the water is pretty muddy, in reality. if i was paying him $40 a month and part of my perk package was i get a copy of any previews, then it is arguable that it is MY copy to do with as i please regardless of what DPC says himself since it was a direct result of me paying him.
if he literally and technically OWNED these things then he could have or should have taken legal action against me and anyone else that "stole" his property. but he doesnt do that cause the legal argument is pretty blurry and would ultimately be a total waste of time and money for DPC cause as per patreon terms of service he can ban any patron for any reason, no questions asked. there is no binding legal contract between DPC and his patrons, it basically just uses the honor system. and while i admit i did violate DPC's honor system, i decided for myself that sharing the previews here that im shelling out almost $500 a year for was something that was within my rights to do (even if DPC disagreed) and that it was not "harmful" to his business (i basically paid him money to advertise his own game lol).
and tbh, the previews are so few and far between and ultimately so insignificant that there is no reason that we shouldnt get them here so we have something to talk about during the insane down time between episodes. IMO, DPC was just acting like a baby cause somebody disobeyed his rules
hopefully the next episode comes out sooner rather than later, though it seems like a halloween synchronization is likely
The point is that DPC is getting a constant flow of money from his patrons. Normally a dev makes the whole game without funding and he gets the money after releasing. Using this way the dev must have enough money to survive the development phase until he gets the money, this would work for big companies but (mostly) not for a single dev.
The Patreon way is likely different, it's more suitable for single developers. But to please the patrons he has to give them small pieces of evidence of the dev process (no matter if they are update news or pics), to reward their loyalty. It's (in Bella's words) naive from DPC to expect that these aren't shared (as the net iss all about share), no matter what he was expecting.
So, i'm with you Sombo, on the one side it's his business model to give some things (news, polls, pics) only to people who support him, on the other side it's naive (*argh* Bella again....?) to try to control what the patrons will do with this pieces after release. Maybe DPC will agree with some sort of delay, after the patrons get the pics they should wait for a amount if time until they share the pics (let's say one week for example), so, if someone is curious about them he has to become a patron to get them directly at they were released.
Sombo, thinking of all of this i would say thank you to you for risking your patron to share BaD news to us, even if you can't do it anymore.