Update (Halsafar): Original post http://pastebin.com/gc0036Qg

While I don’t wish for this site to start devolving into scene drama, I felt a post was necessary on why it is that I’ve recently decided to part ways with psx-scene and what led me to taking the drastic decision I felt was necessary in order to make a statement. This affects all other homebrew developers in the grand scheme of things – and I acted accordingly as the situation demanded it.

New TOS waiving your rights

After the acquisition by QJ.Net, they quietly injected into the already existing Terms of Services a new law that expressly authorizes PSX-scene to effectively assume ownership of any and all material you make available to the public on their community site. I will let this quote do the talking so that there can be no debate about this -

Psx-scene Terms of Service

“User Provided Content, License. You are solely responsible for all content or materials that you post, submit to, or transmit through the Service. By submitting materials or content to PSX-SCENE.COM, you grant PSX-SCENE.COM a license to copy, use, display and create derivative works of the material or content submitted for any purpose, including, without limitation, the promotion and marketing of the Service and the operation of the PSX-SCENE.COM system. By submitting materials or content, you automatically agree (or, to the extent you do not own all rights to such materials or content, you represent and warrant that the owner of the content or materials has expressly agreed) that without any particular time limit, and without the payment of any fees, PSX-SCENE.COM and anyone it permits may reproduce, display, distribute and create new works of authorship based on and including the content or materials. You may not submit content or materials trademarked or copyrighted by anyone other than yourself.”

Now, obviously, this is disingenuous on its face. Stepping aside for a moment the fact that they can not simply waive your rights like this – the fact remains that there are licences to obey when you as a porter decide to port an emulator to another system. Those licences are very clear on ownership rights and your ability or permission to be able to buy or resell them. For psx-scene to put themselves into the enviable position where they believe they can ‘reproduce, display, distribute and create new works of authorship’ speaks to the audacity and clear disrespect of these new site owners who happen to view developers as a bunch of schmucks to be hoodwinked and cajoled into servitude.

‘Successful business != Conning people into waiving their rights’

As a response to that, I took down all emulator threads on their forum that I have personally worked on ( seeing as the previous owner on there granted me Moderator status with no strings attached). Also, I complied with the wishes of many former members who wanted all their content to be removed because they have similar misgrievances about this new ‘clause’ they added to their terms and they don’t like this site profiteering or benefiting in any way from it. Now, obviously, that resulted in my ban – it couldn’t have gone any other way – you know once you throw down the gauntlet like this, what the consequences of that are going to be. I personally requested for them to cast the first stone and ban me – I had no more desire staying on there and feel no need to associate myself with that site anymore.

Now the sad thing is – this kind of profiteering has become fashionable now over the past few years – when you mistake being a ‘good entrepreneur’ with being a ‘con artist’ and a ‘profiteer’ and, worst of all, you don’t even care about any of the amoral connotations that brings along with it – then obviously you’re going to have friction between developers who are doing this mainly out of a passion and then these kinds of cynical businessmen following in the grand footsteps of PT Barnum and his ilk.