Banned

#1

Verinince was banned by Leigh for re-texturing a video game asset… I contacted him personally and he didn’t mean any harm by what he did. I think he’s willing to take down the android pictures from his Flickr site if you give him another shot.

The thread was going on pretty well too and nobody else seemed to have a problem with it. We were talking about bad instructors and I think Verinince will need CGTalk since he won’t learn much at school. The android wasn’t even the image he posted here, someone else asked him about it after browsing his Flickr page and he readily admitted that he didn’t model it.

Please give him another chance. He’s not a troll and he didn’t mean any harm.

#2

It’s not about him trolling, it’s the fact that he’s stolen someone’s work. We’ve banned others for exactly the same offence before.

#3

First, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you directly. I wasn’t sure how to go about this without getting a lot of unwanted attention or ending up with a locked thread.

Anyway, a lot of us here are pretty young. I’m not as young any more, but I can understand the point of view of someone who may not know what he did was wrong.

When someone complimented him on the work, he readily admitted it wasn’t his. I think that’s a good sign there was no malicious intent on his part. I don’t believe he is the type to steal other people’s work to get a job or anything like that. He was just using the asset to learn how to texture and rig a character.

I think, from a technical perspective, he is guilty of no more than modding the asset outside of the original game – which from a legal point of view is probably a breach of the game’s license. Still I don’t know if it is immediately obvious that the act itself is wrong.

Although he may have overstepped his bounds by posting it on Flickr with no explanation, at least he didn’t post it here. The work he did post was created by him, and was sparking a very worthy discussion on the topic of good grades vs good work.

And finally, if he is sued for it, I can’t imagine CGTalk being held liable.

I think it would be nice if you gave him another chance. A lot of communities have a three strikes system. Has he offended before? If not, what are the chances of him offending again? Considering what he was struggling with, I think he really needs CGtalk and all that it has to offer.

#4

I read the other thread and felt and understood that Verinince has a strong willing to go further in CG Field, and accourding to his posts i think he made a mistake without meaning it.
I hope he could be back by crediting the original.

Leigh, it’s clear that he did it for education purposes, he should already have someone else in his life to teach him the good manners, but here he is only seeking for knowledge as his teachers are useless accourding to him. I hope you could bring him back cause it’s a pity to see someone’s willing could be broken by one of the bigest CG Community when he’s just started to walk on the path of his career. Who knows, may be one day he will be a great artist by a simple gesture from you.

#5

We often give people a lot more than three strikes, and often bans are temporary and more of a hard warning, because the soft ones were clearly ignored.
Piracy and copyright violation are the only things we act swiftly and brutally on, because they have hardly any gray areas, and because of the potential legal implications they carry with them.

In this particular case, if that picture was never linked directly anywhere in these forums, you might stretch things a bit thin and say it wasn’t in violation of the rules, but it does paint grey areas in one of the very few scenarios where admins and mods can make an objective and detached call about running the forums.

It’s a tricky issue to be honest, and if Leigh or any other admin even wanted to consider going back on that decision, said member could at least have made the effort to get in touch himself, instead of relying on your good will (much respect for you taking the time to do that for a complete stranger) to fix stuff for him.

The above is of course just my opinion, as, luckily, I don’t have to deal with this kind of stuff :slight_smile:

#6

Yeah, I can understand that.

I admit to thinking I’ve done too much. It is nice to get some clarification from you though. Maybe in a year or two Verinince can rejoin. I’m sure you will have forgotten about it by then anyway.

#7

Said member has indeed gotten in touch. The fact that he didn’t post the images on here makes no difference - he still talked about it on the forum, and that’s a permanent, instant ban. Just as is the case if someone happens to mention they’re using cracked software, or downloaded a film/game/music/whatever illegally. I refuse to believe that someone would get hold of one of those dodgy apps used for ripping models out of games, and use it, without realising that what they’re doing is wrong. People have gotten used to websites that don’t give a shit about that kind of thing, whereas over here, we do.

#8

I understood leigh, it’s a matter of ethic. So you are banning not only people who mention they are using illegal materials but also people who from near or far has anything to do with that.

#9

Here’s what he told me.

"Well, right now, it doesn’t seem like I have much of a say in this. If it’s really that big of a problem, I’ll take down the androids but my Flickr account isn’t primarily for CGSociety, I had them up long before this and I used my account for Displaying my CG on Facebook.

What exactly am I supposed to admit? I already started by saying I didn’t make them. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. I’m not a modeler in any way. I didn’t intend for the androids to be seen, if I could have just posted the images of my USB drives right on the forum I would of. I linked to my account because I didn’t know how to post the images seperate from the rest of my account, I would have had to use a seperate account for that. Honestly, I didn’t think there would be a problem."

#10

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