Carl, speaking for myself (and I'm sure everyone else here as well) I want to express my appreciation for all the hard work that you, Pam, the moderators, the challenge board people, the Union Cove design team and so forth put into this site, and your willingness to share the knowledge you have gathered with the rest of us. I've been a part of other sites that are essentially 'fan sites' for things like Star Trek, and some of the people that came, joined for a short time, and then left, attempted to take the material that group developed and pass it off as their own. That was plaigarism then and this is the same, probably much worse, in my opinion, as the EA Sims 3 Exchange is a lot more public than where those people attempted to post stuff.
The effort that all of you have put into this place for us to enjoy is what has made so many of us up in arms about this person behaving in this way.
I've also been part of a fantasy world building site, Santharia. From time to time, we come across sites (including some wikipedia pages) that either directly copy from that site and claim Santharia as he source, or copy directly from Santharia and claim it as their own work. The first of these are mostly laughed at by us (particularly the scientific site that used what we did on that as evidence for evolution, however the second type is taken more seriously and the owner of that site has written on more than occasion to the holders of the other content to ask them to cease and desist. Santharia has it as a policy that all the material on the site is copyrighted by the original authors, artists, musicians etc and it can't be used without their express permission, and that if Santharia ever attempts to go commercial, permission must be sought from all contributors or their material must be removed.
From my understanding of IP matters and copyright (and I'm not a lawyer, merely someone whose been a member of online creative forums and offline writing groups for a while now), as soon as anyone writes/produces something they own it and it is copyrighted to them, it doesn't legally need anything more. The (c) (TM) (R) and so forth symbols are there to make it clear to everyone and to suggest that people need to steer clear of it, or acknowledge the true owners of it.
So, that's my take on it, sorry if that rambled on, but I wanted to express my thanks to you guys again.
Dek
