Archived On The Topic Of Schematics

[Lyee]

Alright, a short post this time but something I think is quite necessary.

Early today a question was asked in help chat relating to the rules with taking schematic. This question was if it was allowed to take schematics of other people's builds in creative and use them for yourself. After I responded with no, and someone else responded with yes an argument started to take place in general. In the end it was revealed it was not against the rules currently, but here's why I think it should be.

Loss of Profit. So the first reason comes down to profit. I know people who make all of their regals from selling builds, and tend to do such myself. I've even heard of people selling builds for real money, and being able to simply copy their build without consequence can really affect these players.


Plagiarism. Skins and Illustrations are illegal to copy, so why should builds be? Building is as much an art as the other two, and a lot of time is often spent making them. Imagine spending days on a detailed drawing of your imaginary world, only to have it be taken and published everywhere by someone else. Or pouring your heart into a skin only to have other people take it and use it for themselves? Builds are no different, at least for me, and having them taken and used without my permission would really hurt. The same goes for codes and scripts and such. Even taking things written, physically or digitally, is plagiarism.

Players should not have to leave the server for their planning. One of the reasons against this that came up was that, in creative, it's just out there. You chose for it to be available to the public. But I don't think this is correct either. The way I see it, players shouldn't have to go to their own world or server to plan their builds out of fear it will be stolen. Nor it there a way to prevent people from being able to get into your plot!

There's certainly more reasons as to why the rules should be updated to prevent this, but those are just the most prevalent to me.
@Tokuu @Sephite

Note: I do NOT think that Schematica should be against the rules. I use it for ease of building, and so do many others.

 

[Conflee]

Full agreement here. When you join World Staff you have to sign a contract of sorts that sets out terms for use of your builds by Massivecraft, so even barring the obvious "Its my creation its like art so don't steal it", Massive considers it intellectual property. Adding rules about taking schematics to recreate builds from any worlds without permission should be a thing.

 

[Goldifish]

I think it's generally common courtesy to not steal builds from other plots without owners permissions, if this is what you're referring to. If you seem to be saying that people shouldn't take their own builds from creative and schematic them in is an odd demand, but. Not my place to decide either. If you claim that you built something in creative that was just something you schematic-ed in, then that's plagiarism.

 

[Lyee]

If you seem to be saying that people shouldn't take their own builds from creative and schematic them in is an odd demand,

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Oh no, I meant others. I'll try and clarify this in the original post. Ty for pointing this out!

 

[Zacatero]

If you seem to be saying that people shouldn't take their own builds from creative and schematic them in is an odd demand, but.

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It's more specificly like if you built something in creative and then I took a schematic and claimed it as my own. Right now that's totally legal on the server

 

[Goldifish]

I think it's generally common courtesy to not steal builds from other plots without owners permissions, if this is what you're referring to.

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[Zacatero]

I think it's generally common courtesy to not steal builds from other plots without owners permissions,

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That was the General common courtesy, but now that it's publicly been decided that it's legal, its more possible it will happen

 

[Lyee]

That was the General common courtesy, but now that it's publicly been decided that it's legal, its more possible it will happen

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Like, now I can't let people into my plot to see my builds without fear of them stealing them. Before, it was kinda just assumed to be a rule, but it was revealed publicly that there is no rules against it.

 

[Zacatero]

Like it was not common courtesy before... It was just assumed it had been a rule. Sure it might be a dick move but just because it's a dick move hasn't stop people from doing stuff like that before

 

[MadamAries]

As my own two cents, as this has been seen as an issue recently, there needs to be an easy and effective way to have people prove that the build is theirs. If Player A comes up and says "This is my build, it's on my creative plot." but then Player B says "I have the schematic file for this build", then we have an issue, with checking which came first, and if it's caught in the time frame that we can see the Tool logs. Builds take a while to do, and sometimes people take breaks, especially in Survival, and taking someone's word for it would be impossible, cause we can't decide on a decision on here-say. Yes, it would be easier if it was obvious, like Person A Creative build was finished, and then 10 days later Person B took a schematic and Person A reported it. Check the schematic file, and see that the Creative build came before the schematic. But, the chances of that happening are slim, is this has been in an existing issue, and happened in the past, and is rising from old(ish) builds in Creative.

 

[Lyee]

As my own two cents, as this has been seen as an issue recently, there needs to be an easy and effective way to have people prove that the build is theirs. If Player A comes up and says "This is my build, it's on my creative plot." but then Player B says "I have the schematic file for this build", then we have an issue, with checking which came first, and if it's caught in the time frame that we can see the Tool logs. Builds take a while to do, and sometimes people take breaks, especially in Survival, and taking someone's word for it would be impossible, cause we can't decide on a decision on here-say. Yes, it would be easier if it was obvious, like Person A Creative build was finished, and then 10 days later Person B took a schematic and Person A reported it. Check the schematic file, and see that the Creative build came before the schematic. But, the chances of that happening are slim, is this has been in an existing issue, and happened in the past, and is rising from old(ish) builds in Creative.

