The ripping is going on...

I would venture a guess Moymoy and Tomtyl could be one and the same . It is possible every post has been stolen from somebody or another. There can be no confidence that they have upoaded one original effort.

This upsets me (let alone the people that have been ripped off) because I really admire the creativity of the Skinners on Wincustomise. To see their many hours of toil benifiting a thief and another site/s is bloody outrageous.

Having said that, I have no idea how to put a stop to the practise and that's also bloody frustrating. > >

> > > >

I guess this will never stop. >

No...it will never stop...it's a fact of life...but like graffiti, the sooner you remove it, the less likely it will promote more of the same....leave it there and more will follow suit.

So, only thing to do is to keep on responding to it and get it removed...

I worry about sophisticated rippers in the grey areas of international law. The law is very, very iffy in some countries in terms of free-use, copyrights, and reverse engineering. It would be damned difficult at this point to prevent a company based, say, in China from selling skins or artwork derived from skins, and they could sell to users in teh US or anywhere via the internet. The days of the predominately-english internet are waning. What happens when a big foreign language portal uses our skins for the UI? I dunno how anyone could stop them.

with billions of new users in asia, the middle east, etc., I think we are going to have to assume that we are gonna be ripped, and that it could quite possibly be out of our hands. With casual reverse engineering laws in russia and elsewhere, I would expect to see ripped APPS as well. How would one stop a WB clone in Russia or China, where it is practically legal to reverse engineer? Monitoring foreign language sites won't be easy, and stopping them will be next to impossible.

*PLEASE* don't think that I mean people from these areas are more apt to rip. That is NOT what I am saying at all. My point is that rips on foreign language sites are difficult to spot, and in countries with lax or different laws, there may be nothing we can do. If it is not illegal in their country, the moral delimma is far less, and we can't even keep k1dd13s from doing it here... with no money involved. I have great respect for users from all over the world. I don't though, have any illusions about being able to sue a company of any size in Russia or China, and frankly I am unsure if even ISPs in those areas would be willing to cut off sites that distribute. We have been fortunate that Geocities and the like have been so responsive, but when sites like them spring up all over the non-english speaking world, it might be more difficult to make our case.

Forgive my paranoia, but any of the old-timers here will remember people coming onto messageboards and saying "HEY! our skins are in a japanese magazine!" Somtimes even without permission. If it is this hard to spot/address when the perpetrator is in Japan, I am really worried about the explosion in the other, less UScentric areas of the web in the next few years.

Baker.....it's hoped that at least a few people from these alleged potential sources of unsavoury behaviour will help us keep their parts of the world comparatively free of 'rips', etc by translation and communication of our common concerns.
Heck, it's not like we are free from grief even from within the 'English-speaking' corner of the world....ther's enough 'issues' with rips from 'within' to be starting to worry about those from without...

BTW....that japanese mag emailed me again not all that long ago...just a few weeks...

jafo: while I would agree that that is how things have been in the past, I think it is becoming innaccurate. The last time I went trolling for my skins (after I had removed them from sites I had control of), I found many, many on non-english sites that I had never heard of, and I found them only because they retained the english filename. Times are changing. I understand that there are unsavory types everywhere, but at least here there are legal hinderances.

I know this sounds xenophobic, and it is not intended as such. There seems to be warez sites (distributing full versions of WB all day, every day) that that are untouchable, and I assume it is their geographical location. I won't list the name here, because I assum that Stardock knows and I don't want to give them advertising. What would prevent them from reverse engineering it, branding it themselves, and distributing it, freely or for pay? Reverse engineering is legal in many places. The same could be said for any of our skins, wallpapers, scripts, etc. Could any of us, even stardock, put forth a legal effort intimidating enough in places like this to stop them?

I know of some efforts to move illegal activity to servers in openly antagonistic countries like Iran, as well. I am troubled. There is a feeling by some opposed to western influence and economic power, that hacking and piracy are legitimate ways of 'evening the playing field'. I dunno. It may never be an issue. China has an ongoing programming effort to produce their own version of windows 98, which could seemlessly integrate with MS's software and file formats. Could MS even stop them?

This isn't prophesy, just things to consider.

