TSR are still on a mission to eliminate rival sites, and if he can not get your sites, he will get your downloads.
Many of you will be all too familiar with mysterious disappearing files hosted offsite from places such as Mediafire. These hosting sites are popular with those of you that have small sites and/or limited bandwidth, and also with those of you who have had your websites hacked and your downloads deleted. You may think that by hosting off site your downloads are safe. Nope, Tom has that covered. Tom classes these deletions as a form of sport, and gains endless hours of pleasure out of watching someone’s files get ‘legally’ deleted. In most cases the legality is up for question, considering he lies about the file ownership in order to achieve his goal. How does this work? It is really simple. You create a dress, upload it to Mediafire. Tom tells Mediafire he owns that dress, and gives them a link to any dress on TSR. Mediafire do not have a picture of your file, they are not simmers or programmers and they do not open your packaged file. Tom is careful not to provide a link to your site in case they notice your pictures and his pictures do not match. They take his word that it is his file and it is deleted. They do not want to get into copyright arguments – it is far easier for them to delete your file and ignore your complaints.
He also uses this method as a form of harassment; you may remember that like GOS, Spanish site Sunset Sims had their site deleted due to a false TOS report. They launched a new site with the help of Pescado. Since then countless files have been continually deleted from their offsite hosts. I was talking to the site owner, Bencuom, yesterday, ( who I must add is one of nicest and sweetest people you could ever wish to meet ) and when I asked her to estimate the number of downloads she has lost, she replied “many, many”. Which I assume is an awful lot. I do know this has been continuously happening to her on her latest site since she reopened in January and before that Tom had her Wordpress closed, so I would agree an exact amount of lost files would be hard to estimate.
She has kindly provided me with a copy of an Email sent to her from Mediafire in May and gave me permission to share this. I have removed her Email address from the top.
So there you have it. All carpet patterns belong to TSR, ( by law! ) This, from TSR – the same idiots that also tried to claim ownership on the color orange, and then went on claim a full palette of block colors. But let us ignore the fact that The Sims and all its merchandise belong to EA.
UPDATE 4th JULY
The harassment of Sunset sims still continues, this is one of the three ‘take-down’ notifications Sunsetsims has received in one day. Little Tom has been busy.
