I suppose it worries me a bit that a post I made from my phone on my way to go move some tree limbs around the yard is immediately picked up by the site owner and taken as being good policy. Am I that important? Probably not.
[Yet? cough cough if Warsmash were finished.... cough cough]
I guess we can remove the rule about map protection entirely, but emphasize elsewhere that the act of publicly (pastebin, map section, off-site linking) sharing someone else's altered map (e.g. deprotected) without direct/implied permission and without significant attempts at contacting him/her with assistance from the staff is not allowed.
Specifically, I think that we should have this rule in a way that is based on author's copyright intention even if the map file is not damaged or corrupted. If I upload a stupid simple map called "Retera's Idyllic Paradise" with a lot of sheep, it seems like it would be good to have a way that I can tag the upload with a copyright designation that declares probably one of:
1.) Never modify Retera's Idyllic Paradise without permission from Retera.
2.) Modify Retera's Idyllic Paradise in limited ways that keep the original name but improve it
3.) Make literally whatever you want by using any portion of the data from Retera's Idyllic Paradise however you want
Ideally the copyright annotation would be a part of the map file itself that was not specific to this site, but (just a brainstorm here) it seems to me that it would be a possible step in the right direction to have the Hive site allow a copyright designation like this along with the map upload. Maybe in some sense this designation already exists with the "Open Source" tag, so maybe I am just imagining a world where the site database contents are more specific. Whether that's necessary or not, I am not sure.
But I would certainly enjoy it if some day Retera Model Studio had a button to browse Hive models. And when that happens, this topic will be really important to me. If I could perhaps enforce that users in an "edit" mode of sorts only see the models tagged as Open Source, this would save me a lot of headache regarding pinging people on Hive who might no longer be active begging for edit permissions. I have lived for a long time where I would shamelessly use in-game Blizzard models while making new ones (including dissecting them into their animations, and parts, etc). In some sense, I have almost never "added new models to that repertoire" because I did not want to deal with the problem of copyright and simply already accepted that for the purposes of making Warcraft III content, modifying Blizzard Warcraft III assets is always okay.
If I ever become a more serious contributor to HiveWE, what if I wanted to think and operate in the same way, but for maps?
But the next question is, does the Hive have the gumption to start blanket tagging maps older than a certain age with the "Open Source" tag even if that tag was not added by their original author, for example? I am not certain whether I would be in favor of that. It could potentially cause some serious drama or something. But I am asking, is that the kind of thing that anyone is actually planning to do?