Originally Posted by sakurakira
By the current system it's up to the author to notify WoWI about any violations?
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Yes. That's how copyright works in any system, especially systems involving digital distribution and user-submitted content. If someone copies your video and posts it to YouTube, it's up to you to notify YouTube about the violation. If someone uploads your song to a blog without permission, it's up to you to notify the blog host about the violation. If someone writes a novel using your characters and world without your permission, it's up to you to notify its publisher about the violation. If someone copies your website, it's up to you to notify their web host about the violation.
Content publishers and hostng providers cannot reasonably be expected to know about every copyrighted work in the entire world, or to spend dozens or hundreds of hours checking every submission to try to determine its real origin. The primary responsibility is, and has always been, on the copyright holder.
Once you notify the appropriate party about the violation,
then the burden is on them to respond as required by law.
Originally Posted by sakurakira
What happens if a non-author reports an addon violation? Let's say I report that New Addon X is a ripoff of Abandoned Addon Y.
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Legally, the publisher or hosting provider is only obligated to respond to notifications from the actual copyright holder of the work.
However, the publisher/host may, if they wish, investigate reports from third parties and take any action they like. In my experience, WoWI usually does this if there is a clear violation (eg. the original addon is all rights reserved, and the "fan update" doesn't say it has permission and doesn't even credit the original author).
Originally Posted by sakurakira
Well Maybe the author of Abandoned Addon Y wouldn't even care about it, but we don't know if the default license is ARR and the author cannot be contacted.
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Maybe not, but
under copyright law it doesn't matter what the original author thinks, unless they put those thoughts into writing somewhere.
Originally Posted by sakurakira
If ... the reasoning is because regardless of a single absent author's wishes, this method is better for the community as a whole, I disagree. I think more options are better, for everyone, in the long run.
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It has nothing to do with what's "better for the community". It's about what's legal and what's not legal, and it's about respecting the wishes of the person who spent many hours of their free time contributing to the community. If they didn't explicitly
say "I'm okay with anyone using the product of my hard work for anything", you can't just assume they are okay with it. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but you don't know.
Imagine you've spent 1000 hours writing, fixing, adding to, and supporting an addon; let's call it "CoolMod". Now imagine that you suddenly get married and get promoted at work, and just don't have time to even
play WoW for 6 months, let alone develop your addon. Or maybe you lose your job and your house, and spent a year couch surfing or sleeping in the park before you get back on your feet.
Now imagine that once things settle down, you come back to WoW, and find that other people have been using your addon's code or graphics to publish "CoolMod Plus" and "CoolMod Extended" and "CoolMod Fan Update" and "SuperMod" and "MyBetterMod". Maybe some of them are crediting you; others aren't. None of them ever asked you for permisson; your PM box is empty. How would you feel? How might people who view their work differently than you view yours feel? Are their feelings less valid than yours? Should we ignore their views because you (or someone else) think it's "better for the community"?
There's no WoW addon that's so huge and complicated it can't be rewritten from scratch by someone else in a few weeks at most, if someone actually wants to do it. If nobody wants to do it, well, we're back to square one -- the addon obviously isn't as important to most people as it is to you, and your options are (again) quit WoW because you can't play without it, learn to play without it, find another addon that's "close enough", or learn to code and write your own.