Terra, Not releasing to the public makes sense to me. You can always still release to other modelers you trust. Releasing to the general public will always lead to misuse because there will always be 1 or 2% that will do whatever they want with no regard for protocol. People that do that will never change either, they are what they are.
What I found disappointing, was an original design I did was done by someone else. That area is a bit grey as well. Its one thing to redesign a Canon ST ship because that goes on every day and everyone knows who the rights for the ST based design belong to. But when someone else comes up with a ship that looks 90% similar to your non ST original design,only maybe they drop the back wings, then thats a bit unnerving.
I stepped back and took a look at how to proceed and came to the conclusion that as this was only one of my hobbies. It just isn't worth the frustration of displaying my work in these types of forums, where all it takes is 1 or 2 people to disrupt things. Also since no money is involved it does not make any sense to spend too much time or resources trying to police things.
The bright side for me is I was able to take about 10% of the skills I learned in this forum and transfer that into a business that is not related to ship modeling in any way. Amazingly I, who was once a modeling junkie, have found there are other things in life that are more rewarding.
Terra, wish you luck in what ever you decide. Don't rule out never releaseing again though, sometimes just a break is good enough but everyone has to determine when enough is enough.
Regards,
James aka red_green - ship_rods -Model_Peon and general nut case at times but as long as I cause a few morons some grief I'll be doing some good