Here we go again.

well greyhaze, those guys seems to not have too much imagination, it looks that they stay comming here and waitting for us to make skins, then they run out to make their unauthorized ports.

Last week their talk was about UniverseMetal. >

those guys are sad. they make windows users look bad. when linux and mac users say windows users are mindless sheep its because of guys like them. there's hardly any decent ms-style themes that aren't ports.

It's behaviour like this that makes me seriously consider retiring from skinning altogether. It's terribly exhausting trying to knock some sense into these people.

Rippers are destroying our community.

> it was just a matter of time. there aren´t that many Mac artists to rip, now it´s WindowBlinds...
i mean people there are presenting wallpapers they extracted from a Mac *.sit file as their "conversions".

It's a shame the term "port" seems to give some sort of credibility to these rippers. Like unauthorized porting is not the same as copying, plagarism or stealing. To call it a port of a theme it has to be sanctioned by the original designer and include credit to him as well as permission from him. Call it a rip, not a port.
They come off like idiot children supporting each other in this nasty little game. They are stealing an artist's work with no regard and then congratulating each other on what a nice skin they made. These are not skinners and they are not part of the community. They're petty thieves with no talent and no creativity.

It happened with BBX and Milk. They figure that once they start working on it the original artist has no choice. Actually it's all coercion, "ask the author" if he says no we'll release it anyway. I think all skinners need to email Neowin and just ask for the skinning forum there to be shut down. At least until Neowin sets some rules for the skinning forum and more importantly enforce them.

I had a long heated discussion with the admins at NeoWin a while ago about what goes on in the so-called skinning forums over there. Their excuse was that NeoWin isn't a skinning site, and they can't be expected to moderate all the threads on the site.

I honestly believe that closing that section of the forums would go a long way to curbing the ripping that goes on.

I have reported the above thread to the moderators, and have thus far had no response. The thread has gone from one person attempting to port one of my skins to a group of people saying 'screw the author'.

These people aren't a community of any kind. They're parasites, and something needs to be done to get rid of them.

I've talked to Neowin about this sort of thing in the past. He's a good guy and definitely has no love for the parasite minority that tends to make a lot of noise on some of those message boards (there's a lot of places to talk about stuff on Neowin and the vast majority of the message boards are full of intelligent people).

The problem with the sections you're seeing is a demographic one. "Unreality" is a 17 year old for instance. Many of his cheerleaders are of similar age. It's not that being young is the issue, but that understanding intellectual property takes time. When I first got into skinning, I didn't see what the big deal was in porting a skin and giving it credit (without permission). It was only over time that I really grasped the importance of protecting the intellectual property rights of theme/skin authors.

What people don't realize is that the truly great skinners/themers aren't legion in size. You eliminate say 20 individuals from all platforms and we'd be much poorer for it. Imagine skinning without Grayhaze or Treetog or Alexandrie or Dangeruss? You can't just treat skin authors as if they are a disposable commodity. Until the msstyles "community" gets a grip on that, it'll always just be mostly ports. And they have a lot more to lose - you could write a script to convert an msstyle to WindowBlinds but not vice versa. It's in that community's long term vested interest to protect artists because their skins are much more vulnerable to porting.

The sooner Microsoft updates XP and perhaps breaks the reg-hack for these msstylers the better for all of us.
Msstyles is nothing more than a facillitator for ripping WB, just as the Logon makes use of stolen wall art.

The sooner these kids grow up and develop a moral backbone the better....

hehe, sure they will all upgrade to a new warezed update of XP, wether they need it or not. but i do not think that will help that much, somewhere the skins have to be stored and all binary data can be hacked. or will microsoft remove the native skinning?

Makes me feel ashamed to belong to the same species...

read here: http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=275bcc9f68dccfe23b443eb4edaa6bef&threadid=30126&perpage=15&pagenumber=3

may be we WILL see some legal action now!!!

moshi...only if all the others there see that thread and see that there are people ready and willing to kick butt to get results....

http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29814&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28971&perpage=15&pagenumber=22

2 more...it seems that those guys really don´t have any criativity >

Do we have anyone here who is able to do professional quality ports of WB skins to MSStyle format? If we can get a few people doing quality official ports of our skins, these rippers will be out of action and will have to use some creativity for a change.

Although I'm no fan of the format, and I consider it largely inferior to WB, I'd be perfectly willing to work with someone to get at least a basic port of metalX done. My only criteria would be that I have to have final say on any changes that need to be done, and that the person has the abilities and manners required to make a worthwhile port.

I'd say the opposite would happen. It would just fuel rippers.

You may be glad to know that we are working on a method of making skin rips from WB skins much more difficult.

Obviously it will be optional, but I hope it will reduce the number of ports without permission and help protect the skin authors rights.

grayhaze: Making ports now might just give them the impression that they can threaten to port skins and then they will get high quality ports made. I.e. exactly what they want.

Grayhaze: the only two people that i can imagine to fit your categories are Arhra and Chaninja. but those two are original artists whose work was also ported to WindowBlinds, so i could imagine they would be rather interested in doing their own stuff. i see also a little danger in here, because i think as soon something is done for visual styles a lot of people there consider it as some kind of public domain
well i think getting in contact with Arhra or Chaninja is not such a bad idea. here are their sites at Deviantart:
http://chaninja.deviantart.com/
http://arhra.deviantart.com/

Renato: well the first one said, he would not release it without permission given. if that is true is a different story. since you are providing the link, i guess he did not contact you yet
on the second: this Outcast person offers to send a rip of Metal-X per e-mail if you ask him for it. if it is true what Frogboy said that this Neowin is a "good guy" i think it is upon time to get this person and his IP banned. that would probably hurt him most. should i ask for a copy of this rip (in my best ghetto speech), so we have proof about this?

To be honest Neil, I'd rather have one high quality port than ten poor rips floating around. I investigated porting it myself after the original attempts at ripping, but I just couldn't spare the time to learn a second skinning language just to prevent rippers from stealing my work. As I only use WindowBlinds anyway, doing ports in my own time would just be a waste.

I do think that no matter what you do to try and prevent rips, there will always be those people who cut and paste out of screen grabs to create these poor imitations anyway.

Neil: i don´t think that this will help. they often port just from screenshots (Pixtudio themes for example). this is just one reason for the low quality.

Grayhaze was faster

The major sites police rips pretty well. Greg at ThemeXP is a good guy too for instance. I've already contacted him regarding this MetalX port and "Unsanity" will have some difficulty getting away with rips.

Him passing some rip to his d00d friends might get it into hundreds of people's hands but that's nothing compared to being on a skin site.

As for official ports only fuelling the rippers, I'd tend to disagree.

I would actually like to see ports of my more popular skins over to MSStyles, if only to let those people who are not aware of WindowBlinds know that there is a good alternative out there. Sure, they can have metalX as an MSStyle with basic functionality, but if they want custom colors and all the other extra functionality of the WB version, they need to buy WindowBlinds to get it.

It could actually be good for WB sales.

Porting from a screenshot is harder than just using the original source graphics included in the skin directory.

Anything that makes it harder seems like a good thing given the number of rips that have occured over the past 6 months.

especially the different colors will fuel ripping