One of the best Dutch space model designers, Erik te Groen has permanently shut down his website. Reason: his freely available stuff was sold on the Chinese pirate website Alice papermodels. They take downloads of free models and sell these kits in their pirate webshop as printed packs for big prices. Not only Eriks stuff is found there, hundreds of model kits, created by numerous other designers, all their designed cars, planes, spacecraft, ships, planes, all models you can get (often for free) at the websites of the makers themselves, are being exploited by these Chinese criminals.
They themselves think it's all right, they don't see any copyright infringement because they are selling the models in print. But still they violate the creator's copyrights, because the designer didn't give them permission to sell the printed version.
Not only is this affecting the designers, it is affecting the whole community because those bastards simply cause some designers to stop designing and leave the hobby behind. Some have invented elaborate schemes to let people obtain their free models from their websites with passwords, quests and other methods, others simply delete their work and leave us behind with nothing. All because of these bastard Chinese pirates.
What makes this hobby so great? Not just the paper modeling itself, It also is the free sharing of models. Great, superdetailed models of whatever you can think of. Models you'll never find in plastic. Models that are able to be build in big or smaller scales, depending on how you print them. Free models. Made by people who like to share them with the community. Something this pirate website is actively destroying by offering payed downloads of these free models they also got for free.
So be smart and save this hobby by looking for the proper places to download paper models and ignore Alice papermodel. Just don't go there and let them take advantage of other people's work.
Besides, how much of an idiot must one be to BUY a free model?
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