Please remove RPG Up from your affilitates: it is a plagiarist site

Deep Throat · 02-04-2007, 03:06 PM

nick · 02-04-2007, 03:11 PM

It's OK to steal here so long as it doesn't REALLY hurt people. At least, that's what I've been told.

Tidus Blade · 02-04-2007, 03:37 PM

How are you sure?
They could have asked the site or owner of the property for permission...

Deep Throat · 02-04-2007, 03:48 PM

They didn't ask for the articles. I listed only one example of plagiarized article, but there are many others. One big example is on the Before Crisis site of this PalSys system: there's a huge, very long and analytical article on the game, the guy obviously put a lot of effort in writing the stuff. Except that the guy isn't the site owner!

Article with no author indicated: http://www.before-crisis.com/game-gu...ameplay-notes/
Original article from a person named Dragoon King: http://forums.psxgamer.com/topic.php?topic=21&page=1

The site clearly didn't ask for his permission, or they would have put his name somewhere.

Now for the FAQs: most of the FAQs have a blatant Disclaimer section in which the original author indicates the only websites which can mirror their FAQs... and RPG Up and co. are never listed. If the authors had given their permissions, they would have said so in their FAQs.

In a few FAQs and guitar tabs, the webmaster of RPG up went as far as grossly removing the Disclaimers and original author names. The operations were so hastily put together that the FFIV Advance, V, and VI FAQs are actually all the same FFV SNES FAQ, and in one of the FAQ (maybe this one, can't remember) there are even the header and footer texts of IGN's website (the webmaster copy-pasted the whole page with its frames).

Removing the names is a heavy copyright violation and it does hurt the original authors, who see (or don't even see!) their works stolen by a random webmaster who put together his site thank to other people's works.

Tidus Blade · 02-04-2007, 03:56 PM

Well then, best action would be to inform original owners of this.

Yoherz · 02-04-2007, 04:14 PM

Um. I've never even heard of this site. I didn't even know it was a site until I just asked another person on MSN. If what you say is really the truth, then by all means inform the people that got their work taken, not us. It'll be their job to bring the hammer down on this person, not us.

Sakaki · 02-04-2007, 04:18 PM

Yoh is correct, telling us is pointless as we can't really do anything about it. Inform the owners of the site in which you suspect content was stolen, and they will handle it if it is truly used without consent.

PalSys · 02-04-2007, 09:10 PM

Hello folks,

As you can like guess from the name, I am the embodiment of the now infamous Paladin Systems gaming sites. I just wanted to stop by and offer a simple retort.

RPGUp.com acts solely as a depository for RPG multimedia and information. Countless hours have been spent by many people collecting files and information from around the web, and ALL credit is given whenever possible. A good example of this is the links posted above in reference to the hand-typed game manuals: obviously the typist worked hard to transcribe the manuals, and ALL credited information is intact where he placed it. This makes it easy for the owner to contact us at any time and request removal, and we typically oblige. If credit is not given then the fault lies with the staff member who collected the article or media, and ultimately with me. But that doesn't mean that we don't want the work to be credited, it means something was missed when the files were collected.

We also allow submissions of unique content by our visitors, and I do receive a decent amount of work that way (including the Before Crisis article), and obviously some people pass off others work as their own. All we can do is remove it when it is brought to our attention and work harder at screening submitted material the next time.

To be clear, these sites are acting as a service to gamers. If any site owner from any corner of the web wants to contact me personally about content they think is not properly credited or should be removed, please feel free. In the meantime though, you are just advertising our sites with posts like this.

To the poster: grow up, use your brain, and email someone. Paladin Systems is a wideopen establishment with full contact information on our company site that is linked from each and every one of our other sites, including the sites you referenced.
If you don't enjoy the sites, by all means, don't visit. If any of our sites offer you easy access to media and guides, continue to visit (or stop by for your first time, even if a thread like this referred you

).

Everyone enjoy your day, and as I said above, feel free to contact me about ANYTHING at all, I'm actually a pretty nice guy

You can get me at chris(at)palsys.ca.

Sakaki · 02-04-2007, 09:28 PM

Okay, give the above post and the fact we're not taking down the affiliate, I am closing this.

*Closed*

Pacman · 02-04-2007, 10:00 PM

I guess I can say a little something.

Stealing content from other websites is wrong, without giving proper credit. We host FAQs here at Chocobo Heaven, and none of the FAQs are saying Chocobo Heaven have the right to host them. But I have an email from the authors allowing us to.

In all FAQs the authors will say they don't want websites making profit from their guides. That is why we were allowed to host the FAQs, our Guides and FAQs page doesn't show Ads.

Anyway, for what matters of webpage's content being stolen, they can accuse Chocobo Heaven too, and many many other sites... Because If you think a little, we are covering the same games! So, informations won't change much.