But what irked me was they went to an Owsla, and never made a complaint to me at all. It wasn’t as if I parked a bot next to them and had it shout out my newspapers web address every five seconds. At most, I zip through once or twice on the main maps and the dreams of someone I know to let everyone know the latest issue is out, then head back to Honcho’s to work on the next issue.
So keep it cool, furres. I’ll have my own dream soon (Thanks Honcho!) so I can distribute my newspaper from, and have a staff gather, but until then, if you have a complaint, send it to me. Who knows... I might publish it if it’s worthy.
You go to complain to a beekin or an Oswla, and you are told that you should have encrypted your dream and your complaints are ignored from then on. You raise a stink about it, then they come down on your for creating a disturbance.
Sound familiar? I‘ve experienced it on several occasions, and let me tell you, it is NOT a pleasant experience. In fact, it makes me not want to create anything new in fear it is just going to be stolen by someone else before I have a change of growing tired of it.
Some say “well, you should be honoured that people want to use your stuff”, and yes, it is an honour. If they ask for it first, and credit me in their dream for it. It’s not much to ask; yet some furres can’t even do that. They swipe whatever they can from your patch, plunk in into their dream, then tell you to go suck it because they feel they aren’t doing anything wrong.
But they are. From the Furcadia web pages [http://www.furcadia.com/pixel/patches/whatis.html]
PLEASE NOTE! It is advisable to be polite and ask the owner of the dream if they mind you using their patch... it's also just basic respectfulness to let interested furres know who made the patch that you're using in your dreams.
By reading that, you would think that most furres would understand what it means. It means YOU HAVE TO ASK for stuff from unpublished patches. If you are lucky enough, then you also have to put something in the dream that credits the person. Something in the entrytext, or a .txt file that says who made what in your patch. What some furres think is that if the dream isn’t encrypted, then you can take what you want.
Wrong. This is meant for unencrypted dreams. You can’t dig through the patch of an encrypted dream. In fact, when a dream is encrypted, it usually means “don’t bother asking because I don’t want you to use anything of mine”. But some of us dreambuilders would like to share what we create. We do it by publishing out patches, and we usually spell out the terms of use in them. When we “donate” something unpublished to someone else, we expect the same consideration if it was still only in our own patch.
Yet... once we create something new, we seem to lose our right to it the moment we put it in our dream. Even if we encrypt it and never publish it, it can still wind up in someone else’s dream -- unasked for, and uncredited. It’s up to us that create new stuff to look after it. To demand restrictions on it’s use if donated to someone else, to keep our patches encrypted, to inform those that have our creations that they do have them, and to demand their removal if we feel they were taken unfairly.
And it is up to everyone else to uphold this standard. Some furres reading this might not have known about dream patches and that you can only use stuff from other people under certain conditions. The rest know... but don’t care. They feel it’s none of their business, or it’s not important, or don’t see anything wrong with taking some image from someone else’s dream and putting it into their patch without asking or crediting. Unfortunately, it is this permissive behaviour that allows this dream-theft to continue.
While there is no official means to stop it... aside from bugging the Oswals and Beekins to death about it, the creators of new images, patches and dreams do have a method of dealing with it. We will just stop making new images, patches and dreams. Our feeling is, “Why should we bother making new stuff when it’s just going to be stolen from us, and all we get in return for it is the finger?” It’s a sad truth, but a real one. Artists who are appreciated produce and create for those that do. Artists that get ripped off, don’t. There will be no one else to borrow new stuff from, which means that if you want a wonderful dream patch, you will have to make everything in it yourself. And when someone else pilfers your best stuff from it, you will know how we feel.
Reporters, photographers and columnists are needed for The Furry News.