Free content being used on paid resources

[Louwtjie]

Hello MC-Market users. Hope you're all doing swell today.

So one of my recent reports has been handled and I have some thoughts on resource creators, using free resources from multiple websites such as, youtube; planetminecraft and competitor sites which I cannot disclose names of.

Now the resources in question mostly handle builds, you know those blocks that actually pull people to the resource.
Should users be allowed to use free resources from unauthenticated youtube channels like these.

My thoughts are; it should not be allowed unless you get written concent from the content creators, if the content up-loader cannot confirm that he is the valid owner such as in all the content up-loaders videos it just should not be allowed. Yet lately is has been used in some resources.

What is your thoughts on this? and should it be allowed or not.
Should there be requirements be in place or the wiki regarding resources be changed to allow more strict regulations?

although both of them are extremely busy; tagging the resources moderators as I would love to hear their opinion on this.
Justis BucketOfSloths

 

[Justis]

Where would you draw the line on who is "authenticated" or not?
No matter what site you're using to download products released into the public domain for your free use, there's always a chance that some of the products hosted there for distribution is by someone who is not actually the rightful owner of the product.
This occurs all the time on Spigot, deviantart, planetminecraft, and even occurs on MC-Market.

Additionally, how would this apply to things other than builds?
We need to be consistent with our products as much as possible.
I see no difference between using a free and public build released to be used by anyone by its creator, and a plugin in the same situation, or a configuration, or a skript, etc.
Would you disallow the distribution of all free and public products as well, or just builds?
In that case, setups would not be allowed to exist. Since they contain a large amount of free and public content. Builds, plugins, generated configs, skripts, etc.

The best solution and the one we have right now, is simply for each resource author to maintain personal responsibility over what they're uploading.
Everyone is perfectly capable of choosing not to upload something if they have reason to believe they don't have rights to don't want to risk it turning out that the person they got it from didn't have rights to give them. We have rules and moderation and reports to ensure that rights are being respected.
Requiring proof of rights to every free and public product used in the creation of our users' products is unreasonable considering how difficult it is to completely prove ownership, how uncommon it is for 3rd party site authors to provide what we can consider complete proof, and how unknowledgeable any new member on this site is on even going about proving the content they're using truly is rightfully free and public content.

 

[Louwtjie]

Where would you draw the line on who is "authenticated" or not?
No matter what site you're using to download products released into the public domain for your free use, there's always a chance that some of the products hosted there for distribution is by someone who is not actually the rightful owner of the product.
This occurs all the time on Spigot, deviantart, planetminecraft, and even occurs on MC-Market.

Additionally, how would this apply to things other than builds?
We need to be consistent with our products as much as possible.
I see no difference between using a free and public build released to be used by anyone by its creator, and a plugin in the same situation, or a configuration, or a skript, etc.
Would you disallow the distribution of all free and public products as well, or just builds?
In that case, setups would not be allowed to exist. Since they contain a large amount of free and public content. Builds, plugins, generated configs, skripts, etc.

The best solution and the one we have right now, is simply for each content creator to maintain personal responsibility over what they're uploading.
Everyone is perfectly capable of choosing not to upload something if they don't want to risk it turning out that the person they got it from didn't have rights to give them. There's no reason to enforce that they not upload. We have rules and moderation and reports to ensure that rights are being abided by.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Any content released into the public domain (Free) is allowed to be redistribute. Although some content is redistributed with no cause; it can be related to leaks or stolen content and sometimes those stolen content makes their way into this market.

I would suggest that if the lets say accused can validate that the rightful owner of such released content has given permission to be RESOLD it can be allowed (Plugins, builds configurations).
But as we know a majority of content sometimes released by these content uploaders is not rightfully theirs its either downloaded, stolen or taken from other means of media. I understand this would make it extremely hard for you and other resource moderators to determine where this content has come from. Such as "adding proof that you own the content will speedline the progress of accepting said resource" Should these individuals not upload proof that they have gotten accredited permission from the rightful owners that they are allowed to use it?

And is there anyway other than taking the uploaders word that MC-Market regulate where content that is being sold is coming from?

 

[Justis]

Correct me if I'm wrong. Any content released into the public domain (Free) is allowed to be redistribute. Although some content is redistributed with no cause; it can be related to leaks or stolen content and sometimes those stolen content makes their way into this market.

I would suggest that if the lets say accused can validate that the rightful owner of such released content has given permission to be RESOLD it can be allowed (Plugins, builds configurations).
But as we know a majority of content sometimes released by these content uploaders is not rightfully theirs its either downloaded, stolen or taken from other means of media. I understand this would make it extremely hard for you and other resource moderators to determine where this content has come from. Such as "adding proof that you own the content will speedline the progress of accepting said resource" Should these individuals not upload proof that they have gotten accredited permission from the rightful owners that they are allowed to use it?

And is there anyway other than taking the uploaders word that MC-Market regulate where content that is being sold is coming from?

