As Azrael said, you can't regulate someone destroying a map and spreading it on bnet. As I said before, you can find unprotectors anywhere online. There's no need to have a huge discussion on this when it doesn't matter. You guys created this rule, and it shouldn't change just because SC1 is dead now. That doesn't make any difference towards the matter. Of course, I don't care if maps are unprotected, but the "times have changed" reasoning has no place in this discussion. And as I, as well as many others I'm sure, have been thinking, who gives a fuck? Just leave it as is; there's no reason to change the rule.

Yes, which is what we do already and would continue to you do. Your claim as I understood it was that enforcement against map editing and stealing was more or less possible dependent on whether or not SEN allowed unprotectors.

It is already impossible for SEN to stop someone from using unprotectors regardless of where the unprotectors originate from. Whether or not we allow unprotectors here has no effect on what goes on at other sites or on battle.net

... After SEN provides means to do things they are already doing?

Furthermore, SEN would not be "giving anything out". Users would download something here instead of using another website or the superfluous middleman of a search engine.

Also, please stop referring to me as if I were SEN. It is making this more personal than it needs to be.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 30 2012, 7:46 pm by Mini Moose 2707.

To this I respond once again:

Also, in the end, unless SEN is ready to take a stance against private property, I do not think that unprotectors should be tolerated. As Azrael and Devlin mentioned, the Trigger Viewer achieves the educational purpose we want the unprotectors to achieve.
The only reason to support unprotectors would be to actually believe that a map is not the property of its creator.

It now seems to me like the in-between point of views are hypocritical.
But that is just one of those "sudden realizations" and I might be wrong.

Obviously, however, if there is a vote, I personally am in favor of the tolerance.

What part of "this has no benefit whatsoever" is so hard to understand? The fact there is no benefit means there is no reason to do it.

What part of "you have no right to decide for other people if they're allowed to keep their map protected or not" is so hard to understand? The fact it is a violation of mapmakers' rights means it should not be done.

This shouldn't even be a discussion.

As for "It's impossible for us to stop it": It is possible to not contribute to it. Being unable to stop something doesn't mean you should condone and even aid in doing it.

This is wrong on so many levels, for the many reasons provided by the numerous people who gave them, which seem to be ignored for the sake of pushing an agenda that serves no positive purpose for anyone and is completely unnecessary in every way.


This.

How is this rule too old? What has changed in the last 3 or 4 years that should make this rule inapplicable anymore? If anything, we all know tons more about mapping than we did before, so we shouldn't even need to unprotect maps. We all know how to do (almost) whatever is done in whatever map is uploaded here. The age of the rule has nothing to do with this. SEN's always been a insanely strict about things like this, and it doesn't make sense to get rid of it. You guys are the ones who implemented it; you might as well stand by it.

I like this analysis a lot.

Our debate is on the legal right, or the moral right? It seems to be about the moral issue more than anything else, but... If we're talking legal rights, it would imply that we either tolerate both protectors and unprotectors, or ban both of them.

Just sayin'.

EDIT:
You have a pretty twisted vision of what democracy is I guess. (Not saying SEN is a democracy though. *wink wink*)
It's not about the mods imposing the vision of things they had a few years ago, it's about the mods doing what the community mandated them to do. If the community says it doesn't want a rule to be applied anymore, then so be it.
If you can't understand that any act of questioning an established order is legitimate, I will not try to debate about this issue with you anymore. Or bring it to the shoutbox.
If people would think like you, we'd still be living within a society that doesn't recognize women's rights and that advocates slavery (though I could argue we still do, but that's another topic).

That has never happened here on SEN. Almost everything we've suggested has been shot down.

Please stop making analogies that are so far-fetched and unrelated to the topic that they don't even have any meaning here. Oh, and obligatory 'nice strawman because that's definitely what I said.'

I made a lot of maps and not a single one was stolen. Nobody is going to steal anything in a meaningful way. I'm actually against the way of thinking in that something you make can "be stolen" in the first place.

