Plagiarism in Activity Creation

[jp4712]

Mick, Forward it to me and I'll make sure it's looked at.

Paul

[belfastdundalk]

WASIT WE'RE LOOKING AT BEEN PAGERISED?

[phill70]

WASIT WE'RE LOOKING AT BEEN PAGERISED?

???????

[117305]

WASIT WE'RE LOOKING AT BEEN PAGERISED?

???????

Wonder who belfast-dundalk is, and why does he need to shout.

[45002]

WASIT WE'RE LOOKING AT BEEN PAGERISED?

???????

Wonder who belfast-dundalk is, and why does he need to shout.

I wondered why this post came back up, last post on 14 Nov 2006 17:13

Google is your Friend

MARTIN

[Geoffwright]

Buffy & XPTE are quite right in saying that the really important components of an activity are the service & traffic files.
Components such as stock used (stock files are uploaded because the authors want them to be used by activity writers !), and to the most extent services & paths (simply to try to limit unnecessary duplication or near duplication in users bulging MSTS installations) except where those paths & services are most unusual & idiosyncratic.

It is the traffic pattern that takes the vast majority of the activity author's blood, sweat & tears & hours & hours of test runs and fine tuning. It is shameful for a third party to plagiarise this area in order to (presumably) bolster his own feelings of pathetic inadequacy. Maybe we should have some sympathy for such sad & probably very unhappy individuals.

If my conclusion that it is the Traffic file that constitutes the major significance of an activity, then there is a way that plagiarism can be fairly easily and conclusively detected. All the activity author has to do is to include some fairly idiosyncratic items ino the traffic that in fact have no actual impact upon the player service. I would suggest that your average plagiarist would be pretty hard pressed to distinguish which components of the traffic file are logically necessary and which are put in there as "markers".
In the event of suspected plagiarism, inspection activity traffic files and of authors identities and the relevant upload dates would make all fairly clear, wouldn't it ?

[richard222]

For me the simple answer is if you have a problem with any of your work being reused, simply say so in the readme... Then if people copy it into their own they can face the consequences... Also, a good way of deciding whether or not you can use it is that if it has the writers initials before it, for me I would name the path Woking_Waterloo.pat to RD_Woking_Waterloo, Most people understand that if someone is 'bothered' to do this, they should not copy....

Richard

[thenudehamster]

We're really looking at an 'honour system' here when it comes to any of this.

Let's face it, there isn't much in the way of msts add-ons that can't be analysed, disassembled, copied and plagiarised if someone has a mind to; in similar fashion almost any piece of software can have the same thing done - copy protection can be circumvented and file-sharing systems enable these 'cracked' copies to passed freely around the world. It's only the intrinsic honour of users, backed up by the legal muscle of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and the music industry that put any sort of brake on this sort of thing becoming even more rife than it is.

Within the fairly closed community of ukts, w don't generally have too much of a problem; we're self-policing to a large extent, and most of us are honourable people in that we don't intentionally steal other people's work. I, for instance, introduced a friend to msts a few months ago by demonstrating a few CD routes to him on my laptop - which hooked him straight away - but I would not give him copies of them in view of the stipulation regarding distribution attached to most. He did, however, order several CDs and commercial routes for himself - so everyone benefited.

In similar fashion activities suffer from the same scenario - they can be fairly easily disassembled and the components re-used; the problem comes when someone passes off another persons work as his own. As we have all seemed to agree, such items as consists, while not automatically being 'public domain', are, for the most part, hardly worth making a fuss over, especially when it comes to AI traffic, which, for the most part is for interest rather than interaction with the player service. Major paths in many routes, are limited, too - how many different ways are there of going from Thaxted to Elsenham, for instance, or Waterloo to Southampton? However, the really interactive parts are the service file and the traffic file - and they are the most difficult to get right, as Geoff and others have pointed out, but how we can prevent plagiarism is difficult to ascertain. Policing it afterwards is probably the most effective solution, but that depends on a lot of people being eagle-eyed enough to know what is copied and what is original creation.

There are some activites I might change for my own satisfaction - Laurie's Tangmere run on the Dorset CD being a case in point; much of the AI traffic is 442 suburban electrics, but they don't seem to run west of Woking on the Basingstoke stretch; that's all 450s (I think that's the right class numbers - I think of SWT stock as 'red', 'white' or 'blue' and go from there) so just for my own satisfaction I may one day change many of the 442s for 450s and vice versa, but I wouldn't dream of uploading that altered version as my own work - though I might send it to him for approval before simply uploading it as an altered version. Similar thing with GE activities; although I moved from the area in BR Green days, on the odd occasion I've been back most of the suburban electrics were still 8 and 9 car sets, not the fours which appear so much in the GE activities. Similar reasoning applies there. However, were I to ever finish the 'test' activity I'm currently playing with using a Britannia to haul a special from Liverpool Street to Ipswich, would it be such a crime if I used some of MT's paths for the AI trains? After all, to all intents and purposes, I might well need to 'create' exactly the same path for my own activity. However, were I to use the traffic file, I could save myself many hours of work by 'piggy-backing' my little bit onto their work - but that would not be fair, and it would certainly not be honourable.

Others it seems, from reports, do not have the same inhibitions.

However, while many of the suggestions put forward so far have merit, many create more complexity than is needed to deal with the problem. Identifying paths with initials, for instance, can create a library full of identical paths all with different names. I already have a 'Trainset' Folder with umpteen duplicate items in because installations from CD now have identifiers on all their rolling stock; do we really need this level of complexity to deal with what is fast becoming a small problem now that it has been identified and aired? Most of us do not deal in 'illegal' work; the few that do can be identified and dealt with. Deal with the offenders first before you tar everyone with the same brush in an effort to solve a problem that is not of enormous significance in the first instance.

BarryH - thenudehamster