Seems Odd

[Jaxilon]

I was cruising through the interwebs looking over some Maptool stuff and came to a link somehow along the way that had a ton of maps and stuff. Ever interested in such things (duh) I started drilling through and could swear I was seeing things I have seen here. Only thing was this site had no information on the artists who did them. At least as far as I can tell.

So, I went to verify and found the search tool here doesn't do as much as I thought it would or maybe I had seen these maps elsewhere. I finally verified that one of them was indeed Torstan's Pirate cove and it had no indication it was his work. In fact, the name seemed to have been changed.

Now, before I get outraged completely let me just pass the links along to you all and let me know what's up. Perhaps Torstan doesn't care or something along those lines

The site I'm wondering about is: http://www.rpglife.com/maps/world/index.php

The maps I was sure I had seen before (There were others but these ones I remembered):

Torstan's Pirate Cove (as labeled on his Deviant Art page)
http://www.rpglife.com/maps/world/images/darkerCove.jpg

Also, I'm pretty sure this one is from here but can't seem to find it now: Dragonport

The only reason I'm posting this is because the lack of Artist credit and seeming name changes just seems wrong to me. I also noticed that some of the maps seem to no longer be hosted so perhaps some folks have found their artwork and had it removed?

Let me know what the deal is.

[tilt]

hmmm.. at first when I saw the site I thought it was scraped content (thats content stolen from other sites in order to show google that there is content on your ad site). But looking more closely it does look like a proper community. I can see they tell people to upload rpg ressources to share with the community and they of course have a disclaiming about "not being responsible for what people upload/say/bla bla bla... " This of course doesn't mean that they shouldn't remove copyrighted content if asked to do so. Most of the maps in here are under CC license and under such MUST have artist credit, so I'm guessing the right thing to do is to tell all mappers in here to go look if any of their maps are on the site and if so, demand it removed or credited... (doesn't look like they can handle crediting though - but that's their problem.

[ravells]

There are some familiar maps in the City section as well...

[tilt]

Don't know if I spied a wizards map in there... did see the style though - and if thats the case... big guns - pointing your way

[NeonKnight]

Yes, there WAS a Wizards (as in WotC) map in there.

http://www.rpglife.com/maps/inside/i...i_j53209ur.jpg Is from the WotC FANE OF THE DROW product, and was used in their miniatures competition:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/mit/20050728a

[tilt]

I think the best would be if Arcana, on behalf of the guild asked the site to remove all maps that aren't credited. If they will not comply - or says something stupid like "proof it", we should send out a mail to all members and tell them to go look (and we can do that on DA too), and perhaps drop a word to wizards as well. But let them have a chance to make emmends first, it is after all a rpg community

[ravells]

We had a situation a while back when someone started posting wholesale maps posted on the guild on his website. Can't remember who it was (think it might have been Gamerprinter?) contacted him - he was very apolegetic (I think he was a young teen) and took all the stuff down.

I think if someone from the guild is going to contact the admins of RPG Life then we need to know which maps have been created by guild members and whether the creators of those maps have any objections to the maps being hosted on the site at all, or without any accreditation. After the the guild don't have any property in the maps posted by its members and we would look pretty silly asking them to take maps down if the owners don't mind them being hosted there.

I can pop something up on the news forum after a quick chat with the other CLs pointing to the site and inviting guild members to go and have a look. I guess we could post thumbnails of the maps we think have been created here - someone might recognise them and the creator and then we could email / pm the creators to see what they want done.

It doesn't have all be agression with loss though. If RPG Life wants a repository of maps then they could just have a direct link to the finished map forum on our site - they would have to register though.

Hmm I wonder they could become one of the Guild Alliance (which seems to have died a death). I don't know if it's possible (perhaps a subject for another topic) but I wonder if it's possible to have a system where if a person has registered for a Guild Alliance site their username and password automatically registers for the Cartographers' Guild. I'll post a suggestion on the CL board.

[torstan]

Yep, there's a lot of Mike Schley maps up there, and also a number of 'adapted' 3.5 Faerun maps. That's not going to fly with Wizards. I didn't give permission for my Pirate Cove map to be up there, and there's no copyright info or attribution on any of the maps. It looks like man of them are lifted stright from Wizards map-a-week archives.

[tilt]

Of course we don't know if the admins are just sleeping or turning a blind eye. But they aren't doing a good job, especially with the wotc maps - cause they got lawyers and stuff

Does however make me think that I should sign my maps.. not that they "stole" mine... nooo.. they weren't good enough for stealing *ROFL*
And Ravs, concerning login on to more than one system can be done with googles something something ID system, where you basicly log on with you google ID on other pages (a free service from google), but that would require this page changed password system too... and the other... so big job. Otherwise if you shall be able to register with CG while you register any other place would require a common database so it also can check the same login isn't used by different persons...

But I do think that linking to our finished maps section could make everybody happy - we get more views and they get maps. And if they can make a smart thumbnail system good for them (and us) - just as long as the credits are posted too...

[Jaxilon]

That's pretty much what I figured. If only they had the credits with the maps I don't think we would have any issues. They have a lot of good looking stuff for gamers but it seems to me like it's been copied by someone somewhere and then a month later they uploaded it to the RPGLife site. The information of where it came from has been lost and they don't seem to provide anywhere for it in any case (as tilt mentioned). Also, some of the links are tiny little maps which lends me to thinking this is uploads from the community and not something RPGLife did themselves. The rest of their site looks pretty professional so I don't think they would purposely post maps that are basically unusable.

I can agree with the not having to be aggressive as the first step. You can catch more bees with honey after all. Still, it shouldn't matter if we have lawyers or not. Wrong is still wrong. Since there are a number of their thumbs that are dead links it does look like they are willing to pull the images if asked.

Links back to CG finished maps would be nice. Keep us posted on what happens with this.

PS. I just saw the Shley map for Dragonport which is a WOTC which I originally thought I had seen here but evidently not. Either way, I think it's interesting the map styles you remember. I'm pretty sure there are some Devin Night maps over there too.