Art Theft: Punishment Is Needed

(Unrelated note: Today is Mass Effect day on Steam, like I predicted. Go pick up the game; the first one is only $5 today. Yes, I keep mentioning this. Take the hint, maybe?)

So, I had a problem confronting me while writing this entry. Do I either focus on W-H being down, in which case it will inevitably be up again by the time this entry posts, or do I pretend nothing happened and see about writing a topic purely from my (admittedly extensive) notes with no way to double check any info? And there's always the third option, like Sea took - skipping an entry altogether. Although that was somewhat out of the question. I mean, I don't really have a reasonable excuse to get out of writing one...

What he means is that he'll take any opportunity he can to avoid his novel assignment.

Well, of course I will! I mean, who the hell wants to read about cathedral building?

Anyway... I'm going to go with the second option, since I happened to be lurking on the chat when Karl mentioned the site should be up soon. If you haven't noticed, the chatbox is still accessible - you just have to go to the login page, then the chat (via URL, of course).

Of course, without easily-accessible sources, I at least have an excuse to keep this entry fairly short. So, in that spirit... Let's talk about art theft.

I can just feel the rejoicing in all of you. Yeah... Anyway, you may relax, because this isn't about theft perpetrated by W-H itself, or any members of its staff. I'm talking about art theft by users.

Every so often some noob tries to sell stolen art on the art board. Fortunately, there are plenty of experienced users who jump on them, they are promptly reported, the thread removed, and the user punished. And then every so often we have site artists selling stolen art on the art board, and it's funny as hell to watch. Bonus points if you remember who I'm referring to (pre-hack). But again, that's not the subject here.

However, things are a bit more lax elsewhere. While anything on public forums is usually caught, as well as any fairly-well known packs (and quite a few noob ones - remember those stolen banners?), when you get into profiles, it's another story.

I'll be blunt - it's incredibly easy to find noobs with tons of art they do not own on their profiles, and, noobs being noobs, no credit given either. It's all over the place. And, honestly, almost nothing is done about it, particularly since most staff can't actually edit profiles. Back when Phoe was around, some things got taken care of, but then, Phoe came with her own set of art theft related issues. You know, it begins to seem like W-H is doomed to have art theft issues no matter what...

Aside from the obvious issue of staff not being able to do much, there are a few others, such as a lack of any sort of 'report profile' button. I'll be honest - I never really liked how the support tickets worked. There's an incredibly small amount of space, far too little to actually describe much. You end up getting inbox spam when your tickets get answered. And I never found asking for info through them was any good... but then again, that's probably just my experience; remember, most of the current staff learned a good bit of what they know about W-H from a guide I wrote.

The other relates to the TOS... again. There seem to be a lot of issues with the TOS. I mean, most sites have a TOS that's pages and pages long, covering a ton of possible situations. Ours? It's rather vague, and not very adaptable. And then we've got the widely-varying standard on how those rules are enforced, with interpretations changing per staff member. So, basically, if the TOS doesn't absolutely say 'you can't do this', then it's actually fairly likely nobody will get punished for it.

And, of course, the TOS doesn't forbid art theft. It says you can't use W-H's images, of course, but it doesn't say anything about posting images you don't own and claiming them as yours, or requiring credits, or anything. We've basically been going on an unofficial rule about it, which, if I remember correctly, was mostly defined by Phoe... great credibility there.

So I think it should be obvious we need to update the TOS to specifically forbid it, even if it should be common sense, and then take a hard-line stance on it. We've got a very large artistic community, after all - art theft is a big deal to a lot of players. It's bad enough W-H itself is involved in art theft - worse that not much is done about art theft by users on a daily basis.

These things need to be cleaned up. After all, it would make W-H (and the staff) look a lot better if they actually did something about it. It's understandable that moderators (for example) can't exactly do much about the art theft on the map, but they certainly can deal with the users, right?

The only reason I mentioned the lack of a 'report profile' feature is due to the sheer magnitude of the theft on player's profiles, actually reporting it all would spam the support ticket feature. It'd be a nice addition, but not really necessary, especially if the staff is pro-active and can go and clean this all up without us having to individually report profiles.

W-H needs to have clear rules on art theft, preferably harsh, and start enforcing them. It's really the only way to even begin recovering the site's image after all the theft on the map. Can you really object to that?