Adni, yesterday I took a look at the link provided by Carlitus and couldn't believe how many rips I founded (on their boot sections also have a bunch of them), people over there are ripping you, Carlitus, precurser, deaddreammer, etc... It was really frustrating to see.

baker: Yup, unfortunatly I must say that in some parts, your previsions are allready hapenning. Some russian developers are ripping our windowblinds skins, 'forgeting'to give the original authors the apropriated credits. I saw this 2 hapenning times so far.

Jafo: As for the magazines, they are much better (I think) since many of them (japaneses and russians) asks for permission to use our work....4 of them even sent me a copy of the magazine to me when using my skins.

Is themesxp even doing anything about this?

I keep looking and seeing rips still up there...

When I see what a few people will try to do here right under everyone's nose, I have to believe that bakerstreet is much more of a prophet than he will admit. While it's not impossible to teach honor to those unfamiliar with it, it may be the most daunting teaching task in the world.

http://www.themexp.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=25205

There ya go...

I went and started a stink

Thank you Renato for your info
As I said before is a never ending story! Thanks God we have Jafo among us.

adni18 agree with Jafo, bakerstreet and Bangkokboy!

大家好:
我是中国人,英文不太好,所以只好用中文了,看得懂的就看,看不懂的请多多包涵,谢谢!(Thanks!)
这个网站非常的好,我经常光顾,在此感谢站长的精心维护.
不过有时为什么不能下载皮肤(skins)或者图标(icon)(can't download icon and shins?)请站长看一下.谢谢!

This is a approximate translation, based upon worldlingo

Hello: I am the Chinese, the English not too am good, therefore the easy to use Chinese, has only looked understands looks, 看不懂 please many forgives, thanks!(Thanks!) This website unusual good, I frequently patronize, thank stationmaster's careful maintenance in this.
Why but sometimes can't download the skin (skins) or the chart sign (icon) (can't download icon and shins?) 胝 boundary た hastily curtain □.Thanks!

yangyong:

你好,

如果你需要一个好译者, 这夫妇。

http://babelfish.altavista.com/
http://www.worldlingo.com/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html

他们帮助了我许多次。

baker:

I love this site!!!! How did all these people happen to cme to gether like this??? Yes I know the thread is about rips, ut I have to say that even in this enviorment, there are so many good people.

How did all of this happen?? I feel so lucky.

Taking a stand against those who rip other peoples work is very important stand indeed. To not only protect the original artist work but to also educate others as to what IS ripping and that it will not be allowed. Ripping benefits no one, not even the ripper, for we all lose out in such acts when trust and ownership can not be uptained.

Hi all.

I'm a Mod at ThemeXP and, thanks to Doomgaze, I've caught up with some of the issues here. I won't go into it too much here as I replied to Doomgaze's post on ThemeXP's forums.

Basically, ThemeXP does not support rips of any sort. However, I don't know every skin/wallpaper site on the Net, so I rely on people like you to either post in our forums or to PM me with the info. Thanks again to Doomgaze for taking the time off to do so rather than just stand back.

Having said this, these have been removed from ThemeXP:
WinWorld_15 (Login)
Chromed2_15 (Wallpaper)
CrawlSpidey_15 (Wallpaper)
Visual Style: MaximumMac_15 (the graphic in start panel)

As for the rest of the things in adni18's post, could you please be more specific? I must be dense and missing something. Anyway, links to the rip and to the original would be welcome.

Thanks,
GazmanAus.

GazmanAus, thank you for your fast action!

This is darn GREAT, GazmanAus, thank you so much for the promptly action.

Greetings,

As this will be my first post on this site, I just wanted to take the time to thank all the artists for their hard work in creating some wonderful work for others to enjoy.

It is sad indeed that there are people out there who would take another's hard work, doctor it up a little and claim it as their own, personally I view that as outright theft, especially if no credit is given to the original author or permission is asked to utilize/change it.

I sincerly hope that this growing problem does not dull your collective creative minds in providing some truely awesome wallpapers and skins.

Thank you
Kensai

Greetings to you and welcome Kensaisama

GazmanAus...I replied on the other thread here.....in a nut-shell, thanks for the speedy response...I'd emailed Greg with the links yesterday...