There's no legal backup to anything TSR's doing until/unless they get a signed agreement with EA to act as a third party distributor for content. IMO, not gonna happen. What gets me is how they're trying to be two sites at once; a fansite and an online retailer. It doesn't work like that. I'm a tad awed to learn this has carried on for years without fatally imploding yet. That said, their businesses apart from TSR are pretty irrelevant to this situation, at least from what I can see so far. Isn't the larger fuss about various pay creators holding pixels hostage for MONIES across the fandom, not just one big subsite of a family web company selling junk, even if they are the biggest of the offenders?  Looking for legal ways of shutting them down is well and good, I guess, but doesn't solve the core issue, that selling Sims cc is not so great.

The current flurry of activity points one direction - might be hard times coming at TSR. Sims 3 doesn't look to hold much in the way of download profits from custom content in the initial months. They don't make their own tools, correct? That means they'll have to wait for non-affiliated folks to find ways to import cc. (Anything provided by EA will be very basic, created thusly so anyone, regardless of skill, can use it to make simple changes. I don't count that as a true development tool.) They need to limit any bad publicity or irritation when they expect folks to pay for the privilege of downloading poorly-tiling textures to floodfill ugly Sims 3 meshes with, 'cause there's a good chance that's where a sizable chunk of their profits are going for at least a few months.

Ironically, the looming Sims 3 drought could press some worried FAs to consider 'shortcuts' – like the theft being discussed elsewhere – to grab as much as they can before the great Sims 3 migration among TSR's core audience of kiddies begins. A site like theirs is in more danger of a usage dropoff from must-have-the-latest-version! syndrome than the free sites long time fans prefer.

Huh? Is that letter an actual, serious attempt by someone to protect a business? Where is his lawyer? No one with more than one or two employees (is that not what TSR has, people employed to make custom content?) handles their own legal affairs, not even at the correspondence level. This must just be intended as an annoyance or attention-getter. Either that, or he's getting bad legal advice. Or ignoring sound legal advice...

I try to be kind and look at both sides in disputes. I'm currently unemployed. Having been a senior designer and developer for ages, I can bang out the pixel image stuff pretty quick with zero effort. Even though TSR's lousy $500 payouts wouldn't even get me a cheap apartment, let alone buy food or allow for a social life, I'd still step over cute toddlers and puppy dogs to earn that much a month right now. I can completely understand why TSR checks would be attractive to a certain demographic.

Of course, selling stuff for a game created by a company you are neither employed by nor contracted to  seems, to me, wrong on various levels (including, usually, legal ones). I also find it a little odd to often see what's obviously pictures of real clothing and home items slapped onto a mesh (sometimes lifted from Poser or a meshes-for-download site) and sold without consent on various paysites. I'm willing to bet no royalties are being paid out. Not anything in the realm of legal – not to mention lazy and unattractive (just my opinion: I prefer fully created, or at least well disguised real world textures, over photomeshed content). No one could get away with that in a real development company. Fans doing it for free; no big deal. Folks looking for money? Eh, no; that's not ok.

I'm not what you'd call an active sims community member, so I really not into All the dramaz!!11!! between TSR, their fellow paysites and the free creators. I'm simply annoyed that people, (who I assume are mostly, if not all, not professional content developers therefore maybe ignorant of protocol – but that's not an excuse), are selling, at beyond reasonable price, content created, in many cases with images, logos and sometimes meshes they haven't purchased usage rights to, for a game they have no connection with beyond fandom. Weird, legally shady and really tactless.

As to the EULA, my understanding in these situations has always been that if you make content derived from any aspect of a company or individuals property, be that software, images or code, you must purchase the right to do so from the original owner, especially if you intend to sell your work! Hence, you can't grab images from Corbis and start selling posters you designed with them, you can't build a custom level to a pre-existing game and sell it on your website and you can't take parts of a computer game, slap your own texture on it or add your own mesh with their code and sell that either. If you have a screen shot, a video, a sim posted anywhere well, EA owns it, right? It's based on their intellectual property and subject to their rules for use in any way they see fit. Or is the situation different with sims, because I'd be surprised.

Well this is a weird choice for a first post but I couldn't help myself.

Goth and emo have some relation but it's very surface. Mostly it's folks confusing the two, but there is a bit of musical taste overlap. One thing that struck me as funny is emo's only wearing black. Most emos I've met looked more like scene kids who accidently put half thier bright colors into the wash with a pair of black socks. They all go in for screen printed t-shirts and streaked hair. (As a side note; the registration screen asked for no names with xDumbNameHerex. Some emos will do that – 'cause a few of the punkish ones (or fans of certain punk and emo bands) are straightedge – but most goth won't, even if they are edge. xNamex is mostly for kiddies, and while goths can be young too, almost all emos are young.)

Goth encompases a wide range, and I'm about to do a lot of generalizing. There are cybers and rivetheads who like industrial dance bars and pvc clothes. Those into the bondage subscene like pvc too .  The rockabillys and vintage crowd look like throwbacks to earlier modern eras but the former seem more like the types you'd find at a punk concert while the vintage folks have a Amy Winehouse-ish look about them. The trad goth dresses in black and favors looking like they never go outside, others seem best suited to Pagan gatherings with thier fairy dust and penchant for wearing wings. Then there's the victorian and medieval goths – very obvious because they dress and often talk the part of people dropped from a time warp. The lolitas are obvious; they're the ones in frilly gear who love bows and parasols. The loli look is very hard to get right and the Sims community often picks on the poor loli with some rather odd dresses. Babydolls are sometimes confused with lolis but shouldn't be. The do like short frilly skirts but are more concerned with looking (and acting, on the club scene) purposefully childlike. Oh, and there are certainly goths that never wear black. Sometimes it's a ghostly look, in other cases, it's about being sparkly and uber-upbeat. Yes, there are goths like that, one clear difference right there from the emo type.

There are, of course, other sub groups of goth out there. I haven't even mentioned some of the most common ones, probably because they overlap so much with other types. The vampire lovers, for instance, come in every flavor, and causal, old style goths can appear so similar to the punk roots of the scene that you might not know where to place them, much like rockabilly and vintage. I seem to be tossing around a lot of labels, which doesn't really fit with the inclusiveness of the subculture scene, but seeing as the topic – what's a goth and what's an emo – came up, I figured I might as well explain a bit of it. Though keep in mind, this is just from my perspective and you could ask someone from a different region, sphere or generation of gothic culture and get somewhat different labels and descriptions. One thing to remember is that true goths are rarely morbid without purpose, cruel, judgemental or violently dark. Those types are usually isolated kids attracted to the supposed darkness without much real contact within the wider community. Popular culture tends to mislabel anyone strangely morbid and/or violent, into vampires or dressed in odd black clothes as goth and that's simply not reality.


Oh and yeah, there's some pervy goods over at TSR. Yup.