The latest offender is the Ares Expanse SOTF website, a site I like very much and find very informative. But the fact I like it and find it informative doesn't quell my outrage at its use of many of the drawings created by me and by John T. Moltz. I am not even talking of kitbashes made with the ship kits that include components from my drawings and the drawings of John T. Moltz. I am talking about images lifted straight from my site - including images of ships I invented and designed, such as the Perseus, Odysseus, and Icarus classes. Then I looked at the collection of links at the site, and of course, there's no link to mine included... even though the webmaster visited it to obtain the images.
The copyright notice on my site is very explicit and very simple. It states I have no objection to my images being used on other sites - as long as permission is asked, credit is given, and a link to my site is provided. I have yet to deny permission to anyone who's bothered to request it and fulfill the terms of my notice, and I don't intend to. Those terms don't seem like much to ask, but many webmasters seem to think they are, apparently. When I wanted to include Fabrux's Molson class on my site because I liked it very much, I asked him for permission to include his kitbash - a kitbash made with components I had drawn. Yet webmasters of starship sites can't even be bothered to ask for permission to use my images, or to meet the requests of my copyright notice.
When Paramount started cracking down on Trek sites, I thought they were being anal, and I still do. But I am not a billion-dollar corporation jumping on fans or other individuals. *I* am one of those fans and individuals myself, and I find this kind of behavior by other fans and individuals discourteous and offensive in the extreme. But I have no other recourse than to notify the offenders and ask for simple courtesy, to post something like this here... and in the end, perhaps, remove my site from the web so that it cannot be pilfered any longer.
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The Starship Encyclopedia
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"The things hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of stars!" -David Bowman's last transmission back to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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Frank's Home Page
"So, anyways, this is the 24th century. Starfleet officers have injections once a month or so so that they don't go getting each other pregnant. How would it be a problem for my character and Joral to be rocking the casbah?" - Fabrux
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Star Trek: Leeds
Creator, Producer, Only Writer
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"I Got two words for you.. S*uck it!"-DeGeneration X
Oh Hell Ya there back!
Bonecrusher
http://members.xoom.com/smartiee
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Frank's Home Page
"So, anyways, this is the 24th century. Starfleet officers have injections once a month or so so that they don't go getting each other pregnant. How would it be a problem for my character and Joral to be rocking the casbah?" - Fabrux
Laz: E-mail the guy. Make him give you credit or a link or whatnot, or tell his provider and get them to shut him down.
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"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain
And Starships really is the wrong Forum for this. Probably the OL is the best place for it. *moves it there*
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"To make the merry-go-round go faster, so that everyone needs to hang on tighter, just to keep from being thrown to the wolves."
-They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
As for posting this in the starship forum, sorry about that, I didn't even think of posting it here, as I hardly ever visit this forum. I visited the SOTF site through a link in one of the threads in the starship forum and automatically posted there.
Fabrux: Don't worry about it. You don't need to keep apologizing. Once is enough.
TSN: Perhaps a coalition is necessary. I know that WWII sites have a coalition for protecting their images and other files. Maybe there needs to be a similar coalition for Trek sites. This is an issue that needs to be addressed, and I know I'm not the only person whose images are used without permission or even stolen. Like I said before, I don't mind people using my images. It's flattering, really. But to do so without even asking is just plain wrong. If a guy stops me on the street and asks for a quarter, I'll give it to him... but it's quite another thing if he sneaks up behind me and picks my pocket.
Bonecrusher: Maybe you don't care about people stealing your work, but *I* care about people stealing *my* work. And other people whose work is also stolen care when it happens to *them*. People work very hard on the images they create, and sharing them on the web shouldn't mean they're open targets for theft. Are you saying we don't have the right to complain or "bitch" about it? We should just put up with it and shut up? Who is going to make me shut up? You and what army?
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The Starship Encyclopedia
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
The Trek copyright protection society sorta fizzled when noone got involved. *L* I suppose it can get started again.
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"You shot him! You shot him dead!!"
"Well, he was attacking me with a banana!"
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"To make the merry-go-round go faster, so that everyone needs to hang on tighter, just to keep from being thrown to the wolves."
-They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
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The Starship Encyclopedia
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
Laz: Unfortunately there are far too many sites one the web that already use your images. When I was new to the web four years ago, I found them virtually everywhere, and, naive as I was in those days, I thought they were sort of "Freeware". Quite the opposite applies to Jim Stevenson's SSD. Everyone knows the images are from his site, although he did only a small part of them himself. So he mostly gets credit.
I guess if you kindly remind people of giving you credit, they will do so in 80% of all cases. I have only one very bad experience with a guy who copied my whole starship list, pretending that it was "Paramount copyright", and stuff from three other websites likewise. When I reminded him again (the third time) and told the other webmasters, he started uttering mean insults against me...
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"Species 5618, human. Warp-capable, origin grid 325, physiology inefficient, below average cranium capacity, minimum redundant systems, limited regenerative abilities."
Ex Astris Scientia
As for Jim's SSD site, I noticed that someone submitted many of my designs for conjectural starships, using images from my site that have been cropped and converted to black-and-white. I've emailed Jim and asked him to identify the Starship Encyclopedia as the source of these designs instead of the name of the person who submitted them.
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The Starship Encyclopedia