BillyRex

Chill bruh, them space white knights will protect you. Or at least, join a faction in the universe, it's not EVE. You can stay on a planet. Unless they add weapons of mass destruction, you are crispy cream safe.

Honestly I am just hoping for a space engineer that runs better.

Protecting scripts is pretty easy, after they're set up they could just be marked as "unreadable" by the creator and its done.
Protecting hardware is a lot harder, but there could be a way for that too, like creating a blackbox surrounding the hardwar that destroys everything inside if its broken, the question for that is, will we be able to create such a thing ourselves or do we need something prebuilt for it.
 
I myself will most likely try to add triggers for explosives on critical parts, that means if the voxel covering it is removed, as long as thats possible.

I would happily do that job.
 
I think that a system where tag creation, simiriality of designs and players protecting their own designs themselves would probably do the trick

This is it. Just about everything in game (that you'd actually care to protect) is the code for how things operate. If the devs have a creator protection on scripts, which they'd better or the game probably won't be worth playing, then it shouldn't be a problem. Copying the construct without the code would leave the copier with a nice ornamental paperweight. That's about it, unless they put in a ton of work to recode everything. 
That said, do we really need a legal system in game? Maybe the players could set something up if they can convince everyone to follow the rules. But I think that will be unlikely.
 
I will be a builder/coder in game. And I intend to protect my creations. If people decide to copy my work and sell it to others, I will be willing to pay large sums to any mercenary who can prove they have terminated said copycat and destroyed everything they've built.
 
Ruthless? Yes. But it should be a sufficient deterrent.

I'd argue that reverse-engineering constructs/blueprints is actually a good thing and makes the game more entertaining if done right.
 
tl;dr: An encryption system allows you to protect the important technology so a player that spends a lot of time discovering something isn't cheated, but also allows for others to use your innovation to invent other things.
 
First, I think there are two things to discuss: what you are protecting and the motivation for protection.
 
What you are protecting
 
Say I invent a computer monitor. Do I get to have protection over all electronic displays? Just ones that connect on a certain interface? Just ones that are shaped like mine? When you file for a patent in real life, it's not usually the physical form you are looking to protect, but the technology underneath it. There are many different computer monitor technologies, and the reason we keep getting bigger, faster, more 3D-ish, curved, etc. monitors is that it's the underlying technology that is patented, not the form it comes in.
 
With that in mind, I propose that players aren't allowed to patent something like "rocket engine" but instead "solid-fuel rocket engine using this grain I found on a planet". Allow for the protection of the technology, not the particular form it came in. That way many different types of rocket engines can be invented, even many solid-fuel rocket engines, and if what I really did was figure out how to turn a resource I found into a fuel, it starts to allow for other applications of my technology to be found.
 
Motivation for protection
 
I get the idea of wanting protection. It takes a lot of time and money to get a working construct/blueprint. When you have completed your design and tested that it works, you want to be able to reap the benefits of your innovation. If you then don't have any protection from someone logging in and reverse engineering what you have done in a much shorter time frame, the original innovator loses out big time and you'll lose the interest of innovators.
 
However, there are some drawbacks as well. If I'm allowed to protect my invention too fiercely then I have effectively created myself a monopoly which would allow me to set whatever price I want without worry of competition and ruin the economic system that is being built. I can also just sit back and not bother innovating anymore because I will have a continuous revenue stream that is not threatened. This also gives me an unfair advantage in the economy because my buying power will be so much greater than others (assuming my tech is popular). So I feel both the extremes would both lead to a negative gameplay experience, and I feel the answer is somewhere in the middle.
 
Proposal
How about an encryption system for the core technology of your innovation? You have a certain level of security, but is still leaves the possibility for a thief or copy-cat who wants to spend enough time and money (just like you did to create the construct/blueprint) to crack the encryption and get the design. A side benefit is this system would allow for an encryption market to also be created and sold to innovators. Going one step further, this also opens up the market for decrypters  (maybe black market?), which I think would lead to a really interesting cat and mouse security struggle. The longer you want to be the only game in town, the more you need to invest in encryption. Hello security industry!
 
The other benefits of an encryption system is that not only you can choose to sell your technology to the other players, but you'll also be able to license it. Did you discover a way to turn a resource you found on your planet into a fuel source? Is that resource the only viable abundant fuel source in that sector of the galaxy? You might have discovered how to make a rocket engine out of it, but what about someone wanting to make a automobile engine or power plant? License the tech to them and profit when they do. This will bring a real interesting business aspect to the game that I think has been missing from all the builder games I've played.
 
Whatever system is decided on, I think we need to be careful how much protection we give on what so that the game isn't dominated by the first wave of players and prevents newer players from joining later on.

To be as honest as possible the subscription model helps keep masses of unwanted trash players, that will never spend 1.00$ on the game, out of the game.
 
NovaQuark should not use the Titanic game model that has been going ever since WoW took over the MMO market.
 
Can anyone name me a memorable free to play / cash shop game that they have stuck with and played for any length of time? They don't exist.
 
Planetside 1 in its time was vastly more fun than Planetside 2 will ever hope to be.
 
TOR, Wildstar and all the others that start as pay 2 play and go free to play is because they overhype and break the ship in half. There's nothing wrong with their games staying pay to play, but they don't want to put any effort into making the game better so they cop out ditch the sub and put in a cash shop.
Nobody is happy with 50,000 to 300,000 active subscribers anymore its laughable that the industry thinks the gold standard is reaching 1 million active sub's minimum to keep a game alive.
 
WoW and EV.E are the only successful games out there, though both of them are bordering dangerously close to failure with their cash shop's.
 
If you overtap your playerbase for money they'll burn through the content and ditch the game, sure you get a quick buck, but eventually your' game becomes lost in the wind of all the other free to fail games.
 
Once you start putting shares, quarterly revenue reports, and stockholder opinions above the quality of your' game you've lost, you aren't a game anymore.
All they care about is hyping stuff up in order to drive "traffic" into the game, and subjecting them to the highest degree of advertising and pressure to buy garbage from the cash shops.
 
If you like the sound of this game, if you want a community, if you want content, support the developers in their quest to return the glory of subscription's.

That first part was a bit of an overstatement, and actually overwhelmingly untrue. The subscription model certainly has some problems, but it does not, as you say, force you to keep buying a game. Ferran's points are true...with a subscription model, developers have incentive to further update the game, or else players will simply stop paying and playing. Players continue to have access to better content, and developers have a steady stream of funds to further improve content. With buy-to-play, developers see a huge influx of money at first, but that soon runs out and players are left with the game as it is, or worse, even more expensive DLC and expansion packs.
 
Take Netflix - you pay monthly for access to its library of titles, not buying all of the TV shows and movies themselves - that would be enormously expensive. Dual Universe is similar - you don't pay for the entire game and all of its content upfront - you pay periodically for access to a constantly evolving and constantly improving system.