Freeware means that it is free for your to get. Without the need of payment to aquire. Something that is not sold. Free of charges. Doesn’t mean free to take credit of other people’s work and reupload it somewhere else without permission. The therms are on the website, if people want to read they can read it, if they choose not to and direspect them, it is going to be their problem once their website is taken down.
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Actually it is the reversed of what you said. Even for open-source software, no license means the author has full right for their creation and basically you cannot do anything with the source code other than reading and using it. Adding a license opening up more opportunities for people to do more (not less) with your content, for example, modifying, redistributing, monetizing, etc.
People that fill in the blank however they want don’t care about license system anyway. A minority of those are still nice people that really don’t know and just need a bit of education on the topic, but I can’t say the same about the rest.
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Wow, I didn’t think this issue would affect my content, as I focus on bush strips in the Ozark Mountains. Looked up some of my strips, and like you, they are posted on websites all over the place on sites I didn’t even know existed. Pretty crappy.
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All of this talk about copyrights and intellectual property is, I’m sure, true, but the truth of the matter is that you will never stop it. As someone said earlier, using Alaska Airlines as an example, you would have to prove a loss of some sort. The fact that your work appears on a website that you didn’t give permission, IMO, would not prove to be a loss.
The best thing to do is forget about it or stop publishing content. The world is cruel and sometimes requires a thick skin.
Yeah, that is certainly not the solution and not the best thing to do either.
Unless you have the money and resources to, a) put your stuff behind a secure paywall, and b) hire someone fulltime to police the web for copyright infringement, if you put something online, kiss it goodbye. Remember the “glory years” of Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents? It took an international policing effort with corporate underwriting to shut them down because of the size of the bite they were taking out of the entertainment industry. By comparison, some freeware circulating in a niche hobby community is dust in the wind.
One thing I’ve noticed about the introduction of MSFS2020 as compared to FSX fifteen years ago is that today’s online world into which the new sim has emerged is now vast, generally extremely toxic, and energetically predatory. If you are a content provider, then, as blueline308 observes, you better have a pretty thick skin.
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I think a lot of ambiguity would be prevented by properly crediting the original creator.
Indeed, by putting something into the public realm (releasing content as freeware), it’s pretty much fair game in the current ecosystem. Just crediting the original creator is common courtesy, and should be used on all mod scraping/publishing websites.
I completely understand the concept of copyright. The problem is that if there are no consequences for a violation (lawyer, court ect.) the whole copyright thing is the same like asking your children not to eat your chocolate. You can hope for the best and flip a coin.
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