An X-Box XP skin!!

A sick and mad OS?
I think you might be needing to find a doctor, not a skinner.......

The Xbox logo does have sort of a toxic vomit look. Do you live anywhere near a nuclear waste dump, ssjwolf?

Well the closest things to XBox-style WB skins I've seen are(and you really gotta stretch your imagination for these):

Greyhaze's Metallic skin
Essorant's Pravus skin
Morph's Metal skin
Mercury's Matrix skin

what does the XBox's interface look like. Are there any screenshots we can see somewhere?

http://www.xdome.nl/ShowContent.asp?ContentID=3968

There are actual images on the page, plus there are some links to the right under "dashboard".

looks pretty cool.. i'm sure it's heavily animated and alpha'd though. i'm sure it could be done, but would need a dx theme to accompany it to really get the effect.

I believe the "about" dialogue says it is created with Macromedia Flash. Very animated. When you click on a box it animates in either the up or down direction. The background also moves around. The actual interface kind of reminds me of an airport x-ray scanner looking at machinery.

See, it does look good! Hehehe...
Maybe I do need a doctor...

is this the game console??

Yeh the X-Box is a new console!

what about Windowmedia player X-box skin ?

I got that skin, I just need the rest of my Windows XP looking like that!

some one made an X-box skin!

why isnt it being deleted? its a blatant copyright violation not to mention all they did was rip the graphics off the website. Admins?

And there is a sanctioned xbox windows media player skin Vema if you look in the wmp section.

That's REALLY a stretch, Jesh. Try using it before saying that.

We'll show the skin to Microsoft. I suspect they won't have a problem.

what copyright violation???? you even use the skin? the start menu is similar to images on the xbox page but not the same. don't cry wolf or else people won't take you seriously.

I don't want to start a flame war, but if you take the time to read and comprehend everything that JAFO has said then this definitely qualifies as copyright infringement.


https://www.wincustomize.com/msgboardid.asp?id=35540

"Just the simple acknowledgement that your work was 'derived' from another's precludes its public distribution without permission.
Emulating, or copying another's work, or style of work is OK in your own bedroom....but not for public consumption."

by Jafo - 4/5/2002 6:40:15 AM

No wonder we never make any progress with Copyright infringement. It's perfectly OK unless it's a) blantant and against a "small time" skinner rather than a big corporation.

Why is it that we have to ask a corporation if they mind copyright infringement? I thought the law and rules were pretty well laid out already.

Listen to Xymantix!

By that reasoning there'd be no fan sites in existence. No Planet Geforce. No Warcraftiii.net, no Lord of the Rings fan sites, etc.

There is a critical difference here. One serves to promote, the other serves to harm.

These IP debates aren't just idle intellectual excercises. They are about creating awareness of why ripping is bad and what ripping is.

When someone creates a Spiderman skin or an X-box skin or whatever, no one mistakes the author as being the owner of X-box. When someone rips, however, they are essentially claiming ownership of another person's intellectual property rights. Hence the fan site analogy.

If people try to assert IP demands too broadly, it loses its effectiveness. The group that makes such aggressive assertions loses their moral support because they are seen as being extremist. The Kaleidoscope community, for instance, ran into this very problem when they would start calling anything that looked like it might have even been inspired by one of their skins as a "Rip". Pretty soon people stopped taking them seriously.

Remember, the point in creating an awareness of ripping is to protect individuals. Fan skins that I've seen don't break copyright but do push trademark fair use pretty far (just like a fan site). Some companies welcome fan sites, others don't. But I'm not going to harass people who make fan skins any more than I'm going to go around to fan websites screaming copyright violation.

Brad, if you can't be consistant on this subject, don't expect to be taken seriously when you rant about software piracy. It's just as easy to create gray areas there too.

I am being consistent. Perhaps I am not being clear enough in my explanation but my position has been consistent from day 1.

The problem is that people don't know the differences between copyright, trademark and tradedress.

How about this:

Copyright violations = bad.
Unauthorized trademark use = gray area.

Ripping violates copyright. The X-box skin does NOT violate copyright. I've talked to IP lawyers on these sorts of issues for years. The X-box skin does however use the X-box logo without authorization.

OS skins do not violate copyright. They do potentially violate trade dress.

I'm sorry if I sound impatient, I just get frustrated hearing net people argue intellectual property law when they really have aren't that informed about what it is. I should probably sit down some time and write up an article on it so people know the difference between copyright, trademark and trade dress.

In sort our policy on rips is that they are copyright violations and we do not tolerate copyright violations on this website.

Wait, Brad, what about a fan skin that uses a copyrighted picture?
That's not just unauthorized use of trademark, it's also unauthorize use and distribution of a copyrighted picture. Therefore copyright violation, so: bad.

Agreed.

right.. and this would be one source of perceived inconsistency. the admins and wizops are deciding daily what gets posted and what doesn't. sometimes i'm sure the choices may seem inconsistent, but really it's due to this issue and the confluence of zeitgeist and grey area. in other words, one admin on one day may see things that fall in the grey area one way, and another admin at another time may see something similar in the grey area a different way.

if one works in the grey area, your mileage 'may' differ, but probably not by much. for example, i would love to see a great spiderman skin.. but, i 'probably' wouldn't approve it if it included that specific view of spiderman's face that marvel also uses as one of their trademark images.

While I was a bit worked up when I first posted, one of the reasons that I did post was to try to apply some of the arguments that I've read against ripping and copyright violation to something that did appear as an infringement for copyrighted material. I actually emailed Jafo privately to ask for some clarification because I'm aware that I don't know all of the details. And, interestingly enough, many of the details that I am aware of came from this message board.

At any rate, my thinking was that 90% or so of the skin was original. All of the buttons, scrollbars, etc. are probably original work by the skin author. Those may have been modeled after the XBOX style, but I have no problem with that. What did appear to be problematic was the Start Menu. It's fairly obvious that it's extraordinarily close to the graphics from the xbox.com website. So close, that it's probably a copy.

Now, is it bad to copy that graphic? I would assume so. I'm not up on all of the legalities of trademarks and copyrights, but the www.xbox.com site says this:

"You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from the Xbox.com Web Site."

So, in my defense I interpret the above legal statement from MicroSoft as saying "don't copy and redistribute the graphics from our site". However, I'm aware that that's still up for debate, as they don't specifically say graphics. But then they do say derivative works, which was my original argument. If you take the spirit of their request instead of scrutinizing which specific words they've chosen, it sounds like you shouldn't be taking their graphics.

I too agree that copyright enforcement can be taken too far. For instance, I think it's absurd that Mauna Loa Macadamia Nuts have trademarked the specific color of blue that they use for their packaging. Trademarking a color is going too far in my opinion, but then again if our country and laws are setup to accomodate and protect such things - why not?

In closing (sorry this has been so long), I *would* like to see an article covering trade dress, copyrights, IP, etc. I'm still learning the rules here as I'm sure many others are. The better informed we are, the better!