Stolen design: it happens again

[Kozuki]

Apparently, NCWest carelessly accepted a stolen design. Though it was not one of the winners, it is still added to the Facebook Gallery, where its real origin is discovered.

 

[Here is the Reddit thread about the matter, with the original artist's confirmation]

 

Noted that this is not the first time this happened. The contest 2016 also had a stolen design, which managed to make into the list of runner-ups. This year, the same incident happened again, except it did not win.

 

With that said, I think NCWest simply does not have enough staff to inspect every single details of each design to realize which is copied, which is stolen, and which is clean.

 

Also, despite calling it is a community-voted, NCWest still has their strong influence in by selecting a handful of staff-picked designs for players to choose from.

 

I think to prevent art thief, as well as let it completely community-voted, NCWest should hold the future outfit design contest starting from the root: let the community sees every outfit design and select the one they like.

 

Since there are a lot of outfit designs, they should be put into smaller brackets, keeping eliminating each other until the last standing. Kinda like a fighting tournament.

 

Also, during the bracket voting, players are very fast in discovering tiny copied/stolen details (have been proven through 2016 and 2017 contests), thus help NCWest to prune out disqualified designs.

[AmatsuDF]

NCWest won't care about this. IT would take someone threatening to sue for copyright violation (reminder that the moment those artists drew their work, it was automatically copyritten to them) for NCWest to respond, and they'd probably just ban whoever threatened legal action instead.

[Hirukaru]

10 minutes ago, AmatsuDF said:

NCWest won't care about this. IT would take someone threatening to sue for copyright violation (reminder that the moment those artists drew their work, it was automatically copyritten to them) for NCWest to respond, and they'd probably just ban whoever threatened legal action instead.

On what grounds they would ban. Copyright can indeed be transferred, but this should be clearly stated.

 

For example in the terms there should be a point

X: copyright

X. X on the delivery of the art work the artist accepts that they transfer their copyright to ncsoft

 

(don't know if they have something like this) if they do the person stealing the art broke the copyrighy  from ncsoft and not from the artist. 

 

Rules suck, so check the terms, if nothing regarding to copyright is there sue the art stealer. 

[PhoenixMitra]

Greetings,

 

You can find an official response about this topic here: