From what I have seen, EA *does* respect creators. While I don't believe they have or will take a stance against re-uploads, they put the "Original By" field in there for a reason, which was to retain credit to the original creator. When they use someone's work, in their promo videos for instance, they also credit them. If they didn't care, they wouldn't bother. The problem has been that there were (and in the case of rooms and households still are) gaps in the coding of the Original By field that enabled people to (whether accidentally or purposefully) remove the Original By completely. EA has worked on rectifying this over time and indeed have removed all known loopholes from lots, and I hope they will do the same for rooms and households too.
My personal take on it as a builder (with all due respect to other builders that have a different opinion) is that I would prefer to have more creative control over what I share on the Gallery, such as a flag creators could toggle that would dis-allow re-uploads (with full disclosure to a downloader that this is the case so that they could skip the download if they didn't want that restriction) or a system where a downloader could request permission to re-upload something, and the creator could respond yes or no. I don't think we will actually get a system like this in TS4, but maybe we can request it for the next iteration of The Sims.
The issue for me is that with every build, I try to do something unique and I spend just shy of forever on it. I struggle over every little detail, and thus my creations do have a lot of meaning and value to me. Unless a downloader radically changes it (which has happened, and which I was okay with), it pains me to see something I intended as one-of-a-kind pop up over and over again on the Gallery. For that reason, I always request that my work not be re-uploaded and then just hope for the best. I have found that politely letting a re-uploader know how I feel can be effective in many cases, but I am very aware that it's optional on their part, and I have to accept that. I really appreciate the ones that respect creators' feelings, and fortunately, that's many of them. :)
