Who Do You Think You're Foolin'?

Post by **paulrace** » Mon Sep 23, 2019 10:41 am

To the vast majority of our members who contribute and share and encourage, I apologize for the negative tone of the following missive. For the members who contribute here extensively and also have free-to-participate putz house resources of your own, please understand this does not relate to you. However:

If you never contribute ideas or tips or resources TO our forums but nevertheless have no problem "borrowing" ideas, tips, and resources FROM our forums and turning them into commercial products that you sell online elsewhere:

OR:

If you are trolling our forums chiefly to find folks you can recruit to contribute to your profit-making enterprises elsewhere:

You are probably mistaking tolerance for ignorance or stupidity.

Starting in a few months, I will begin weeding out profiteers. Or if you want to become a "supporting business member" or our site for a monthly rate, I can help you migrate to that membership. Please use our Contact page to find out what that would entail.

In the meantime, please don't imagine we're clueless to theft of our members' intellectual property.

- Paul

Post by **maria** » Mon Sep 23, 2019 10:47 am

Thank you.

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Mon Sep 23, 2019 2:40 pm

Yay!! Long overdue.

Post by **Pete R.Oehmen** » Tue Sep 24, 2019 4:36 pm

Thank you so much Paul. I really needed to be said! I only hope the message get out to the right person/persons that violate our code of ethics.

Post by **paulrace** » Tue Oct 01, 2019 5:49 am

I just deleted a conversation that took this thread off-topic.

Sorry for any confusion. Here's a summary of why I started this thread.

Copying patterns and graphic resources you find here to create commercial products to sell elsewhere is wrong.

Trolling this site just to find people to attract to your own commercial enterprise is wrong.

If you regularly contribute information, tips, techniques, resources and other things of value and you also have your own putz house site or some such that readers here find their way to, that's fine. If you just hang out here so you can figure out who our participants are and drag them over to your commercial enterprise, that's not fine.

Also, since the question came up offline, "clipping" a picture from this site to your Pinterest page is okay as long as the link back to the original page stays intact.

By the way, CardboardChristmas.com is run on an entirely volunteer basis, including the many individuals who share ideas, plans, and resources simply out of their love for the hobby. From a financial standpoint, it runs "in the red" 100% of the time (even with the few dollars a month we get from new member signups). We can only afford to keep it online because other sites we manage DO generate a profit.

Many, if not most, of the people now unfairly profiteering off all the volunteer effort wouldn't even know about putz houses if it weren't for this site and the people who have shared so much.

Is it rude to ask people bent on appropriating other people's intellectual property to stop pretending they're doing it simply for the "love of the hobby"?

- Paul

Post by **BrianB** » Sat Oct 05, 2019 7:26 pm

Wow, seems like I may have missed some stuff! Hope everyone is doing okay, sorry this happened! Wish I had more content to contribute, but I've been busy with other hobbies lately. Paul, this forum is the best!!!
Cheers!
-Brian