My email to those morons:
Dear PC Zone Magazine,
In a recent article (June 2003 issue) about Object Desktop, a program from Stardock Inc. certain accusations were made, that were not completely true, and the statements should not have been made without any research into the programs mentioned. However, the article made it's way into your magazine, anyways, despite the fact that no actual research was done on the programs in question, and no tact was used in the way that your columnist made his improper claims.
Here is a quote from your article; "The vast bulk of replacement frame, images and cursors are garish, blatant copyright theft or just plain awful." The truth is that, even at Stardock's own website, www.wincustmoize.com, any copyright infringement is shunned upon, and it is in the terms and conditions of the site that no one attempt to upload copyrighted material without permission from the original author. The truth, which you apparently have not attempted to find, is that every skin that is uploaded is moderated for quality. Any skins that don't work properly, or are found to infringe on copyrights are not shown on the site, and authors may be removed from the site, and have their ISP number blocked for disobeying the terms of service of the site. On Wincustomize.com you will find this in the rules of the site "If you upload something that is owned by someone else or contains materials owned by someone else, we have the right to delete that item without notification," and also the following "Images taken from other sources cannot be accepted without permission, including but not limited to pictures taken from movies, television shows, games, web sites, magazines, celebrity pictures. However, although they are theoretically also copyrighted, we will be lenient concerning corporate logos and OS ports, unless we are approached by the companies and asked to remove them. An exception: sports logos. Sport organization make money selling the right to use their logos and explicitly forbid the distribution of art containing their logo unless a license is purchased."
Also I would like to know if you can site specific examples of copyright theft that you mention, so that I could forward them to Stardock, and the others at Wincustomize, so that the skins in question may be removed. I am sure however you will find very little on a Stardock sponsored website at all, since all skins are moderated. I find that a journalist is lacking when he makes claims that he can not support, and this is very unprofessional to make unjust claims of a company or product you obviously have no first hand knowledge of.
You mention that the rest of the skins, that aren't copyright theft are "awful". Most of the artists that design the skins for the programs in object desktop design custom interfaces for other programs such as Trillian, Litestep, Aston Shell, and many others. Authors that make skins for Object Desktop designed the interface for the movie The Recruit, and commercial interfaces have been designed by Pixtudio.com, which specializes in skins for many Stardock products. Pixtudio has made skins for major companies like Nintendo, and NVidia. Two multi-billion dollar companies don't think the Skins are "awful." In fact, Nintendo and Nvida both paid for Pixtudio to make custom Windowblinds skins, and yes Windowblinds is a big part of Object Desktop. A Windowblinds skin was even made for PC Magazine, and they gave Object Desktop an awesome review. The top artists that work with Stardock make skins for almost every skinnable program on the net, and are respected in the skinning community for their interfaces that they make for other programs as well as skins for Windowblinds, Object Bar, and Desktop X which are all parts of Object Desktop. So the interfaces for every skinning program on the internet should be called bad and not just Stardock's, if what you say is true. The top skinners in the community have up to 5 years experience skinning if not more, and up 20 years with graphics programs. So, to say that an artist with that much experience makes something "awful" is a blatent insult, and is not called for, however to say that a journalist that makes untrue claims, and insults others is ignorant, is 100 percent justified in my eyes. I noticed that you mentioned cursors as well, Object Desktop does not include any cursor program when you buy it. You may be referring to a program called Cursor XP which is sold separately, but like most of your other comments, if you had done research you would have known that. So if your one of your claims isn't even about object desktop, then why did you put it into your article as though it was a problem with Object Desktop.
Here is another quote from your magazine; "Object Desktop - Turns Windows into an unusable, graphically offensive, mess." In fact Windowblinds which is a part of Object Desktop, and skins the windows themselves, uses the same API's as the default Windows XP theme, so any problems inherent in Windowblinds would also be inherent in Windows itself without Windowblinds. Also Windowblinds uses 2 megabytes less ram than the default Windows XP theme, issues of stability don't apply since Windows will run faster with it, than without it. Windowblinds is in the Windows catalog, and is endorsed by Microsoft, no other program of it's type is. Even Microsoft endorses it over their own built in skinning engine. Microsoft considers it an enhancement to their software, and it is no way unusable since a majority of the skins work much like the default Windows themes in functionality. The many Object Desktop programs will work wonderfully with novice to advanced users, because one can make subtle changes, with the looks, colors, and icons or one can add functionality with extra titlebar buttons, advanced taskbars, and MP3 player plugins.
I think this was terrible on the part of your magazine, and I think the author of that story should be repremanded for his blatent personal attacks against Stardock, and the artists that devote their time to making the skins and themes for Stardock products. He has no right to make comments that are untrue, and such action does not only make him look bad, but it makes everyone that works for your magazine look bad. I hope whatever his personal issues are that he has he gets them worked out, and this nonsense of his can stop, and I hope that your magazine can someday be something worth reading again.
WinCustomize Forums
I think digital copyright's are just too confusing... it's best with authors to follow your advice jafo 