I think the real problem comes into play when someone not only redistributes your work - be it legal or illegal - but attempts to make money off it via passing it off as their own or using advertisements to generate a revenue off of it.
I know exactly what the OP's post is referring to, since my friend is part of the Rom Hacking community and he told me about exactly what happened. Apparently, someone decided to take like, a large portion of the Rom Hacks on the Rom Hacking board and redistribute them on their website. If that was just it, I could probably let it go - they didn't link the forum thread, but they attributed the creator. However, they included two download links - both of them behind adfly short url generators. The thing about Adfly is, you have to sit through an advertisement to actually access the link, and that advertisement grants a small small
small revenue of income to the person who made the links. There are well over 20 rom hacks on that site, each with two download links - and some of them a big-name hacks, too. If you were to do a google search for it, that website would be among the first to pop up. So going back over the points, this is whats going on:
- Someone decided to make a website to redistribute Pre-Patched GBA Rom Hacks, which is already even more illegal than distributing the .ips files.
- Someone decided to not link to the forum thread for the Rom Hack at all, only giving credit by the developers name.
- Someone decided to put the download links to the pre-patched roms, which is illegal by most standards because it constitutes and promotes piracy, behind adfly links which allow them to profit off someone else's work, illegal work I might restate again.
All in all, this is a textbook case of art thief and making money off work that isn't your own, and I have very very little tolerance for it. When i learned of the website, I sent in an immediate DCMA Claim to Adfly to try and have the links pulled down. I'm waiting a few more days, to see if the moderators of the Rom Hacking thread can manage to convince the individual to pull the links themselves, before I send in a second DCMA Claim to the website host to have the entire site pulled.
And if you think it doesn't affect you all, you're wrong - there's Pokemon Essentials fangames there, too. Only two right now, Blaze Red and Raptor EX, but what's to say one of your own projects wont go up there?
To properly answer the question of the thread: Do I think a website, or a thread, or even a simple pastebin, that serves as a collective of all Fangames/Rom Hacks would be a good idea? Yes, I do. So long as it credits the developer and links back to the original development thread, I see no issue with an idea at all. However, the works should not be reuploaded. This prevents them from getting updated when the developer releases a newer build, and people are left playing much older builds of a game than what is currently released.