A quick (but necessary) rant.

Alright, so, as a site mod I like to check out part-picking websites so I can stay on top of what parts are commonly used and be able to recognize them easily. Today I decided to go to the Miners Need Cool Shoes armory. I went to the 'shirts' section and *this* is what I saw on the very first page:

Notice the pig hoodie I circled? It probably doesn't look familiar to you, but it sure does to me. I immediately recognized that hoodie as being a stolen and edited version of my hoodie from my Skin Clothing Emporium. If you check out my Emporium you'll see I clearly state not to upload any of those parts to PMC or any other Minecraft website.

Now, there are two other very important points to mention in this rant. First of all, unlike PMC or even the Skinex, Miners Need Cool Shoes does not have any way to flag or report stolen content. They truly and honestly do not care about the integrity of the content posted on their site, nor do they care about intellectual property rights. In fact, this brings me to another issue:



See that? That little blurb is posted at the bottom of all MNCS pages. What really makes me mad is not just that they steal skin parts, but that they outright lie and say they have license to them. Don't believe me? Well, let's take a gander and read what Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 actually says. I'd like to highlight the important part of that text:


Huh, I guess MNCS just skipped over that part when they were reading. They don't give two f***s about attributing the content in their armory to its actual creators. Furthermore, they claim that content created using their armory is licensed, when in reality it is not. This is so flabbergasting to me that I need to repeat it again: they are outright lying to their users and pretending to have license to this content, when they do not.

People often complain about PMC's strict rules, but this is exactly the reason why have them. We believe in the integrity of the content that's posted here, and we respect our users. We don't lie to you and we actually protect your work. Please don't take this for granted, because (as I've shown) other websites are not this generous...

NOTE: Some people in the comments have been talking about using the legal system to get my stolen content removed. This is called a DMCA takedown notice. I've sort of been musing over the idea of doing this. I know Halucid has been trying to get MNCS to take down his stolen stuff, so I might talk with him about it to see what he's done.