In all my time spent here at SEN, I've used unprotectors more than protectors. Out of that time, every single moment I needed an unprotector it was an annoying hassle to go find it somewhere else. All in all, Azrael is stubborn and doesn't understand or accept much outside the realm of what he wants.

Seriously? You're asking how people could have published knock-off versions under my name, if I had made the map unlocked and included a request in the triggers? Wow. I'll try and explain it to you...

The people who were knocking off my map, sticking my name on their lame work, would continue to do so if it were unprotected. They can easily ignore a polite request in the triggers - after all they went through bigger hurdles to unprotect it in the first place (for a while, there weren't any tools that could unprotect tinymap).

That's like telling Prada to put notes in all of their handbags that say "please don't pirate our designs".

Because there's a good portion of players, I'd estimate 60% from my experience, that don't just join games of specific versions of the map, they just join any game that has a familiar name. I already covered that in my post, by saying there were some people who actively avoided the knock-off maps (especially after I told them they were knock-offs), but most people didn't. And it's not solely a question of "making people happy"; it's these lame knock-offs tarnishing my reputation. Again, if they had renamed the map something or made it clear that it wasn't an official version, I wouldn't have minded nearly as much.

I wasn't defending it or saying it was a good thing; the question was asked what legal rights map-makers have to their work, so I pointed out the legal right that exists. It attaches automatically to everything that is created, unless you specifically opt-out of it.

Just to be pedantic, "open source" just means the source code is distributed/available upon request. Nothing more, nothing less. What you're confusing here is the GPL license, which is an open source license that requires all modifications and derivative works to be distributed/made available upon request. But there are many other types of open source licenses out of there, notably the LGPL (lesser-GPL) and OpenBSD licenses that give you the right to retain all modifications and derivatives, as well as use them for financial gain.

If you had actually attached the GPL license to your DS maps, then you could legally engage the free-software-foundation to help you prosecute those that didn't comply with the license.

Of course. This particular protector just does things that other ones don't; which isn't too hard if you're the only one still in active development. In particular it munges the MPQ, the only things I found that could open the MPQs were SC (obviously), Staredit and an old CLI MPQ editor program that hooks into Staredit to open MPQs.

So you wouldn't see it as 'stealing' if I hacked up Ancient Forest and Grumpy Monsters to remove your credits, replace it with mine and tell everyone I created it?

Cecil, I (as well as others) have cited any number of facts outlining what is wrong with this idea, there hasn't been a single good argument for this proposition, others have cited experiences that differ vastly from yours (and mine have as well), and numerous other people (including this site's administrator) have posted against your position.

I have no idea how you thought a personal attack against me would possibly help your position. Let me try, maybe I'll understand it then.

All in all, Cecil is just stubborn and apparently doesn't understand the discussion at hand, possibly due to the fact he hasn't opened a map editor in over two years. He has not been a StarCraft mapmaker for a long time. Why he even considers himself relevant to this conversation is anyone's guess, but clearly focusing too much on StarCraft 2 and forgetting that Brood War even exists has left him incredibly biased on the subject. This doesn't explain why he insists on violating the rights of active mapmakers (which is a group he isn't a part of) with zero benefit to anyone, including himself. I guess we can just contribute it to irrational stubbornness.

Except I haven't opened the editor in years, focus completely on SC2, and have only ever really finished like 3 maps in the 10 years I made maps on StarCraft. Theoretically my opinion should be invalid then as well.

Actually my position on this is that SEN should host unprotectors, in particular this one (since it also has a protection method with a password).

My main justification is just pragmatism: for all of Azrael's fallutin' rhetoric, it doesn't change the fact that these tools are readily available online anyway and people are going to download them and use them, if not from here, then from elsewhere. Actually hosting known-good (eg, non-virus) versions on this site would be doing people a service.

