape from such people)

[Herculine]

I've been a Nexus member, both premium and not, for a couple of years now. I'm not gonna lie; I've never read the entire TOS word-for-word. Nonetheless, it didn't take very many visits to the Forums for me to figure out that the staff of this family of sites takes a stern stance against piracy, whether it be of retail material or of another modder's works. Furthermore, the term piracy by it's very definition should indicate to one that it's illegal. My point is this: whether you believe video game pirates are somehow justified like some sort of Robin Hood or you understand that it's illegal and simply have no moral objections, stating in any public forum that you possess contraband materials is just pretty stupid, wouldn't you agree?

[Telyn]

Different people will have different sources they trust. I went to some trouble to find one I felt was both knowledgeable and had no economic reason to be biased, because, like the author I am about to link, I felt that various groups have inflated their positions on all sides.

 

This is a report on game piracy at Tweak Guides, by someone who actually has the experience in both games and economics to be interesting on the subject. He also has nothing to gain financially in either direction, according to him. I believe him. You may not.

 

http://www.tweakguid...m/Piracy_1.html The author happens to be a trained economist.

 

Here is his disclosure regarding potential bias:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full Disclosure

Before going further, I must explain some relevant facts about myself. At 37 years of age, I've been gaming for over 20 years now on a variety of platforms including the Atari 2600, Amiga 500, Nintendo 64, and of course, the PC. I currently game exclusively on the PC and do not own any consoles. I've written over 40 different detailed tweak guides covering a wide range of PC games and various versions of Windows over the past seven years. I am not sponsored by any hardware or software manufacturer of any kind. I am not involved with The Scene, nor do I receive any income from any piracy-related websites. I was not paid or sponsored in any way to write this article. In short, I have little incentive to write a biased article. I feel I'm as qualified as anyone could be to give a balanced view on this topic, free from any commercial interests in either side of the piracy debate.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Edited to add a possible bias in the above report. The following comment is by Telyn, not by the author of the piracy report above:

I perceive that the author may indeed have a financial interest which could cause bias, but I do not believe any bias caused by it would affect his position on piracy. Allow me to explain. He does sell a product called The TweakGuides Tweaking Companion: Deluxe Edition. That edition contains no information which is not also available for free on the site. It just provides some convenience features and extra pictures, apparently. He has not put any DRM on it, and given his report, he surely knows it will be shared and has chosen to go with the honor system nonetheless. The bias I see is that it is in his interests if PC games continue to be made. Whether they are commercial or free should not affect his finances, since he could still write TweakGuides and sell deluxe editions. So his financial bias, if he has one, would probably be to promote the survival of PC games, but there shouldn't be much financial impact him whether games are paid for or pirated, as long as there are PC games that can be tweaked. My guess is he probably does not make much money from selling the Deluxe editions, or hosting the site. The financial impact on him would probably not be that big even if PC games stopped being made, but I am speculating here based on having seen public financial disclosures of other popular game sites.

[greywaste]

well in regards to your 2nd point you yourself said

the site does technically have illegal content on it too

um how do you know it is illegal if you didnt actually open the files themselves to see? 0.o

 

Against your 3rd point where you said

Thirdly I don't own some of the games involved so can't always offer concrete proof

if you can't provide the proof then how to you know it is illegal content >.<

 

In response to your

So yeah, do I really want to rat on people who are far more valuable and popular on a site than I am anyway public/style_emoticons/dark/tongue.gif ?

um yeah i would rather get one idiot gone than the whole site to have to go down because of one or two people that can't apparently read the rules or use common sense when posting something up

 

And lastly i have two concerns with this statement

The ones I will make extra effort on behalf of however are the scumbags who post daz/poser files that are expected to be paid for, since thats taking money straight out of people's wallets.

I for one am planning on using Daz/Poser content they do make stuff that is free to use you know? And how is posting someone else's stuff from one game into another not taking money out of someones pocket? stealing is still stealing regardless of how little or insignificant the matter being stolen is

 

Thanks for clarifying for me LH :)

 

Any of the first points you're welcome to pm me about if you want further explanation on

 

As for Daz/poser stuff, firstly I should have bolded the "expected to be paid for part" since I'm well aware they have a big freebie section - In any case, unless you know how to bake normal maps and optimize meshes I wouldn't bother, they just don't look good enough to justify the polycount and framerate hit most of the time :tongue: The time's better invested in learning to build, UV and texture your own stuff as I've found out.

 

Game content vs commercial models and textures?

Well, keep in mind that a lot of the oblivion ripped stuff is from games that are completely free to play, now obviously, one is expected to use the assets in said game only In most cases, but I just can't rationalise taking an asset from a game being comaparable to taking an entire product - If they've pirated the game to get the assets then sure, you have a point. but not everybody does go out an pirates a game just to grab a model or two.