The insanely large majority of content within our niche does not come with entirely verifiable proof of exactly who owns rights to it at any point in time.
It would be impossible for us to maintain a marketplace where every piece of content a member tries to distribute either as their own resource or especially an asset to their resource also come with entirely verifiable proof of who owns rights and that the person with rights gave this person rights to distribute it.

Refer to my previous message explaining why that is.

That is why it is assumed that the uploader does have rights to distribute the contents they're uploading until evidence suggests otherwise.
Similarly to the innocent until proven guilty policy.
We regard them as having rights to distribute the content they upload unless sufficient evidence suggests otherwise, not the other way around.

Changing this, I fully believe, would bring more harm than good. Putting a stranglehold on essentially all resource types and large project distribution.

 

[Louwtjie]

The insanely large majority of content within our niche does not come with entirely verifiable proof of exactly who owns rights to it at any point in time.
It would be impossible for us to maintain a marketplace where every piece of content a member tries to distribute either as their own resource or especially an asset to their resource also come with entirely verifiable proof of who owns rights and that the person with rights gave this person rights to distribute it.

Refer to my previous message explaining why that is.

That is why it is assumed that the uploader does have rights to distribute the contents they're uploading until evidence suggests otherwise.
Similarly to the innocent until proven guilty policy.
We regard them as having rights to the content they upload unless sufficient evidence suggests otherwise, not the other way around.

Changing this, I fully believe, would bring more harm than good.

I totally agree with this. But it seems we both have different views on it. I myself believe if you do not own the content (free etc) you should not include it in your resource rather redirect it from the accredited source.

Thanks for your input, you've broaden my viewpoint on the matter.

 

[Justis]

It is unfair to the creator and everyone that users should be allowed to take work from free websites and then sell it on this one. It is practically scamming the people that pay for the work

https://www.mc-market.org/wiki/redistribution-rights/

If you do have redistribution rights, you may never claim, imply or suggest that it is your content.
Though it is not required, the best possible decision you could make would be to to credit every single author of every single product you use in the creation of your content.
A less admirable, but equally acceptable alternative is to simply describe the content that is original to and owned by you, and only if you decide to specifically describe the features of someone else's product, also disclaim that those features are a result of that other product.

Selling or distributing content as your own content without the owner's permission is regarded the same for free content as it is for paid content.

You have no redistribution rights over any premium content unless explicitly and specifically granted by the author.
If you have purchased a license to use a premium build or plugin or setup or configuration, etc, whether on MC-Market or another platform, you have purchased only that, a license to use it. You do not inherently have the right to distribute that content to anyone else, nor are you allowed to include it within your resources. No matter how much of your owned content you are distributing it with, if even one item within that set violates this policy, you are distributing content without right.

What do I mean by explicitly and specifically granted?
For example, due to Bukkit being licensed under the GNU GPL, every single plugin that is created for Bukkit or Spigot must be licensed the same way, meaning every plugin must be open source and public. This is why leak sites which make money selling ranks to members so they can download dozens of premium plugins for free are able to legally exist.
MC-Market has higher standards than what is legal, we also consider what is moral; and that is why, if you purchase a plugin, even if the author concedes to the forced open source license, you must get their explicit permission for you specifically to upload it here, before you do so. If the resource belongs to a member of our site, you must also get that same permission before uploading it externally.

If you are a premium product owner, and you would like to grant everyone redistribution rights over your paid product, or forking rights over your product or otherwise, please create a support request: https://www.mc-market.org/support/requests/create-thread

 

[Louwtjie]

I believe you should only be allowed to post your own work or work that you have specific resell rights to and can prove you have those rights.

It is unfair to the creator and everyone that users should be allowed to take work from free websites and then sell it on this one. It is practically scamming the people that pay for the work

I don't think I've mentioned users are scamming by doing this. My opinion is it's a bit unethical to say the very minimum of what I want to.

 

[StrafeZ]

If it has credits I believe it should be fine

 

[RustyDev]

Regardless, couldn't the user then sell configs for all the free plugins?

 

[Ivain]

So, here's my bit on it. If you're using a free plugin or build resource and the creator of that plugin or resource has said it's ok to use it for commercial projects that you're selling, you're allowed to use it in your resource.
However, I would personally see it as good manners to link to the resource you used, as a form of credit.
Now, I say that at risk of sounding hypocritical, because I don't do this for the treepacks I use, the reason being theres so many of them and so many different combinations that I use in my projects that I can never tell them apart. Though perhaps I should just start linking the PMC collection I made of all treepack resources, since whatever free projects I use will be in there.

Short and simple, however, we could make it a requirement in resources that any free assets included in that resource should be linked to. Throwing this out there as a discussion point, I dont have an opinion on it myself atm.

 

[Mick]

There are cases of some resources such as Citizens that are free, however they still don't let MCM users include them in their resources. If there is a product that explicitly says they don't allow redistribution then they can say so, but if they don't care about redistribution like 99% of the internet.

To me, this just seems like making an issue out of something that isn't an issue.

Denied, thanks for the suggestion.