It's the same argument I use for legalised abortions: I don't really care about the rights of unborn fetuses etc, because I know there are people in the world who would have a different opinion to whatever opinion I had, and that people will want to get abortions for a variety of reasons. Making them illegal or restricting access doesn't actually help anyone, only harm people. So might as well just make them legal. In that sense, I haven't really given a lot of thought as to the rights of the mother vs rights of the child because IMO it's irrelevant: people will demand abortions no matter what my opinion is and there is clear evidence that restricting access to them leads to negative consequences for individuals and society as a whole. Generally though I'm in favour of the right to choose.

Guys.
Please.
Stop.

If SEN doesn't allow unprotectors, you can always go to another site and download it. If SEN allows unprotectors, we're seen as immoral people who don't mind stealing other people's work. I think the better option is the fist one.

It really concerns me how little all of you have actually discussed in the last four pages. The only things anyone has talked about is ethics, copyright, and murdering people/enslaving women because we don't mind unprotectors.

All in all, we all suck at arguing. Lanthanide seems to be the only one bringing something new to the table. As Merrell said in the shoutbox a few days ago in regards to Serious Discussion, "the stupidity blows me away."

That's irrelevant since it doesn't affect the tens of thousands of maps which have already been released, over a thousand of which are uploaded here already. The protection method can also be bypassed anyways.


That supports the fact that it's totally unnecessary to host them here.

Also, your logic is brutally flawed. Same logic applied: Porn is readily available online anyway, therefore we should host it here.

No, just no.

We don't need to aid in map theft. This is a site for mapmakers. We should not assist in violating mapmakers' rights.

And this "education" angle is completely absurd. There are plenty of avenues for "education": Trigger Viewer (which is a map unprotector that doesn't allow map theft), the Mapmaking Assistance forum (where I've made demonstration maps and triggers on many occasions), and the Wiki (which you can update if you feel it is somehow lacking).

There are literally no benefits whatsoever to this idea.

Well you see, DigiPen has full legal rights to Ancient Forest and Grumpy Monsters. I don't own it at all, much like everyone here owns nothing of the maps they make.

Think outside the box. We could rig up a script that went through all existing maps, if they were protected and the author/uploader is no longer active, run them through the protector on this program with a unique but default password known to the SEN administrators. Then if these people ever come back, they can be supplied the password by the SEN administrators.

This in fact would IMPROVE the protection on these maps in the DLDB, because only the only methods to unprotect them would be this program + the password, or manually editing the HEX etc. Whereas the moment, most maps protected in the DLDB can probably be opened by Osmap without much hassle.

It means hosting it here doesn't really affect availability at all.

No, because the site administrators can easily choose what should be hosted and what shouldn't be hosted based on whatever justification they like. Justification "already on the net" works in favour of hosting the unprotector, but justification "already on the net" does not work in favour of hosting porn.

Humans actually have brains, they aren't rigidly bound by logical constructs like computers are. They are free to add further rules and justifications as they see fit, as well as act irrationally.

Taking your mechanistic logical view from above, this means this entire thread should be deleted, because we're discussing the existence of unprotectors, therefore assisting in violating mapmakers' rights.

We have copyrights on our creations, regardless of what Blizzard's EULA says (which has not been tested in court).

You basically sidestepped the question though. I asked you if you'd care. You didn't say yes or no, you talked about the strict legal ownership of the item being discussed.

Oh sorry, to answer your question directly: no it wouldn't bother me. I'd bring it up to DigiPen and let them handle it. The point of me making that project is to show to future employers, and it won't really matter if some random nobody tries to steal it.

Presumably you would feel the same about a game you made for commercial purposes, to derive an income from, given your blanket statement that you don't think people can steal other people's creations.

I think it's pretty obvious that the reason so many of us don't care if our maps are stolen is because they are non-profitable. Of course, if money was involved, I'm sure everyone would care more. I don't give a damn if someone steals one of my shitty maps because it's not like they'll become rich and famous off of it. And please, don't mention IceFrog, because something like that would never happen for a Brood War map anymore.