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I would have to agree with this, but I'm not sure how that would be done. You could always have the witness of you building it, but really? You're not always going to have someone else there. What I may suggest doing, though, is simply using HE on both builds (as I believe you said). It would be assumed that this would show which one was built first and that'd be the original. However, there is two issues with this I think should be addressed before it's made into any sort of main system. Issue number one is that, as I do think you said, the log may not go back far enough. The second issue is that it's possible for someone to build something, someone else take a schematic, person a gets rid of build, person a rebuild build. Or any sort of similar situation.
However, as I compared it to skins in my initial post I'll do it again. I think it's important to look at what sort of system they use for determining who owns a skin originally. Of course issues come up here too, as it's not quite the same, but I think it's a good place to start.

 

[Zacatero]

What I may suggest doing, though, is simply using HE on both builds (as I believe you said).

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IIRC as @MomAries mentioned... Hawkeye data drops dead after 2 weeks. So like she said this whole thing would kind of have to rely on being lucky enough to be within the 10 day or two week period when the records are still there

 

[Lyee]

IIRC as @MomAries mentioned... Hawkeye data drops dead after 2 weeks. So like she said this whole thing would kind of have to rely on being lucky enough to be within the 10 day or two week period when the records are still there

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Issue number one is that, as I do think you said, the log may not go back far enough.

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[Zacatero]

Also your poll is confusing to me

 

[Winterless]

stealing schematics is pretty lame tbh, but there are certain people in the community without a shred of integrity who will do it regardless of the impact it will have on their reputation.

Stealing builds using schematica should be illegal.

 

[Zacatero]

stealing schematics is pretty lame tbh, but there are certain people in the community without a shred of integrity who will do it regardless of the impact it will have on their reputation.

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Because now its legal. Or rather i guess it was always legal but it was just thought as being illegal because its not gonna state on the rules page "Its allowed to steal builds" lol

 

[MokeDuck]

Ok, so heres my master opinion on what should happen in regards to this.
1. It needs to be understood that there was a question asked about this, however that simply sparked a discussion. It was not a heated discussion, it was a very in depth discussion. No personal insults occurred or anything, and nobody seemed angry. It was just a general discussion about people's opinions, which should be allowed an encouraged on topics that don't have a known tendency to get heated.

2. This hasn't, to my knowledge, happened. The simple fact that someone asked in help chat shows that no ill-intent happened or anything.

3. The server does not NEED to solve every player's problem. In the old days of massive, you didn't steal from a faction or just join it to steal from it. Noobs did, sure, but the community shunned it and even though there were no rules against it, it still didn't happen a lot. When it comes to things with such a limited palette, its very easy to look at certain things, like small fountains or statues, and say "oh! thats how I could do it" and then build it themselves with only a few minor edits. I personally took a LOT of inspiration and will probably even copy stuff from spatz0r's dwarven build, but I tried as a builder to gauge how much I was gonna copy him. Now that he is inactive and his faction gone, I want to re-create it for history's sake. All these factors are, in my opinion, simply too much for the server to be in charge of. The server in this case, I think, should encourage behavior but not enforce it.

To be perfectly clear, this was not the opinion I expressed earlier and in chat. I believe that builds SHOULD be protected, but the playerbase could do a much better job at this than massivecraft.

To close, I want to ask. Is it legal in the survival worlds to use schematica to become familiar with the layout of a faction. For instance looking at traps or the design of the brewers they use or where portals lead etc. If this is illegal, then we shouldn't be worried about creative builds; we should just design them in single player if we are afraid they will be stolen, which I'm not. Keep in mind here that I have a totally rad set of designs right off spawn in creative. If anyone should be concerned, its me.

 

[Zacatero]

To close, I want to ask. Is it legal in the survival worlds to use schematica to become familiar with the layout of a faction. For instance looking at traps or the design of the brewers they use or where portals lead etc

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Since there's no way to know if a schematic has been taken, meaning there would be no way to know if you took a schematic of my town to see all of the traps and stuff? I would think it's legal cuz there's no way to prove against it. And I don't know what you mean by seeing where portals lead because you can't do that with a schematic.

 

[Lyee]

It was not a heated discussion, it was a very in depth discussion. No personal insults occurred or anything, and nobody seemed angry.

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There was anger towards me. A lot of it, to the point where I really should have reported it, but I'm too forgiving for that.

 

[Lyee]

Also your poll is confusing to me

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I'll just get rid of it, tbh... It would confuse me too

 

[MokeDuck]

There was anger towards me. A lot of it, to the point where I really should have reported it, but I'm too forgiving for that.

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oh well it WAS a lot. I probably missed it. I was juggling 3 chats
just because something isn't punishable doesn't mean its legal.

 

[Lyee]

Alrighty, just going to bump this. But actually, I think it may just be worthwhile to lay down rules for every sort of "art", rather than just in-game builds.

 

[Zacatero]

I think the general consensus on the thread here was that, while it seems like an amazing idea it would be really hard to enforce