Copy cat
An ex-colleague of mine was interested in geocaching and we agreed to do one together some day. I took Dijleland 1 : Arenberg GCKX21 close to work as a perfect example what geocaching is all about.
This multi has a nice story, the scenery is nice, the waypoints are cleverly designed and there is a trap where most of the loggers have been falling into. The logs are hence laudatory. We fixed last Friday after work as the time to tackle this cache. At first he hadn’t of course the geocache way didn’t find any of the waypoints, but he hanged in and at the end he found some waypoints. After some calculations we went for the final search and didn’t find anything. We went for some food in order to nourish our minds and found out that we did some miscalculations somewhere. We went back to the crime scene but it was too dark to find anything. I had a torch with me, but that didn’t work. It’s the second time that a torch lets me down. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel (sorry for the pun). I could discover the torch Weedboer was using during the WW6 event, mentioned earlier. I’m very tempted to buy the same one, but more on that later.
Anyway, I went yesterday back to the cache location during lunch time and found it rather smoothly. It turned out that I was also fooled by the Jester and his companions. A bit later I could free Queen of Diamonds and log this cache.
During my search I found out that there was a cache in the neighbourhood which wasn’t listed on the gc.com site. It was called a science cache, a kind of derivative of caching. It seems to be something set up by a college, with the focus on science. As such I don’t have nothing against this, but when I was looking up the cache I find on my way, I was shocked. About 70% of the assignment was identical to the original cache. One just added some extra tasks to let it look more science oriented. At first sight, only the end coordinates aren’t the same.
It seems that these students at this college wanted an easy way to dash their assignment off in the hope that their professor wouldn’t notice. Compare it with book reviews downloaded from internet and slightly modified before handing in. The least one could do was to mention the original cache and author.
Regardless whether such thing as copyright exists for geocaches and the ‘authors’ have permission from the original cache owner to base their cache on, I find this way of working not done. dash something off.
Update: The TOUA of the Groundspeak says:
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March 11th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Nice that you did find it. Too bad my first cache wasn’t found.
Well, better luck next time.
By the way, this is the torch I was talking about : http://www.nextorch.com/nt/en/product_detail.asp?id=27
March 11th, 2009 at 11:59 am
There will be a lot of occasions you’ll find the cache. It’s always difficult in the beginning.
Thanks for the torch info.